Concurrent Publication of Medical Works in Neo-Latin and French in Early Modern France

Credebam antea nefas esse, chirurgicae disciplinae libros in vulgarem linguam verti, ac publicas in manus venire.

‘I previously used to believe it would be shameful for books on surgery to be translated into the vernacular and come into lay hands.’

In the preface to his translation of a short work of Galen, Second Livre de Claude Galien à Glaucon (1549), Guillaume Chrestian (or Chrestien) articulated his readiness to set aside his former scruples and join the growing ranks of humanists convinced of the need to translate certain medical works from Latin or Greek into French (Durling 240). It is scarcely a coincidence that this damascene admission occurred in the same year as the publication of Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la langue françoyse, for—despite Du Bellay’s cautions at 1.5 in the Deffence—the development of the vernacular was intimately bound up with the tide of translations into French which honed and proved its literary credentials. Yet the movement did not operate in a single direction: in various disciplines, and medicine is a key case in point, translations from the vernacular into Latin were highly significant for the transmission of texts within and between reading communities (on the epistolary circulation of knowledge among learned physicians, see Sirasi). The pioneering recent work of Peter Burke has drawn attention to this relatively neglected field of translations into neo-Latin. He estimates there were over 1100 printed translations into Latin before 1799 (Burke 21, 65-80), a provisional figure that, from the evidence of translations of medical works, I would suggest needs to be raised. In this essay, I propose first to review general trends in the composition, publication and circulation of translations of medical works from Latin/neo-Latin into French and from French into neo-Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then to address the specific question of why some works composed in this period in one particular area of medicine, namely reproductive medicine and women’s health, circulated concurrently in both languages, and how far this reflected their movement between different reading communities.

1. From Latin / neo-Latin into French and From French into neo-Latin

A starting point for the discussion of the major trends in the translation of medical works in early modern France is the list compiled by Harold Stone (see Stone). The decades c. 1540-90 saw the burgeoning of translations across all areas of medicine: following a generation of urgent scholarly activity in western Europe, notably in Italy, to produce humanist editions of Greek and Latin texts—Calvi’s Latin version of the complete works of Hippocrates, Hippocratis octoginta volumina (1525) was a milestone—translators looked to provide surgeons, and also apothecaries, with vernacular versions of essential works. At the same time, an increasing number of contemporary physicians, fired both by their readings of the ancients and by the new wave of anatomical discoveries (for example, Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (1543)), and with a new confidence in their own experience as practitioners, sought to publish their views. Thus, alongside the vernacular translations of classical or medieval medical texts, there appeared a parallel stream of new works composed in Latin by living authors. In his analysis of the trends in the composition, publishing and circulation of Latin medical works in the Renaissance, Maclean demonstrates a particularly sharp increase in production of medical works in Latin (some innovative, others new editions of classical and medieval works) across western Europe between 1570-1630 (100-101). For physicians in early modern France, as in the rest of western Europe, Latin remained the obvious language for publication if their anticipated readership was primarily their peers,¹ since Latin remained the international language of professional exchange, and had the additional advantage of excluding less-educated lay readers—precisely the concern which had initially led Guillaume Chrestian to fear allowing vernacular translations ‘publicas in manus venire’ (‘to come into lay hands’). To cite just a few examples, leading French doctors such as Jean Fernel (1497...