RT Article
T1 Materia Medica in a Multilingual Context: Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine and Its Latin Translation of Book II
JF Medieval encounters
VO 29
IS 2/3
SP 196
OP 221
A1 Veit, Raphaela
LA English
PB Brill
YR 2023
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1850687137
AB For centuries, Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine was a crucial text used in medical studies across the Islamicate area as well as in Latin Europe. It was first translated from Arabic into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187) and his students in Toledo. This article focuses on the second book of the Canon which is dedicated to the description of simple drugs. It is in this part of the Canon that we find many references not only to borrowings from Ancient Greek but also from Eastern material. A careful comparison of the Arabic text and the Latin translation demonstrates that the Latin translation was often imprecise, and while it eliminated some but not all obvious Muslim religious references, it did not try to adapt the material to the Latin readership in other ways.
K1 Peter Kirsten
K1 Andrea Alpago
K1 Gerard of Cremona
K1 materia medica
K1 Canon of Medicine
K1 Avicenna
DO 10.1163/15700674-12340162