La Scuola Medica Salernitana: Gli autori e i testi (review)

This collection of nineteen essays in Italian (ten), French (four), Spanish (two), and English (three) presents current research on a major phase of medieval medical history and heralds an important new editorial project. Notwithstanding a rich modern historiography devoted to eleventh- and twelfth-century Salerno as a center of medical knowledge and practice open to both Greek and some Arabic influences, much remains to be learned about the composition, manuscript history, fortuna, and influence of many of the texts associated with Salernitan medicine. Many works lack modern or critical editions, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century the pioneering but—in several important respects—defective Collectio Salernitana edited by Salvatore De Renzi in the mid-nineteenth century remained the only general collection of Salernitan medical texts to have been published. Accordingly, the proposed Edizione Nazionale La Scuola Medica Salernitana, authorized in 2006, is a welcome and much-needed initiative. When completed, the Edizione Nazionale will comprise a collection of new critical editions of texts associated with Salernitan medicine (several are currently in preparation), together with accompanying manuscript repertories, bibliographies, and research studies. The present volume of contributions by scholars at work on Salernitan textual and manuscript studies contains the results of a conference forming part of this undertaking held at the University of Salerno in 2004.

Most of the articles are devoted to detailed studies of the manuscript fortuna of individual texts, including both some attributed to named Salernitan masters and anonymous or insecurely attributed works. Many of the contributions provide (in several cases explicitly) information prefatory to a critical edition, from which it is clear that the task facing the editors of works in the new collection is a challenging one. As Danielle Jacquart remarks in her introduction to the volume, even the identification of texts or authors as "Salernitan" is far from simple—in any given instance does the adjective indicate an author's association, even if short-lived, with a place or just a type of medicine? Moreover, an extremely complex manuscript and textual tradition characterizes a number of medical works associated with Salerno. Their generally practical orientation led to wide dissemination over several centuries but also to much modification, interpolation, borrowing from other texts, and rearrangement. Such developments are especially notable in the case of collections of medicaments or remedies—as Iola Ventura's discussion of the manual of pharmacology known as Circa instans shows—and nowhere more so than in the famous versified Regimen sanitatis salernitanum here investigated by Marilyn Nicoud. Similarly, Monica Green points to the "fluid" nature of texts associated with Trota (Trotula) of Salerno (p. 208).

Other articles address the presence and use of Hippocratic (or supposedly Hippocratic) and Galenic texts and the emergence of a more theoretically oriented commentary literature: thus, Faith Wallis examines the commentaries by Bartholomaeus of Salerno on the collection of short Hippocratic and other texts that later came to be known as the articella, while Irene Caizzo draws attention to an anonymous commentary on the introduction to Galenic medicine known as the Isagoge (translated from the Arabic of Hunain ibn Ishaq). The complex linguistic situation underlying Salernitan (or medieval southern Italian) medical culture is the subject of two articles by M. Cruz Herrer Ingelmo and Enrique Montero Cartelle and by Anna Maria Ieraci Bio that examine cross-influences among medical texts and terms of Byzantine Greek and southern Italian Latin origin. The chronological and geographic extent of influence that can be described as Salernitan (with regard to both individuals and books) is another focus of interest, as in Agostino Paravicini Bagliani's study of evidence for the presence of the medicine of Salerno at the twelfth- and thirteenth-century papal court.

In a brief review, it has been possible only to indicate some major themes of a collected volume in which the standard of scholarship is generally...