chapter 19 Translating Galen in the Medieval West: the Greek-Latin Translations

Anna Maria Urso

1 Medieval Translations of Galen: an Overview

1.1 From Late Antiquity to the Twelfth-Century Renewal As Owsei Temkin writes in a study that remains a milestone in the story of Galen criticism, ‘the centrifugal forces that tended to separate the Roman Empire into Latin West and Greek East gave Galen to the East’, in particular to Alexandria.1 Here – between the era of Oribasios (later third/early fourth cen- tury) and the Arab conquest of the city (642), in a cultural milieu dominated by Neoplatonism impregnated with Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy – a selection of Galen’s works was for the first time used as the foundation for a medical training curriculum.2 This was the first step in the cultural process of acquisition, organisation, and interpretation of the thinking of the master from Pergamum, known as Galenism, which would be further developed in Syria and the Islamic world, but would only take root in the West at the height of the Middle Ages. The first traces are to be found in Ostrogoth and/or Byzantine Ravenna, where evidence of interest in Galen appears in a corpus of Latin com- mentaries whose selection of texts seems to reproduce the foundation course in Alexandria.3 Apart from these commentaries, however, and a fully preserved translation of the On Sects for Beginners, the West in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages did not leave evidence of interest in the theories of Galen. We can merely suppose that there were translations of the Art of Medicine and On the Pulse for Beginners, of which commentaries survive,4 while in the other surviving translation of the Therapeutics to Glaucon the Greek text seems

1 Temkin (1973: 59). 2 On the Galenic syllabus as it existed in sixth-century Alexandria (later called ‘The Sixteen Books’, but consisting in fact of twenty-four treatises, some considered as parts of larger works) see Garofalo (2003: 203–8). 3 An annotated bibliography on Alexandrian Galenism and its Western spread during the sixth and seventh centuries, from the basic Augusto Beccaria’s researches to 2000, is to be found in Palmieri (2002). 4 Fischer (2012: 694–5).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004394353_021 360 Urso to have been significantly reshaped.5 Rather, translations of pseudo-Galenic works have been preserved. In their highly practical approach, they are com- parable to most medical texts prior to the Schola Medica Salernitana, mainly concerned with remedies and treatment.6 In order for Galen’s thinking, in both its practical and theoretical aspects, to take hold in the West, and there to ‘constitute the basis of formal medicine … at least until the seventeenth-century’ Scientific Revolution,7 a cultural renewal was needed, which brought with it the awareness of shortcomings in the scien- tific education of the time and the need for new texts to fill the gap. The trans- lation movement that brought Galen’s theories to the West, along with those of other fields of science (or pseudo-science) such as philosophy, mathematics, and astrology, was how the need for cultural tools was satisfied in a Middle Ages above all dominated by Latin. This movement, which proceeded uninter- rupted albeit in isolated and circumscribed episodes, first emerged in central- southern Italy in the eleventh century, gained energy in the twelfth century, and then continued until the threshold of the Renaissance.8 As far as medicine is concerned, the movement is commonly deemed to have been started by two forerunners linked in different ways to Montecassino: Alfano, a monk at the abbey and later Archbishop of Salerno, and Constantine the African (d. before 1098/99), a Carthaginian monk who had settled in the Benedictine monastery and whose life is surrounded by legend.9 The former translated directly from the Greek Latinorum cogente penuria the On Human Nature of Nemesios of Emesa,10 a patristic work that assimilates philosophi- cal doctrine and elements of Galenic physiology. The latter provided the West with its first corpus of medical texts, translating both works originally written

5 Fischer (2012), however, argues that in a number of cases the Latin translation may pre- serve the most authentic version. As Fischer (2013: 676) stresses, the Therapeutics to Glaucon was ‘the most important Galenic work for the Middle ages … at least until the second half of 12th century’. 6 On the Latin translations of Galenic and pseudo-Galenic works during the early Middle Ages see the updated overview by Fischer (2013). A summary of the medical production in its whole before Salerno is to be found in Jacquart (1990: 251–5). 7 Nutton (2008: 355). 8 A synthetic but complete picture of this translation movement in its whole is to be found in Chiesa (1995). For an exhaustive and updated bibliography on the medieval Galenic translations, particularly the Greek-Latin ones, from the relevant pioneeristic contri- bution by Haskins up to now, I refer to the Fiche thématique of my disciple Alessandra Scimone (2017). 9 On Constantine the African as a translator, see Long (Chapter 18) in this volume. 10 Alfanus, Premnon, pr., ed. Burkhard (1917) 2.23–4. As d’Alverny (1982: 426) argues, the reference to the penury of Latins is ‘a topical formula of many translators’.