Scholars of medieval medicine have waited a long time--nearly half a century in fact--for this edition of Arnau de Vilanova’s Speculum medicine (Mirror of Medicine). As editor Michael McVaugh explains in his preface, the editorial committee of Arnaldi de Villanova Opera Medica Omnia (AVOMO), founded by McVaugh and the late Luis García Ballester and Juan A. Paniagua, had debated since the series’ founding in 1975 how to adequately edit the Speculum, arguably Arnau’s most important work. In the intervening decades, AVOMO has published critical editions of most of Arnau’s medical works, thereby creating one of the most important printed repositories of medieval medical texts, but not the Speculum. Well into this new century, McVaugh and the editorial committee at last decided to produce a “reading edition” of the Speculum based on several of the best manuscripts rather than wait even longer to find a scholar able to produce a comprehensive critical edition. This is a wise decision, as there are few people in the world other than McVaugh--a renowned specialist in Arnau’s works and later medieval learned medicine--who could be expected to identify the best manuscripts and most likely readings of a medical work by Arnau de Vilanova.

Arnau de Villanova (ca. 1240-1311) was one of the most prolific and controversial physicians and professors of medicine in later medieval Europe. The Speculum is his longest medical work (about 90,000 words) and one of his last, completed around 1308. It contains a mature synthesis of Galenic medical theory and the general principles of the art of medicine as propounded by Arnau and his colleagues at the University of Montpellier. The Speculum builds upon the Isagoge of Johannitius (Hunayn ibn Ishaq), offering an extensive gloss upon that work but adding significant pharmaceutical theory as well. By the time Arnau was writing, the Isagoge had been read for two centuries in Europe in the Latin translation of Constantinus Africanus, introducing students to Galenic medical thought as interpreted by Islamicate scholars of the ninth century CE. In particular, Arnau’s Speculum reproduces the emphasis of the Isagoge on the “non-naturals” (diet, climate, exercise and rest, passions of the soul, etc.) that were believed to influence a body’s state of health or illness.

The Speculum begins as a typical gloss on the Isagoge, closely following that work’s structure in its first fifteen chapters. Arnau provides first an introduction to the Galenic “naturals” (elements, qualities, humors, members, virtues, operations, spirits, age, skin color) and the first three “non-naturals” (air, exercise, movement). However, that traditional structure is interrupted by an apparently separate treatise in chapters 16-78 on complexionata, that is, foods and medicines understood in terms of their medicinal complexion and their consequent actions on the body. Most of these chapters (chs. 35-73) are organized according to those medicinal actions on a patient’s organs and humoral balance, i.e., medicines that are aperitiva, mollificativa, maturativa, digestiva, frangitiva, and so on. The intrusive nature of this subordinate treatise is even clearer when Arnau returns in chapter 79 exactly to where he had left off his treatment of the remaining non-naturals, discussing sleep and waking, sexual activity, and baths, before turning to the third and final category of Galenic medical theory, the “contra-naturals” (diseases, their signs, and their causes). The chapters on complexionata take up roughly half of the entire Speculum and can in fact be seen as “a coherent treatise in itself” (385), longer even than many of Arnau’s other separately pubished medical works. The uneven structure of the Speculum, with this overwhelming emphasis on medicinal complexionata, provides a clear demonstration of Arnau’s redefinition of medicine late in his career: the educated physician’s primary concerns are the identification, composition, and prescription of medicines informed by the teachings of Galen and Avicenna.

For a “reading edition”, this volume is nonetheless impressively thorough in its size and scholarship, like all AVOMO publications. The bulk of the volume (pp. 95-353) is dedicated to the Latin edition and apparatus of the Speculum medicine. And like other AVOMO volumes, this book includes a preface and introduction in both Catalan and English (pp. 9-94 and 355-416, respectively). The Catalan introduction, translated by María Toldrà from McVaugh’s English, is printed first. (My comments are based solely on McVaugh’s English introduction.) This is no mere summary of the work, but a comprehensive essay on all aspects of the composition and contents of the Speculumthat summarizes and refines many decades of research on the subject first by Juan Paniagua and then by McVaugh himself. [1] The introduction is divided into three sections: “Arnau de Vilanova’s final medical writings” (361-376), “The content of the Speculum medicine” (377-404), and “The mirror of a career” (405-416). The first section of the introduction was already published in a shorter version. [2] The volume is rounded out by a bibliography and three indices: of names, words, and codices.

