Arnold Cassola: The German memoirs of a Maltese intellectual, Giovan Francesco Buonamico (1639-1680). Prominent, 2013. 78 pp.
This volume is an adjunct to the 2012 volume about Giovan Francesco Buonamico’s Belgian memoirs, also by Arnold Cassola, which I reviewed last year. Buonamico was an interesting man having wide interests; it is a pity he died when he was just 41.
Many Maltese schoolchildren know him as the author of the second-oldest poem in Maltese known to us, and some older readers will know him as the author of pamphlets and treatises on medical subjects and as a prominent physician in the Malta of his time.
His unpublished writings include his memoirs of his travels in Europe – today’s Belgium, wide areas of Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Sicily. He spent nine years studying medicine and travelling before he returned to a fairly short but distinguished medical career in his country.
In this volume, Cassola comments on the Italian text of Buonamico’s German memoirs, a text he supplies in full as an appendix to his own text. His comments are always useful but perhaps not as comprehensive as they might have been.
Cassola writes disapprovingly of Buonamico’s religious intolerance, seemingly not seeing that it was inevitable
The 17th century was the one in which the reform religions that had broken with the Catholic Church were in full development. Europe had fairly recently begun to live without the nightmare of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) which, apart from being a power struggle among the great powers, was also, as one historian wrote, “an extension of the international wars of religion between Catholic and Protestant”.
When describing a city he visited, Buonamico remarks on the religion that is dominant there and whether there are other significant religious groupings, such as Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and sometimes, Anabaptists.
Cassola writes disapprovingly of Buonamico’s religious intolerance, seemingly not seeing it was inevitable. Even when I was a young man, it was normal for Maltese Catholics to look askance at other Christian religions. And, of course, 17th-century Malta was a bulwark of the Church and was governed by a religious order that would provide the young Buonamico with the career he aimed for.
Buonamico’s intellectual interests did not include a close study of religions and an ability to regard, say, Lutherans, as being close cousins of Catholics.
He sometimes gives us an idea of a particular city’s political allegiance. As Albert Friggieri says in his very informative foreword, Germany was at the time a conglomeration of different German states.
Buonamico informs us that they form part of a Duchy, or are self-governing or, in the case of Koblenz, that it was an ecclesiastical principality ruled by an Archbishop who was also an elector of the Holy Roman Emperor.
I would recommend Friggieri’s foreword for the useful, historical background he provides to throw light on the Germany Buonamico visited.
Cassola emphasises Buonamico’s great interest in medicine and medical care, and his observations on the produc-tion and consumption of wine, beer and also the aqua vitae produced in and exported from worms, giving what is clearly an informed description of its production.
In his short paragraph about Mannheim, which he describes as “a new city”, Buonamico may not have been aware of what had happened to the city earlier in the century.
The city had been levelled to the ground in 1622 during the Thirty Years’ War and is said to have been rebuilt in 1653.
But the rebuilding was not far advanced by 1660, judging by Buonamico’s remark that while the exterior – meaning perhaps the fortifications – was fine, there were apparently no buildings inside the city walls.
Later in the century, Mannheim suffered the misfortune of a second destruction in 1688, at the hands of Louis XIV’s army.
Rebuilt with streets in grid fashion after 1698, Mannheim subsequently flourished, and it was not until World War II that it suffered again some serious destruction.