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Illustrated herbals were in the Middle Ages linked to chains of exempla, diminishing the fidelity of their images to nature. Its 192 illustrations testify to the gradual shift away from an earlier, conventional representational system, toward a more naturalistic style that came to predominate by the century’s end. The first group of specimen images from the first half of the fifteenth century are often visually unrecognizable. The roots, for example, are given special prominence, sometimes incorporating fantastical anthropomorphic creatures, as in the drawings of a female mandragora or a blue-faced woad plant. The commentary text, present for about a quarter of the plants, describes preparations and predicted medicinal properties. Most of the medicinal notes are in Italian, though some are in Latin and a few mix the two languages.

Publius Vegetius Renatus (ca. 383–450 AD) is principally known as the author of two surviving works: the Epitomata rei militaris, whose influence on military tactics endured in the post-Classical world; and the Mulomedicina, a concise summary of ancient veterinary science derived in part from two earlier works. As a high-ranking Roman official, Vegetius traveled extensively throughout the Roman Empire, learning from the Barbarians and the Huns he encountered, and acquiring a working knowledge of horses and bovines, including the different breeds and the various equine diseases and their remedies. Veterinary activity chiefly dealt with the health of beasts of burden: horses, mules, donkeys, and cattle, for much economic and military activity depended on their wellbeing. The Mulomedicina maintained its popularity in the later Middle Ages, and four distinct dialectal Italian translations of the text appeared in the Renaissance. The present manuscript contains the first vernacular adaptation in a Tuscan dialect.

This volume consists of fourteenth-century Latin medical works translated into Hebrew. The first text is a unique and anonymous translation of a medical manual and collection of 592 prescriptions ascribed in the text to Gentile da Foligno (d. 1348), professor of medicine at Perugia and Padua. Gentile’s posthumous fame was considerable: he is memorialized in the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 as “that most subtle investigator of Avicenna’s teachings.” Translations of da Foligno’s contemporaries follow, such as a treatise on surgery and bandaging by the Florentine physician Dino del Garbo (d. 1327). The final substantial work is the Mavo be-melakhah, a Hebrew translation by Abraham Avigdor (1350–after 1399) from the fourth book of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine. Avigdor, a member of a distinguished family of physicians, lived in France during the second half of the fourteenth century. He translated many medical texts from Latin into Hebrew.

Avicenna (ca. 980–1037) was the most renowned Islamic medical author of the Middle Ages. The present text contains Books 1 to 3 and the beginning of Book 4 of his comprehensive quasi-encyclopedic work, the Qānūn fī al-ṭibb or Canon of Medicine, translated into Hebrew from the original Arabic by the Italian Jewish translator, Nathan ben Eliezer ha-Me’ati (act. 1279–83). The Canon is an immense compendium of ancient and Islamic medical knowledge drawing from the work of Galen and Hippocrates, known to Arabic audiences through translations from the Greek originals. Avicenna adduced findings from his own medical practice, producing a work that was canonical in Muslim and Jewish cultures and was immediately accepted as authoritative in Europe after its translation into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the twelfth century. The Canon of Medicine constituted the first systematic description of the human body, its diseases, and their treatment.

This compact Hebrew manuscript provides evidence of the intellectual exchanges that animated the daily life of one of Northern Italy’s most prominent Jewish families, the Finzi. The first portion of the volume contains copies of twenty letters in which the names of various members of the dynasty occur frequently. The first letter identifies the astronomer and mathematician Mordekhai Finzi (ca. 1407–76), Yehudah of Rhodos (Rhodes?), and Abraham Kohen as “men of influence at the courts of the Pope and the King of France.” Lastly included is the Sefer ha-seder ha-katan, an anonymous translation from Arabic into Hebrew of an abridgment of Avicenna’s Qānūn fī al-ṭibb (Canon of Medicine), which begins with a list of human limbs and their qualities, and proceeds to the middle of the third book, which is dedicated to special pathology, or diseases concerning single organs.