Des registres de rationalité en concurrence? Empirica magiques et médecine scolastique

The recurrent opposition of scholastic physicians to vetulae and empirici can be understood as a confl ict between levels of rationality. First, three levels of rationality in the way of thinking magic are set forth; then, two ways of rationally justifying some empirica included in learned medicine are addressed: that which made use of occult properties and that which relied on the power of the imagination –in the latter case, it was rather the power of the imagination on the body of the imagining man than on another body. The occult properties seem to offer a more satisfactory issue, rationally speaking but maybe also theologically. The paper ends with a case study: the way that the valencian physician Jeroni Torrella in the Opus praeclarum de imaginibus astrologicis (1496-c. 1500) faces an empiricum rather uneasy to rationalize –a late testimony of the issue at stake in the scholastic naturalistic rationalization.