Pickles, Hiccups, and an Upside-Down Gloss: Two Fragments of Judeo-Arabic Medical Treatises in the Stanford University Collections

Abstract

Abstract: This article reconstructs the history of two fragments in the Stanford University Collections. Although they once belonged to different manuscripts, they share much in common: both were copied in the western Mediterranean sometime around the fourteenth century, both contain excerpts of Arabic medical treatises transliterated into Hebrew characters, both contain marginal glosses in other languages (Latin in the one case; Hebrew and Romance vernaculars in the other), and both were subsequently reused as book bindings. Thanks to the insights gleaned from tools both old and new (the latter ranging from multispectral imaging to Twitter), the fragments together attest to the circulation of knowledge from Iran to Iberia, the material frameworks that enabled exchanges across religious and linguistic divides, and the violent dismemberment of manuscripts and communities alike in the closing decades of the Middle Ages.