From Constantinople to Southern Italy – and Retour?

Southern Italy played a significant role for Byzantine medical history in many respects, not only because numerous medical manuscripts were copied in southern Italian scriptoria and disseminated from there throughout the entire medieval world, but also because the centres in southern Italy played an important role in the transmission and adaptation of medical theory and practical therapeutic concepts. The teaching canon of the University of Salerno was based on Alexandrian-Byzantine foundations (so in particular the development of the famous Articella), and the reception, translation and textual criticism established there also followed the model of Byzantine epitomisation and rewriting structures. Furthermore, Southern Italy was an important crossing point of different medical cultures, including not only Byzantine and Western Latin traditions, but also the Arab-Jewish medical culture: their blending in turn had a major influence on medical and pharmacological terminology, as well as various therapeutic concepts. My paper attempts to contextualise the various influences from Byzantium, Byzantine physicians and scholars, and Byzantine healthcare institutions (xenones), that reached the Latin West via southern Italy, an essential transcultural crossing point, and asks to what extent this encounter between different medical cultures and traditions in Southern Italy also had an impact on the development of Byzantine medicine and how this development manifested itself in the Byzantine medical literature.