Tratado medico de Constantino el Africano: Constantini Liber de elephancia

Following the editorial formula developed by her mentor, Enrique Montero Cartelle, Ana Isabel Martín Ferreira offers yet another valuable contribution to the stream of recent editions of the minor works of Constantine the African. Constantine (who died before 1098–99) was a North African who migrated to southern Italy and eventually became a monk at the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino. There, he translated some two dozen medical works from Arabic into Latin.

Martín Ferreira’s study of the Liber de elephancia (Book on leprosy) has been prepared with the same scholarly rigor as earlier ones published in this series. She prefaces the edition with an extended introduction that addresses questions of the text’s authorship, the significance of the title, and the manuscript tradition. Her edition of this brief text (which scarcely fills thirteen pages) is based on the eight known medieval manuscripts, with comparisons with two Renaissance printed editions. On the whole, the edition is expertly done, though I did find at least three instances where, in my opinion, the readings of the Lyons 1515 edition should have been preferred to those of the manuscripts (Theodoriton euperiston is probably the correct reading in line 6.4, since it refers to a well-known compound medicine; the sign for “drachma” should be added to lines 6.28 and 6.30; and “tyrie drachmas XL” seems redundant in line 6.35 since snake flesh had already been included in the ingredients). A facing-page modern Spanish translation, a comprehensive glossary of materia medica, and an index verborum complete the study.

Martín Ferreira argues that the Liber de elephancia does not reflect a translation of an independent Arabic text on the subject of leprosy (though she demonstrates that at least one did exist). Rather, she believes that it is simply several chapters excerpted from a larger medical encyclopedia called the Pantegni, which was written by ‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbas al-Majusi in the tenth century and was translated by Constantine the African. My comparison of the texts confirms that the Liber de elephancia does indeed correspond to chapters 2–4 of book IV of the Latin Pantegni, Practica attributed to Constantine the African. (Martín Ferreira does not theorize as to why the fourth Pantegni chapter on leprosy [Practica, book IV, chapter 5 in the Lyons 1515 edition] did not circulate with the independent text.) Contrary to Martín Ferreira’s claims, however, the Liber de elephancia does not correspond at all to al-Majuisi’s Arabic original, nor to Stephen of Antioch’s very literal 1127 Latin translation. ¹ Like other sections of the Latin Practica, therefore, the chapters on leprosy have somehow been reconstituted by Constantine or some other editor from other sources. The fact that the text circulated independently as early as the twelfth century suggests that it began as an independent work.

Whatever the sources of the Liber de elephancia may prove to have been, Martín Ferreira has offered us not only an important contribution to the history of leprosy, but also a valuable witness to the editorial activity in eleventh- and twelfth-century southern Italy, which produced a new corpus of texts that would influence European medicine for the next several hundred years.