Italian Charlatans Database, 1550-1800

From the mid-sixteenth century, Italian Protomedico tribunals, Colleges of Physicians or Health Offices (jurisdiction varied from state to state) required ‘charlatans’ to submit their wares for inspection and, upon approval, pay a licence fee in order set up a stage from which to perform and sell them. As far as the medical magistracies were concerned, charlatans – or quacks, empirics, mountebanks, itinerant pedlars, whatever we wish to call them – had a definable identity. They constituted a specific trade or occupation. In this context, the Italian term <i>ciarlatano</i> lost some of its bite, becoming less a term of abuse and more a generic, bureaucratic label, identifying a category of healer. The word had a more precise meaning, fewer figurative connotations than it would acquire in English. More importantly, it was a label, the charlatans used themselves.<br> The licensing regime in place in early modern Italy allows us unparalleled opportunities when it comes to the investigation of suspect but generally tolerated categories like charlatans. It was the ongoing attempt to regulate the activity of charlatans which provides us with the raw material for this Database and for the book associated with it, David Gentilcore’s <i>Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy</i> (Oxford University Press, 2006; ISBN 0199245355)<br>