This is the first complete translation in English of the 1560 edition of Cardano’s De Subtilitate. Cardano planned this as an exoteric work, covering everything from elemental physics to the visible natural world and its inorganic and organic constituents—humans, their attributes, and their arts and sciences, with a stress laid on mathematics and mechanics, ending with the spirit world, the universe, and God. An earlier edition of Cardano’s encyclopedic work had been rendered into French in 1556 within six years of its first publication by a professional translator, Richard Le Blanc, whose introductory dedication to the sister of Henri II indicates that it was produced for a nonacademic, probably courtly, readership curious about intellectual innovation.

John Forrester’s version is aimed at those with an academic interest in Renaissance intellectual history. The scope of Cardano’s undertaking poses a considerable problem for an aspirant translator. Le Blanc allowed himself considerable freedom, and delivered his version in a jaunty style that disguises the approximateness of the rendering. Forrester, a medical man with training in classical Latin, decided in his retirement to serve the interests of the non-Latinate scholar. He first undertook something in his own field, two works by the Neoplatonist physician Jean Fernel; with Cardano, he has had to grapple with broader and very different academic domains. What has resulted is, in the self-deprecating words of the translator and editor, a “modest effort to speed Cardano studies up” (xii). Together with the introduction, co-written with John Henry, it will help those who need an English version in order to approach the text with some confidence. Forrester has had to come to terms with Cardano’s quirky, even idiosyncratic, Latin, whose obscurities he discusses with great honesty in the footnotes. Much of the text consists in descriptions and anecdotes that, being relatively straightforward, are faithfully rendered. There are also sections that are devoted to a range of specific disciplines, all with their terms of art and their characteristic modes of argument. For the mathematical sections of the text, Forrester was able to call upon the help of the late Jackie Stedall, and her grasp of Cardano’s allusive and often casual geometric and algebraic excursuses is shown here in the footnotes to book 15, where Cardano attempts to reconfigure Euclid, and book 16, on the “scientiae.” Ideally, the translator should have had various other experts at his elbow (not least, a student of Neoaristotelianism), but he had to manage without them. As a result, logic and philosophy are dealt with in a less satisfactory way.

Forrester translates the initial definition of subtlety as “the feature (‘ratio quaedam’) by which things that can be sensed are grasped with difficulty by the senses, and things that can be understood are grasped with difficulty by the intellect” (15). One may note here that “ratio”—a crucial term in the book—is polysemic (Le Blanc rendered it with two words); it sometimes means a mathematical ratio or proportion, sometimes logical coherence, sometimes a cause. There are other such terms that Forrester renders informally: “ridiculous” for “absurdam/absurda” (799–800), “splitting up” for “dividendi ratio” (819), “type” for “species” (in contexts where it relates to definition: e.g., 821). One way such terms of art might have been dealt with would have been to retain the Latin term, and supply the different meanings in footnotes. The additions and modifications made to the text over the two reworkings engaged in by Cardano (in 1554 and 1560) are informally alluded to in the notes, without a rigorous identification of the three strata of the text.

These are reservations about the translation that will immediately strike a specialist; they should not disguise the fact that this translation offers a valuable starting point to those not equipped with the full range of requisite linguistic and philosophical skills, and will allow them to embark on a reading of the original text. It should be welcomed principally on these grounds.