Collecting Recipes: Byzantine and Jewish Pharmacology in Dialogue ed. by Lennart Lehmhaus and Matteo Martelli (review)

This volume came out of a unique conference, which aimed to create a dialogue between scholars working on the Byzantine and the Jewish pharmacological traditions. Generally, there has been very little work done on ancient and medieval pharmacology, and this volume offers an extremely stimulating group of thirteen essays divided into two parts. The first part consists of three chapters on Near Eastern and Galenic pharmacology. The second assembles seven chapters dealing with Byzantine pharmacological sources and three on Jewish ones, mainly the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. Most of the contributions are written in English, with two in Italian and one in French.

The volume starts with a long and very informative introduction by Lennart Lehmhaus and Matteo Martelli that also includes a survey of ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Graeco-Roman pharmacology. Markham J. Geller, the author of the first chapter in part 1, makes some brief observations on Babylonian pharmacology illustrating the peculiarities of this tradition, such as, for example, in the pharmaceutical handbook Šammu šikinšu in which some plants are used for the treatment of bodily affections, such as fever, and also for witchcraft. The next chapter is by Franziska Desch, who by focusing on the plant list Uruanna (twelfth century BCE) emphasizes the difficulty in identifying certain plant names, which are often disguised with the use of secret code names. In the last chapter of part 1, Caroline Petit, by focusing on Galen’s On Simple Drugs, convincingly shows that the Pergamene physician was not always as rational as we tend to believe since he sometimes recommends the use of amulets or remedies, such as the burning of crabs on a particular day of the year for a rabid dog bite, that clearly fall into the category of iatromagic. One might have expected that, in discussing the reception of such remedies by late antique authors (pp. 70–73), Petit would have made special reference to the significant tradition of physika remedies, including many examples of the use of amulets, whose main ancient representative—cited throughout late antiquity—is the first- and second-century CE Greek physician Archigenes of Apameia.¹

The second part opens with an essay by Eric Gowling, who provides a brief examination of Aetios of Amida’s (fl. first half of the sixth century CE) method of excerpting from Galenic pharmacological works and demonstrates that Aetios was no mere copyist, but often reorganized Galen’s text, making it more user-friendly, perhaps as an outcome of his own practical experience. Gowling would have benefited from the use of recently published dictionaries of Byzantine Greek, as, for example, in the case of the word ἔλλιγμα (pp. 97–99), which is clearly a variant of ἔλλειγμα.² Laurence Totelin explores how pseudo-Galenic texts, such as On Procurable Remedies (De remediis parabilibus), were often employed by Byzantine medical authors for lack of any extensive treatment of gynecological affections in Galen’s pharmacological works. Most importantly, she has shown for the first time that Book II of On Procurable Remedies shares common recipes with the Byzantine gynecological treatise by the author conventionally known as Metrodora. In the next three chapters, Serena Buzzi and Irena Calà (cosmetic recipes in Oribasios and Aetios of Amida), Gabrielle Lherminier (treatments for poisons and venomous animals in Paul of Aegina), and Christine Salazar (recipes for head affections in Paul of Aegina) provide abundant evidence that it is only by closely examining the compilation techniques employed in late antique medical handbooks that one can glimpse the authors’ sources and appreciate their working methods. Perhaps the most original contribution to this volume is by Matteo Martelli, who provides an edition and commentary for three different versions of the recipes attributed to the prophet Ezra, which are very commonly attested in the Byzantine tradition and might be a remnant of late antique, now lost, works written in...