Andres Laguna y el humanismo medico: Estudio filologico, and: Entre la imitacion y el plagio: Fuentes e influencias en el "Dioscorides" de Andres Laguna (review)

In the final sentence of Andrés Laguna y el humanismo médico, the author writes: "We are now able to affirm with the necessary rigor that Andrés Laguna ought to be placed among the great medical humanists of sixteenth-century Europe" (Andrés Laguna, p. 298). Whether either of these books succeeds in accomplishing this objective is questionable. Although exhaustively researched and rigorously structured, they suffer from an unfortunate lack of wit, making it hard for the reader to want to delve into their contents. Still, they provide a useful entry into the chaotic world of Renaissance medical humanism. This is particularly true in Andrés Laguna y el humanismo médico, where González describes Renaissance and medical humanism in general, and then examines their specific Spanish variations. He also examines Laguna's work as genre and as textual criticism, and his use of sources—finally evaluating him as a Latinist.

If humanism can be described as a Renaissance cultural movement that rediscovered and cherished the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity, González writes, medical humanism is the specific attempt to recover ancient science, believed to have been hopelessly corrupted by its Arabic and scholastic transmitters (Andrés Laguna, pp. 29-30). Consequently, medical humanism was a philological enterprise where knowledge of and the ability to use ancient languages trumped experimental science.

The author then turns to Laguna's biography and a study of his works. We discover here, and in a similar section in Entre la imitación y el plagio, that Laguna was born around 1511, studied in Salamanca, and then moved to Paris where he finished his bachelor of arts degree and also earned a bachelor of medicine studying under teachers such as Gunther von Andernach, Jacques Dubois, Jean de la Ruelle, and Jean Tagault (Entre la imitación, p. 16). While in Paris he published his first works. Later at Bologna, in 1545, he earned the title of doctor of medicine (Entre la imitación, p. 18). Laguna died in 1559 at the age of forty-eight while traveling to Roncesvalles as part of the committee to receive Elizabeth of Valois, the future wife of Philip II (Entre la imitación, p. 19).

González places special emphasis on Laguna's converso background, which, he contends, explains why he tried to ingratiate himself with church and political leaders and spent most of his career outside Spain. Converso families—Spaniards of Jewish descent who at some point had converted to Christianity—often went to great lengths to hide their background, or to "erase the stain," as González puts it (Andrés Laguna, p. 49).

In the slimmer of these volumes, Entre la imitación y el plagio, González considers Laguna's contribution to the Dioscoridian corpus. Again, González writes a very structured tract, outlining in chapter 2 the tradition of Dioscorides' De materia medica from antiquity through the Renaissance, and in chapter 3 dealing more specifically with Laguna's three Dioscoridian works: "Annotationes in Dioscoridem Anazabeum"; a Castilian translation of De materia medica; and the "Apologetica epistola in Ianum Cornarium medicum." In the "Annotationes" Laguna corrected some seven hundred passages of Jean de Ruelle's Latin version of De materia medica, published at Paris in 1516. In the 1555 Castilian translation...