Cosmic Order, Complexion, and Character: Humoralism in Goro Dati’s _Sfera_

        _Sfera_, a Tuscan cosmographical primer in 144 *ottava rima* verses by the Florentine silk merchant Goro Dati (1365-1435), was among the most popular vernacular texts in the century after its author’s death. Dozens of surviving manuscripts testify to this, as do the eighteen printed editions published between 1470 and 1543. _Sfera_ has captured the attention of historians of geography for the periplus of the Mediterranean that comprises its fourth and final book, and for the descriptions of lands beyond the Latin West in its third, both frequently accompanied in manuscript editions by detailed maps and diagrams.

       Scant attention, however, has been given to verses not bearing directly on the mapping of ports and populated lands. This neglected content includes nearly all of the poem’s first two books, which in moral-didactic fashion explain rudiments of standard late medieval scholastic cosmology, natural philosophy, astrology, and medicine. A major theme of these first two books is the determination of human temperament by the primary natural agents and foundations of cosmic order, namely the stars, the planets, and the four sublunar elements fire, air, water, and earth. Basic late medieval humoral theory, rooted in Galenic medicine and Aristotelian natural philosophy, links the elements and the celestial agents as the determinants of a person’s character. This is clear not only in verses on the four Galenic temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic), but also on those that explain climate, weather, and disease in terms of complexion, i.e. of the mixture and action of primary qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry) substantiated by the humors and elements.

       My paper will examine the humoralism of Goro Dati’s _Sfera_ from the perspective of late medieval Italian intellectual and cultural history. It will suggest probable textual source of Goro’s understanding of *complessio* and *umore* as the physical roots of personality, and consider the cultural significance of his appropriation of learned medicine and natural philosophy as a Florentine “merchant writer” with high intellectual and religious aspirations.