The Opera medica omnia of Arnau de Vilanova is an outstanding monument to the study of medieval medicine over the last quarter century. Nothing else has done as much to illuminate the nature of western scholastic medicine, achieved through the old-fashioned virtues of scholarly textual editing. The latest addition to the series of volumes is a translation by Arnau into Latin from the Arabic of Abū-l-Ṣalt's Arabic text on simple medicines. It is the first to be published since the death in 2000 of Luis Garcia-Ballester, who was effectively founder of the series, and saw to its continuation. Fittingly, this volume is dedicated to his memory. The editorial board of the series has now been reconstituted, bringing on board Jon Arrizabalaga, Pedro Gil-Sotres and Fernando Salmon, and the advisory board too has been supplemented with distinguished scholars. The first volume produced under this new leadership is a peculiarly challenging project, as its editors admit. Since neither the translation nor the original Arabic had ever been published, it was necessary to edit both from the surviving manuscripts. Ana Labarta prepared the Arabic text and Jose Martinez Gazquez the Latin, while Michael McVaugh and Danielle Jacquart modified the presentation of the Latin in conjunction with the Arabic, and prepared the Arabic-Latin and Latin-Arabic glossaries. A medieval Catalan translation (known only in a Paris manuscript) of Arnau's Latin text was found to witness to a fuller and earlier version of his translation than any of the surviving Latin witnesses, and Lluis Cifuentes prepared a transcription of the Catalan text to accompany the Arabic and Latin ones. Introductory essays in Catalan by the editors are repeated in English and French after the translation itself, which presents Arabic and Latin versions on facing pages, and has the Catalan version as an appendix. The author of the original Arabic text, Abū-l-Ṣalt, was born in Andalucia in 1068 CE, and was one of the greatest ornaments of Maghrebi culture, a poet, philosopher, and musician, as well as physician. The ‘Book of simple medicines’ was a kind of practical handbook for physicians presenting information about the simples that could be used to evacuate humours and treat diseases of the whole body or of particular organs. It is organized in twenty chapters, and typically each chapter consists of a succession of statements about particular simples, of the form (14.11) “bitter almonds are hot and dry in the second degree. They clear obstructions in the spleen”. Even the prologue on theory which explains the Galenic humoral theory of the four qualities and the principle of treatment by opposites operates at a basic level. Although it introduces the question of how to compound simple medicines using quantitative ratios that was to preoccupy writers in Muslim Spain, it does not explore the question in detail or in a sophisticated way. Perhaps it was this very simplicity of argument and of grammatical structure that drew Arnau to the text in the 1270s. Interestingly even so Arnau may have balked at the theoretical prologue, for it is not found in manuscripts of his Latin translation, which launches directly into the twenty chapters. The editors speculate that it was the first of his three known translations from the Arabic, and its list-like structure may have made it straightforward. Nevertheless, the work may have sparked Arnau's interest in the compounding of simples that later in the 1290s gave rise to his own highly sophisticated Aphorismi de gradibus(Opera medica omnia, II). The quality of Arnau's Latin translation is not high, despite the simplicity of the text he translates. Even allowing for scribal errors in the surviving manuscripts it is clear that Arnau often misunderstood the Arabic—for instance confusing the words for “pigeon” and “bath” to disastrous effect. Omissions often include the method of administering a medicine, which perhaps he decided was not central to the purpose of the text. The editors of the Latin text make judicious use of the Catalan translation, which is very faithful to the Latin, to emend evidently erroneous readings in the later Latin manuscripts. But they do not go so far as to choose to follow the Catalan manuscript when its reading coincides with the Arabic but is entirely different from existing readings in the two families of manuscripts that preserve the Latin. As they confess, given the surviving manuscript evidence (Arabic and Latin) no accurate reconstruction of Arnau's original translation is possible, only an approximation to it. What we are given is nevertheless a volume fit to stand alongside its predecessors in this splendid series.
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Jul 1, 2011
Tomàs Martínez Romero 
Open Access