{"title":"Materia Medica in a Multilingual Context: Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine and Its Latin Translation of Book II","authors":"Raphael Veit","doi":"10.1163/15700674-12340162","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nFor 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.","PeriodicalId":52521,"journal":{"name":"Medieval Encounters","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Medieval Encounters","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340162","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
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.
期刊介绍:
Medieval Encounters promotes discussion and dialogue accross cultural, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries on the interactions of Jewish, Christian and Muslim cultures during the period from the fourth through to the sixteenth century C.E. Culture is defined in its widest form to include art, all manner of history, languages, literature, medicine, music, philosophy, religion and science. The geographic limits of inquiry will be bounded only by the limits in which the traditions interacted. Confluence, too, will be construed in its widest form to permit exploration of more indirect interactions and influences and to permit examination of important subjects on a comparative basis.