That two names, of which neither can be given preference, designate the same individual--Joachim von Watt, the name he was given at his birth in the Swiss Sankt Gallen, and Joachim Vadianus, often shortened to Vadian, his humanist appellation at the University of Vienna--reflects the manifold genius of a man who was at once a distinguished citizen of his native canton and of the universal Republic of Letters. He represents not only an extraordinarily wide range of scholarly interests--classical, medieval, and contemporary literature; law; civil and ecclesiastical history; geography; music; medicine; and theology, so that, despite his own modest disclaimer he illustrates in himself the universal education, the "encyclopedia" for which he calls in the penultimate chapter of his De poetica et carminis ratione (Of Poetics and the Structure of Poetry, 1518)--but also the application of learning and scholarship to the administration, medical care, and transition to the...