Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine

Herbals

The term “herbal” (herbarium) usually refers to early printed books of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the therapeutic properties of plants used in medicine. However, it can be applied to earlier works dealing with the same topic, from their prototype, De materia medica (MM) by the Greek *Dioscorides (first century C.E.), to late-medieval compilations such as the early fourteenth-century Liber de herbis.

In their medieval canonical form, herbals usually consisted of a list of plants whose parts (roots, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds) were used as primary ingredients (that is, drugs) for the preparation of medicines, be they simple or composed. A chapter was devoted to each plant and all such chapters were ordered alphabetically by plant name. Each chapter normally contained the following: (a) The most commonly used Latin name of the plant and its synonyms; (b) A description of the plant; (c) The part or parts of the plant or plants to be used for therapeutic purposes (i.e., the drug or drugs), and their state (fresh or dry); (d) The preparation of the drug and, when appropriate, the proper ways to store it, that is, the type of container necessary for good conservation, without interaction between the drug and the substance of the container itself, and the maximum possible length of conservation without alteration of the drug and its properties; (e) The properties of the drug, usually expressed according to *Galen’s system, that is, according to the four primary qualities (hot and cold; dry and humid) and their grade (on a scale of four degrees); (f) The disease or diseases for the treatment of which the drug was used; and (g) A drawing of the plant, more or less developed or schematic.

After the translation period and the assimilation of Arabic texts into Western medical sciences, the schema above was modified to include a list of synonyms that included the Greek and Arabic names of plants transliterated into the Latin alphabet and often adapted to Latin phonetics but which was deformed by mistakes of all kinds. The list of diseases was very often preceded by long quotations from previous authors’ works. Such citations were attributed and ordered according to the probable chronological sequence of the authors, be they Greek (known through their Arabic versions themselves translated into Latin) or Arabic (in Latin translation). A further innovation was the inclusion of medieval commentaries on these authors; these might contain the text of the primary author, divided into thematic sections. Such commentaries tended to accumulate with the passage of time.

Byzantine and Arabic Precursors

In Byzantium, Dioscorides’ MM rapidly became the standard work for the knowledge of herbal substances used for therapeutic purposes; it seems to have been preferred to Galen’s works on the topic because of the Christianization of medicine. MM was widely spread from Egypt to Constantinople and from Rome to Syria. Its original text was rearranged several times, including the production of a herbal stricto sensu, first attested by the manuscript now in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, medicus graecus 1, c. 513 C.E. This herbal contained about three hundred plants and their representation in color illustrations, and was abundantly reproduced until 1453 and even later in the West. Eastern plants from the original version of MM were eliminated in this herbal, and not reintroduced until the eleventh century in the manuscript now Athos (Greece), Megistis Lavras, S 75.

The works of both Dioscorides and Galen were translated into Syriac during the sixth century. MM was translated into Arabic twice during the ninth century by *Hunayn ibn Ishaq working in Baghdad in collaboration with Istifan ibn Basil, and several other times later on. Plant representations in early Arabic copies of MM strongly recall their Greek models, and include other decorative elements suggesting natural habitats (with animals and environmental elements such as rivers and rocks, for instance) and human uses (with representations of physicians, for example). Their works contributed to the production of original Arabic herbals (or sections on herbal drugs in larger medical encyclopedias) such as the Book on Medicinal Plants of *al-Biruni and the Canon of *Ibn Sina (Avicenna). The discursive genre of the herbal, such as represented by MM and reproduced among others by the above authors, was transformed by ibn Butlan (d. c. 1063) in the Tables of Health. He segmented textual information so as to present it in a tabular form where each column contains one single category of data: name, nature, degree, best variety, usefulness, toxicity, treatment of toxic action, property, usefulness according to patient’s temperament and age, and to season and place.

Arabic herbalism attained its apogee in the Cordoban school, whose origin dates back to the Umayyad ‘Abd al-Rahman I (756–788) and to his experiments of naturalization of Eastern plants. Local knowledge was enhanced during the tenth century thanks to a Greek copy of MM sent by the Byzantine emperor to the emir ‘Abd al-Rahman III (929–961). During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, al-Ghafiqi (first half of the twelfth century?), from Córdoba, and ibn al-Baytar (before 1204–1248), who was born in Málaga and traveled to the East, wrote the most comprehensive Arabic herbals, mainly following the MM model.

The West

Western herbals can be divided into three major chronological groups: (a) Late antiquity; (b) The translation period; and (c) The post-translation period.

