The indirect tradition of ancient medical knowledge has also been entrusted to a precious and neglected vehicle of transmission, namely the sylloge of the Late Antiquity and Byzantine period. A significant example, in this sense, is provided by the compilation activity of a physician of the court of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, Theophanes Chrysobalantes. All of his medical handbooks, in a chain of sources yet to be explored, draw on authors already known, partially known or sometimes unknown to the Latin West. Even the Περὶ διαίτης/De alimentis, in its thematic homogeneity, is articulated in a sort of cento plot of which it is almost always possible to recognize the sources. The influence of this ἐγχειρίδιον is amplified through its use in Latin translation by the physician and humanist Giorgio Valla from Piacenza. Mut. gr. 61 is the antigraph on which Valla prepared its first Latin translation, published in Venice by Simone Bevilacqua in 1498, and the text inserted within the De oeconomia section of bk. 42 of his De expetendis et fugiendis rebus opus (Venice, 1501). The spread of both the incunabulum and the “encyclopedia” provides us with the opportunity for a textual journey that due to a need for compilation leads, through an interesting process of linguistic and cultural transcoding, to the construction of the modern medical lexicon for nutraceutics and digestive processes.
In ancient and Byzantine medicine, dietetics played a key role in both preventing and treating disorders of the cognitive faculties. In his posthumous De expetendis et fugiendis rebus (1501), the Italian humanist Giorgio Valla devoted particular attention to these conditions by translating the entire sixth book of Aetius of Amida’s Libri medicinales (6th c.), dedicated…
The Mutinensis gr. 61 (produced in Venice in the 1490s) is a key manuscript from Giorgio Valla’s library, as it served the celebrated humanist for his translations of two Byzantine treatises on food: Symeon Seth’s De alimentorum facultatibus and Theophanes’ De alimentis. For the latter work the Mutinensis preserves a distinctive recension of the text,…
Giorgio Valla’s Latin version of Theophanes Chrysobalantes’ Perì diaítes (De victus ratione, Venice 1498) forms part of his broader engagement with translating Greek medical and dietary texts. This paper compares the translation published in 1498 with two other renderings of dietary material included in his posthumous De expetendis et fugiendis rebus (1501): the partial translation…
The Vallian construction of the medical section of his encyclopedia constitutes a genuine case study for understanding the use of the tradition of medical texts in Humanist translations. The reading of Byzantine epitomes and of a vast corpus of medical literature certainly informed the Valla’s work . In particular, through the analysis of the vocabulary…