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Reviewed by:
  • Tradizione e ecdotica dei testi medici tardoantichi e bizantini
  • John Scarborough
Antonio Garzya, ed. Tradizione e ecdotica dei testi medici tardoantichi e bizantini. Proceedings of the International Conference, Anacapri, 29–31 October 1990. Collana di Atti e Miscellanee, no. 5. Naples: M. d’Auria Editore, 1992. 380 pp. Ill. No price given.

In this collection of studies, twenty scholars address the problems of analysis of primary texts of Byzantine medicine and pharmacy, as well as of other medieval medical works in Arabic, Latin, and additional tongues. Many of these works exist in unedited manuscripts, but several of these manuscripts are crucial for our understanding of essentials in Byzantine and classical Arabic medicine as a whole; there is a multiplicity of authors to be untangled—for example, Aretaeus of Cappadocia, Philumenus, Dioscorides, and Galen—and frequently one meets compilations under a “name” that is quite misleading.

Of great importance are the Greek manuscripts of Aetius of Amida, and three essays focus on this facet of medical texts in the Age of Justinian: Maria Capone Ciollaro, Irene Ginevra Galli Calderini, and Adriana Pignani all concentrate on Aetius’s “borrowings,” noting in passing that volumes 9–14 of Aetius’s Libri medicinales exist in several manuscripts. However, all three academics dwell on the fruitless quest of determining exactly what passages of earlier authors are quoted, rather than on the evidence of Aetius’s adaptive talents.

Papyri offer tantalizing and idiosyncratic fragments of a living practice of medicine and pharmacy, and Isabella Andorlini neatly shows how the Antinoopolis papyri attest to the widespread use of drug-compounding formulas (here by Lucius of Tarsus). A major puzzle is posed by two tracts on toxicology descending in the manuscripts under the name of Dioscorides of Anazarbus: eleven manuscripts provide Alain Touwaide with a series of serpentine arguments (the pun is irresistible) on recensions, some of which could derive from Nicander’s Theriaca or Alexipharmaca, or from Dioscorides, or from the summary of Dioscorides’ writings in the Bibliotheca of Photius, or from H(integral)unain ibn Ish(integral)̄aq’s use in the 860s of a Greek tract on poisons, or from five other possible sources. Touwaide concludes that the works at hand are “Byzantine,” but “à l’ambiance des siècles dits obscurs” (p. 335). His essay represents a major study on two aspects of Byzantine pharmacy and medicine—the confused and confusing state of the manuscripts, and why one must use the manuscripts themselves (Greek, Arabic, Latin), not the early printed versions of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Armelle Debru demonstrates succinctly how Aetius transmitted Galen’s basic concepts of the “strangled womb,” and how Aetius suffused his own touch into his “new” Galen; and Jean Irigoin expertly summarizes how Greek and Syriac medical works emerge into the famed Arabic translations. Another papyrus, a fragment of a “teaching text” just prior to the Muslim conquest of Egypt, gives Daniella Manetti some insights into late Alexandrian commentaries on Galen. Several other authors and their topics range as widely as the term “late ancient” permits: Maria Amalia D’Aronco on Anglo-Saxon texts, Danielle Jacquart on Byzantine Greek Zoroastrian works (as sources for al-Maḡus̄ž), and Juan Antonio Lopez Ferez on Galen’s own views of textual transmission in his own time. [End Page 518] Sometime between the seventh and early tenth centuries, an obscure Paul of Nicaea synopsized sections of Paul of Aegina (much confusion in the manuscripts, of course), Oribasius, Galen, and Hippocrates—a synopsis that had a heavy influence on medical instruction in tenth-century Italy, perhaps including Salerno; one appreciates the tenacity and meticulous analysis of this Paul of Nicaea by Anna Maria Ieraci Bio.

Tradizione e ecdotica mirrors ongoing dilemmas in the production of reliable texts, translations, and commentaries for Byzantine medical history, and to a lesser extent for the medicine of the Latin West. Most of the contributors to this volume follow the well-traveled trails established since the Renaissance, trails seeking the Greek or Roman sources that were preserved (and fossilized) by medieval physicians. That weight of medical classicism obstructs clarity in the analysis of the fine physicians among the Byzantines, and it still hinders the...

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