(a) Late antiquity. Herbals of this period were mainly translations, adaptations, and compilations of previous or contemporary Greek and Latin works. They can be divided into two main sub-groups:

(a1) Translations and adaptations of Dioscorides’ MM, and of books 20–27 of Pliny’s Natural History, which are devoted to medicinal plants. These include (in probable chronological order): Gargilius Martialis (third century), Pseudo-Apuleius (fourth century?), Medicina and Physica Plinii (early fourth, and fifth/sixth century respectively), Theodorus Priscianus (fourth/fifth century), Vindicianus (fourth/fifth century) (now lost), Pseudo-Dioscorides, De herbis feminis (fifth century), Marcellus of Bordeaux (early fifth century), Serenus Sammonicus (of uncertain period, between second and fourth century), and *Isidore of Seville (bishop of Seville 600/601–636). Such works amalgamated local material, sometimes characterized by superstition and magic.

(a2) First medieval original syntheses, from the recipe book of Lorsch Abbey (Germany) (790 C.E.) to Hraban Maur (c. 780–856), Walahfrid Strabo (c. 808–849), and *Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). These works reflect the development of gardens of simples in the context of Western monastic institutions, and include the newly developed Christian approach to the medicinal powers of plants, characterized by prayers to the saints Cosmas and Damian which concentrate on God’s creative power, and thus restrict speculation on the natural origin of the plant’s therapeutic power, as well as materialist theories such as those of Galen.

(b) Translation period. Translation activity started in southern Italy, be it from Arabic into Greek or Latin (for the latter, *Salerno and *Monte Cassino, with *Constantine the African [d. after 1085]), and later pursued in Spain (*Toledo, among others with *Gerard of Cremona [c. 1114–187]), southern France (Montpellier), *Arnau de Vilanova, and Sicily under Manfred, King of Naples and Sicily (1258–1266). Translations included a wide range of works, from the classical Canon of Avicenna translated by Gerard of Cremona to the Travelers’ Medical Manual of ibn al-Jazzar (d. 1004–1005) translated by Constantine as the Viaticum, and the Tables of Health of ibn Butlan translated in Sicily as the *Tacuinum sanitatis, maybe by Faraj ibn Salim (thirteenth century). All such translations were widely spread in the West. Illustrations of Tacuinum sanitatis were particularly developed in northern Italy, with the creation of a new iconic genre: plants were inserted into scenes borrowing their elements from other scientific and non-scientific fields such as agriculture and the calendar.

(c) Post-translation period. The injection of Arabic texts into Western medicine fostered the writing of new herbals such as the Regime of Health (tenth/eleventh century), the Dynamidios perhaps of Gariopontus (late eleventh century), the herbal of Platearius commonly identified by its first words as Circa instans (twelfth century), the Salernitan secrets, and the early-fourteenth century Book of Herbs, with its French translation, the Livre des simples médecines. As the latter suggests, versions in the vernacular proliferated from then onward (even though they were not a novelty of that time), in Romance, Anglo-Saxon, and German languages. The illustrations of a copy of the Liber de herbis, the early fourteenth-century manuscript Egerton 747 now conserved at the British Library (London), have a realistic character that induced historians of art to think that they were made from nature directly, rather than reproducing previous models.

During the post-translation period, new translations of Greek works were made by such scholars as *Burgundio of Pisa, *Pietro d’Abano, and *Niccolò da Reggio. Characteristically, they included Galen’s treatise On the Mixtures and Properties of simple medicines and tried to reintroduce Galen’s herbalism, which was abandoned during the early Byzantine period. In Pietro d’Abano’s pharmacological work, both Dioscorides’ and Galen’s texts are associated.

Into Print

The first printed herbal was the Herbarius Maguntie impressus (Mainz, 1484), followed by the Herbarius Patavie impressus (Passau, 1485), and the herbal attributed to Arnau de Vilanova and Avicenna (Vicenza, 1491). In the same year came the Ortus sanitatis (Mains, 1491), immediately followed by the De Plinii aliorumque in medicina erroribus by Nicolao Leoniceno (1428–1524) published in 1492 (Ferrara), which put an end to the era of medieval herbals. The work suggested a return to Greek science (that is, to Dioscorides’ MM) rather than using Pliny’s Natural History or the Latin translations of Arabic medical treatises. No new herbal appeared before the Herbarum vivae eicones by Otto Brunfels (c. 1488–1534) in 1530 to be followed shortly by the De historia stirpium commentarii by Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566).

See also Botany; Magic and the occult; Pharmacology; Translation movements; Translation norms and practice

Bibliography

Arber, Agnes. Herbals. Their origin and evolution. A chapter in the history of botany, 1470–1670. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1912.

