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’.