Error of Transmission or Misinterpretation... Making Uncertainties Speak for Themselves in the Transmission of a Medical Text in Vulgar Languages

Abstract

Is Bernard de Gordon’s Lilium medicinæ translated in the same way in French and in other European languages? If there are differences, they are embodied in several levels of reading, as many clues that make it possible to retrace the history of the circulation of a work and to draw up an overview of the translation practices of a text of scholastic medicine, from its composition in Latin at the beginning of the 14th century to the manuscripts in the vernacular language of the 16th century. Far from the error of transmission or random interpretations, these translations are representative of the diversity of readings of a work of medicine.