McVaugh divides his edition of the Speculum into 103 chapters, a numeration different from that found in early printed editions of Arnau’s works, but following most closely the edition of theSpeculum in the Arnaldi Opera of 1504 (Lyons). He provides a useful table of contents to these chapters (97-100), giving both his numeration and that of the 1504 edition for the use of scholars accustomed to citing from the older work. Each chapter is given a title, but McVaugh notes that these are missing from most manuscripts. They are based rather on chapter titles from the 1504 edition and have been provided for the modern reader’s convenience. McVaugh briefly describes the twenty-three known witnesses to the text in manuscript and print, but has fully collated only three of the oldest and most complete manuscripts (J, P, and S in his sigla), and compared them with the 1504 edition (called Y). Two other manuscripts (L and V) are brought in as needed to help resolve some of the more difficult readings. Pride of place is given to manuscript J, a 1413 copy produced apparently in Montpellier itself and now Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 14732. McVaugh explains that he used J in most cases of divergent readings unless it was clearly erroneous. Folio and column locations of the text in J are indicated in the margin of the edition, along with a new set of line numbers on each page, to aid scholars in citation.

As a “mirror of medicine”, the Speculum medicine not only “mirrors the world of learned European medicine as it stood at the beginning of the fourteenth century” but also “reflects... its author’s training and evolving interests” (405). That is, Arnau’s Speculum demonstrates the profound debts owed by European physicians to the Greco-Arabic medical theory of Avicenna and Rhazes as well as the growing criticism of those works inspired by careful reading into new translations of Galen’s own works (the so-called “New Galen” described in other publications by McVaugh and García Ballester). Arnau likewise carefully crafted the Speculum as a mirror, or summation, of his long medical career, as he cites from many of his own treatises (all published by AVOMO), including his De gradibus, De intentione medicorum, De humido radicali, and commentaries on passages from the works of Hippocrates and Galen.

The publication of this edition is a great boon to the study of Arnau and of later medieval medicine. It will likely be used for many years to come. Yet McVaugh is the first to recognize that his edition is far from complete and should be, at best, only a transition to a critical edition employing all known manuscripts. A frequently repeated word in this book is “arbitrary”, used as a defense of its transitional nature: the chapter titles are “arbitrary”, the choices of the index verborum are “arbitrary”, his methods of word expansion (e.g. econverso rather than econtrario) are “arbitrary”, and so on. I am happy to trust McVaugh’s arbitrium in all these cases, but he underscores the lack of a scientific approach in many aspects of the edition. The critical apparatus of his edition is spare, indicating only the most important variants from a minority of the manuscripts. He rightly remarks that “for the purposes of a reading edition, an elaborate critical apparatus did not seem necessary” (88). Yet a comprehensive study of the entire textual tradition may turn up significant alternate readings that indicate how the Speculum was read and copied in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Similarly, there is no apparatus fontium or any systematic attempt to trace Arnau’s citations and influences or echoes of contemporary medical works. So, there is still much to be done to understand fully the composition, accurate text, and reception of Arnau’s Speculum medicine. But until another scholar of medieval medicine and textual criticism appears to undertake such a herculean task, we should be grateful that McVaugh chose to publish at least this carefully considered reading edition of the work.

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Notes:

[1] Juan A. Paniagua, “La patología general en la obra de Arnaldo de Villanova,” Archivos Iberoamericanos de Historia de la Medicina y Antropologia Médica 1 (1949), 49-119. For McVaugh, see for example his introductory essay, “The Development of Medieval Pharmaceutical Theory,” in his edition of Arnau de Villanova, Aphorismi de gradibus, AVOMO 2 (Barcelona, 1975; repr. 1992), 3-136.

[2] Michael McVaugh, “The Writing of the Speculum Medicine and its Place in Arnau de Vilanova’s Last Years,” Arxiu de Textos Catalans Antics 30 (2011-2013), 293-304.