Born into an old family of
Ferrara, Manardo was a follower of
Leoniceno, whom he succeeded in 1525 as the chair of medicine at the
University of Ferrara. Having begun to teach in the
University of Ferrara, he worked as the personal physician to
Pico della Mirandola from 1493 to 1504. From 1513 to 1518, he was the court physician to the
Jagiellonian kings of Hungary,
Vladislaus II and his son,
Louis II. He then returned to the Este household in Ferrara, to provide for the health of
Alfonso d'Este. In 1533, he was with another student of Leoniceno, , one of the doctors who attempted to cure
Ludovico Ariosto. In 1494, on the death of
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Manardo oversaw the publication of his
Disputationes adversum Astrologiam divinatricem, in which the philosopher criticized astrological beliefs and practices, marking a clear distinction between astronomy (mathematical or speculative astrology), which studied the harmonic reality of the universe, and astrology (judicial or divining astrology), which supposedly revealed the future of men according to astral conjunctures. Manardo also participated in debates on
syphilis, particularly in Ferrara and
Leipzig, where he wrote a pamphlet entitled
De erroribus Symonis Pistoris de Lypczk circa morbum gallicum, published in 1500 in
Nuremberg. While Manardo had already shown his ability to apply philological principles to medical science in his commentary on
Galen's
Ars Parva, his humanist erudition was evidenced especially in his
Epistolae Medicinales which started to be released in bits and pieces starting in 1528, but which was not fully published until after his death in
Basel in 1540, after which it went through numerous posthumous editions. The
Epistolae combined the traditions of councils, forums and philological discussions about medicine and botany to the field of pharmacological terminology. The
Epistolae, besides criticizing the botanical knowledge informed by
Arabic medicine, described the
anthers of flowers (belonging to the
angiosperms) for the first time, and had a particular influence on
François Rabelais who republished it in
Lyon, because he saw in Manardo's work both a useful contribution to restoring medicine to the prestige it had once enjoyed in antiquity, as well as being an authoritative voice underlying the renewal of culture. ==Publications==