Materia Medica in a Multilingual Context: Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine and Its Latin Translation of Book II

Abstract

Abstract For centuries, Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine was a crucial text used in medical studies across the Islamicate area as well as in Latin Europe. It was first translated from Arabic into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187) and his students in Toledo. This article focuses on the second book of the Canon which is dedicated to the description of simple drugs. It is in this part of the Canon that we find many references not only to borrowings from Ancient Greek but also from Eastern material. A careful comparison of the Arabic text and the Latin translation demonstrates that the Latin translation was often imprecise, and while it eliminated some but not all obvious Muslim religious references, it did not try to adapt the material to the Latin readership in other ways.