When Giovanni Battista da Monte died in 1551, he had not put to paper a single line of his medical Consilia (advice given to patients during bedside consultations) that were praised so highly by his students. In contrast to common practice, da Monte’s Consilia comprised not only personal advice for rich patients but also clinical lectures that were often delivered together with one or two other medical professors. Between 1554 and 1587, eleven editions of the Consilia were published by former students, at least nine of them by Johannes Crato von Krafftheim, personal physician of Maximilian II, two by Giralomo Donzellini, an Italian physician, and the rest by Polish physician Valentin Lublin. Each of them promised to cleanse the text of contaminations caused by earlier editions, to correct misunderstandings, and to restore the original wording. By comparing the editions of da Monte’s Consilia this presentation will demonstrate the paper techniques used by his editors: Correcting misunderstandings; reinserting what had been omitted; translating Italian passages into Latin; augmenting earlier text versions based on notes from other students. In a competitive process driven by the printing press and based on the humanist textual method, an ‚original text’ was constructed by printers, publishers, typesetters, deskmen, and editors.
