Giovanni Manardo (also known as Manardi or Mainardi; Latin: Iohannes Manardus; 24 July 1462 – 8 March 1536[1]) was an Italian physician, botanist, and humanist.

[2] Having begun to teach in the University of Ferrara, he worked as the personal physician to Pico della Mirandola from 1493 to 1504.

[4] While Manardo had already shown his ability to apply philological principles to medical science in his commentary on Galen's Ars Parva, his humanist erudition was evidenced especially in his Epistolae Medicinales[5] which started to be released in bits and pieces starting in 1528, but which was not fully published until after his death in Basel in 1540, after which it went through numerous posthumous editions.

The Epistolae combined the traditions of councils, forums and philological discussions about medicine and botany to the field of pharmacological terminology.

[6] The Epistolae, besides criticizing the botanical knowledge informed by Arabic medicine, described the anthers of flowers (belonging to the angiosperms) for the first time, and had a particular influence on François Rabelais who republished it in Lyon, because he saw in Manardo's work both a useful contribution to restoring medicine to the prestige it had once enjoyed in antiquity, as well as being an authoritative voice underlying the renewal of culture.