Servetus felt that the writer of these works could not safely show
himself in Paris under either his proper family or his maternal name,
and so fell readily upon one derived from the town of his nativity,
Villanueva. Servetus seems indeed at no time to have been very
particular as to his name and designation. On his trial at Vienne he is
of Tudela in Navarre, on that at Geneva, of Villanova in Aragon; and
Tollin finds him inscribed in the academic register of Paris (1536) and
in that of Montpellier, which he must have visited some time in 1540,
as neither of Tudela nor Villanova, but of Saragossa! During all the
years he lived in France, he was never known save as Monsieur Michel
Villeneuve, or, when he wrote in Latin, as Michael Villanovanus. Under
the name of Villeneuve he now announced himself, entered as student of
mathematics and physics at one of the colleges, and at a later period
took his degrees of M.A. and M.D. in the University of Paris. Under
the same name he subsequently wrote and edited various works at Lyons;
and it was as M. Villeneuve that he finally became known in the town
of Vienne in Dauphiny, where he lived for twelve years engaged in the
practice of medicine, and on terms of intimacy with the Archbishop and
all the notabilities of the place, both lay and clerical.
As a man of scholarly acquirements Servetus in the first instance
probably found employment, and the means of living with some of the
typographers of Paris, as reader and corrector of the press, a line of
life which he certainly followed for the next three or four years, in
the course of which we find notices of him first at Orleans, then at
Avignon, and finally at Lyons, one of the chief centres of the printing
and publishing business that had been called into such vigorous life
by the revival of learning, the discovery of the art of printing with
moveable types, and finally and very essentially by the Reformation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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