This book is the third volume of a most welcome collection devoted to the Salernitan Medical School, a landmark in the history of medieval medicine that has not received the thorough historiographical attention that it deserves. The series intends to provide critical editions and learned analysis of medical texts belonging to the Salernitan tradition, as well as historical studies on the scholarship of Salenitan medicine – ultimately responsible for the creation of the so-called ‘Salernitan Medical School’. In order to do this adequately, the project was launched in 2004 as an international endeavour lead by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, who presides over a scientific committee composed of an international team of scholars specialised in the field.
The present volume is the written results of the papers delivered at a conference held in 2007 with the aim of assessing and revisiting the editorial work of Salvatore De Renzi and the historical consequences of the publication, between 1852 and 1859, of his Collectio Salernitana, a five-volume work that has since shaped the image of Salerno as a centre of medical practice and learning. However, as Danielle Jacquart states in her introductory chapter, since De Renzi published his collection some of the texts he edited have proved to be not Salernitan; some obscure authors have been identified and authorial and textual misidentifications have been singled out; the number of manuscripts containing Salernitan texts now unearthed supersede by far those he knew; and last but not least, De Renzi’s historical aims were different to those that move present-day scholars participating in this project. If the two volumes that started the series addressed important questions regarding the authorship and the textual lives of important works of the Salernitan tradition, including the critical edition of texts, the focus of the present book is the impact of the enterprise of a nineteenth-century editor on the construction of the ‘Salernitan Medical School’ as a landmark of Western medical tradition.
Working with De Renzi’s personal papers, Antonio Garzya analyses his relationships with the international network of scholars who provided him with manuscript transcriptions later edited in the Collectio, offering an inside perspective on important aspects of the project that were never published, as well as an understanding of the working conditions in which these scholars acted. Taking a step further from the history of the project itself, Monica Green offers important results of her ongoing project to assess the identification and provenance of extant manuscripts (or attestations) of medical texts dated in the time frame of the ‘long twelfth century’. Her findings are significant regarding the history of medical literature. The most important relevant to Salernitan medicine are: the existence of a Late Antique medical corpus that became extinct by the thirteenth century; the eleventh century new translations and editions of older works, with no Salernitan connections; the limited impact of the Constantinian corpus on twelfth-century Salernitan medicine, opening new perspectives for a non-textual introduction of Arabic medicine in Southern Italy; the identification of different patterns of circulation for the Salernitan theoretical corpus and for the works of praxis, as well as the highlighting of the Norman influence – and England’s reception – in their dissemination in Western Europe.
Michael McVaugh contributes to delimiting the Salernitan impact on one important aspect of the medical enterprise: the texts of the surgical tradition. Through careful analysis of the literature supposedly of Salernitan origin, McVaugh establishes a new history of the composition processes and outcomes of the surgeries by Ruggero Frugardi and Rolando da Parma, as well as the so-called First and Second Salernitan Glosses – a distinction and an adjective he finds unsustainable, for he demonstrates that they are two versions of a single Ur-gloss, with no clear connections with Salerno. The extent to which the imprint of the label ‘Salernitan’ by De Renzi and other early editors on certain versions of medical texts enlarged for decades Salerno’s literary accomplishments is also the focus of Romana Martorelli Vico. She studies two anatomical texts, the Anatomia porci and the Demonstratio anatomica, that were included in the Collectio on the basis of early-fourteenth-century manuscripts and renaissance editions. Her analysis, based on the differing paragraphs on the anatomy of the uterus that were published at the end of both texts, concludes that the original Anatomia porci did not include those paragraphs; at the same time, she finds space for traces of oral medical cultures that also surface in other chapters. Iolanda Ventura explores the influential impact that De Renzi’s editorial decisions have had on the history of pharmacology, particularly his commitment to despising Arabic contributions to that field – a commitment that had the unplanned effect of depriving us of certain texts that he decided not to publish and that have since been lost. She also reconstructs De Renzi’s editorial enterprise locating his endeavour in the history of medicine as a discipline as well as in the history of pharmacology.
Anna Bellettini takes on a monographic approach to a (supposedly) early medieval text, the Carmen Medicinale originally published in the Patrologia latina but reproduced by De Renzi in the Collectio. While contributing new data to the study of this poem – a manuscript version significantly older than those hitherto considered – she asks important questions of its composition, relations with other texts and authorial intentions, recognising that the difficulties to trace its textual history involve problems that go far beyond establishing its writing date. Florence Eliza Glaze also focuses on a single text, planned to be included in the sixth volume of the Collectio that never saw the light: Gariopontu’s Passionarius. She gives a detailed account of the earliest manuscript cultures that produced, reproduced and commented upon the text. Such codicological and paleographical analysis, interpreted in conjunction with precise historical connections with the Salernitan world, enable her not only to shed new light on the composition of the text itself but, most notably, to assess changes in the ways the text was used that would have otherwise remained unnoticed. Instead of revisiting one particular text, the focus of Mireille Ausécache is one Salernitan master whose core biography and two of his works were included in Salvatore De Renzi’s Collectio: Magister Salernus, an acknowledged author and teacher by later generations of physicians. Ausécache reconsiders his biography and his work as a medical author in light of new information that she and others have unearthed since De Renzi’s publishing efforts, providing manuscript evidence that opens up the possibility to ascribe three new texts to him.
Although devoted to a single Salernitan text that De Renzi transcribed in his Collectio, the last contribution by Alejandro García González aims to study it as an instance of a genre of texts. Like other medieval scientific and medical glossaries, the Alphita glossary belongs to an open textual tradition where texts were unstable by their very nature. This feature must be acknowledged and faced not only as a way to understand better the texts themselves but also because it poses particular problems to the scholar attempting to produce a critical edition. These reflections are important since they make us aware of the limits of the interpretative stance taken by editorial practices that try to fix texts that were conceived as modifiable and open to additions.
This learned, multi-lingual volume ends with useful indexes of names and manuscripts that will help readers to use the scholarly richness it contains.