Collins, Minta. Medieval herbals. The Illustrative Traditions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Daems, Willem F. Nomina simplicium medicinarum ex synonymariis Medii Aevi collecta. Semantische Untersuchungen zum Fachwortschatz hoch- und spätmittelalterlicher Drogenkunde. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993.

Müller, Annette. Krankheitsbilder im Liber de Plantis der Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) und im Speyerer Kräuterbuch (1456). Ein Beitrag zur medizinischpharmazeutischen Terminologie im Mittelalter. 2 vols. Hürtgenwald: Guido Pressler Verlag, 1997.

Opsomer, Carmelia. Index de la pharmacopée antique du Ier au Xe siècle. 2 vols. Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1989.

Riddle, John M. Dioscorides on pharmacy and medicine. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

Sadek, Mahmoud M. The Arabic materia medica of Dioscorides. St-Jean-Chrysostome: Les Editions du Sphinx, 1983.

Stannard, Jerry. Herbs and herbalism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.

———. Pristina medicamenta. Ancient and medieval botany. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.

Stirling, Iohannes. Lexicon nominum herbarum, arborum fruticumque linguae latinae ex fontibus Latinitatis ante saeculum XXII scriptis. Budapest: Encyclopaedia, 1995–1997.

ALAIN TOUWAIDE

Hermann of Carinthia

Hermann of Carinthia (fl. 1138–1143) was a translator from Arabic into Latin of texts on mathematics (including *astrology) and Islam, and the author of original works on astrology and *cosmology. The various epithets attached to his name—de Carinthia, Dalmata, Sclavus—indicate that he was a Slav from the northern Balkan region; and he himself refers to “Central Istria” as his homeland in his translation of *Abu Ma‘shar’s Great Introduction. He referred to himself as “Hermannus Secundus,” perhaps in recognition that his scientific work was a continuation of that of Hermannus Contractus of Reichenau. Inspired by the example of *Thierry of Chartres, chancellor of Chartres cathedral, to whom he refers as “his most loving teacher” (diligentissime preceptor), he embarked on a program of translating mathematical works from Arabic, together with his colleague, Robert of Ketton, to improve the quality of the textbooks available for teaching the secular sciences (the seven liberal arts) in the Western schools. Many of the texts that they prepared have not survived, including their translation of *Ptolemy’s Almagest from the Arabic, which was their ultimate aim and may never have been completed. But versions of astronomical tables, of *Euclid’s Elements and Theodosius’s Spherics have been attributed to them, and evidently formed part of their enterprise. In 1143 Hermann dedicated Ptolemy’s Planisphere (on the mathematics of stereographic projection, on which the operation of the astrolabe is based) to Thierry. Robert and Hermann’s project was interrupted in 1141 by a commission from Peter the Venerable of Cluny to translate the Qu’ran and a representative collection of texts on Islam, of which Hermann was responsible for On the Generation of Muhammad (on the transmission of a divine spirit from Adam to Muhammad), and The Doctrine of Muhammad (a simple exposition of Muslim belief). Hermann was particularly interested in establishing the scientific bases of astrology in Latin, by translating works (e.g., a work on general astrology by Sahl ibn Bishr, translated in León in 1138) and compiling manuals on specific topics (e.g., texts on weather forecasting and finding treasure and lost objects). He may have worked closely with *Hugh of Santalla in putting together summae of astrological judgments based on several Arabic authorities.

Principal Achievement

Hermann’s most important contribution to astrology, however, was his translation of Abu Ma‘shar’s Great Introduction to Astrology (1140), which underpinned the whole field of astrological doctrine with rational arguments, several taken from Aristotle. Hermann used these doctrines and arguments in his original work On the Essences (1143), which was devoted to physics “whose first part” (in his own words) “considered the nature of the upper world, and second part, the nature of the lower world, these being respectively the formal causes and the material causes of all things” (from his preface to the Planisphere). The “essences” of the title are cause, movement, place, time, and “condition” (habitudo), and Hermann expertly weaves together doctrine from the Arabic and the Latin traditions to form a well-constructed synthesis on the constitution and operation of the cosmos, the formation of minerals, plants and animals, and finally the composition of man. Hermann was writing at a time when the subject matter of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics was still being established in the West. The section on “cause” in On the Essences is virtually an essay on metaphysics, while “movement” (the effect of the cause) involves discussion of physical principles, to which the astronomy of the Almagest is accommodated. The analogy of musical harmony is often invoked (e.g., in the comparison of the planets’ diversification of the movement of the first cause to the production of different pitches issuing from a single breath being blown into pipes of different lengths), and the biological language of the mating of masculine and feminine elements, characteristic of alchemy, is used. Hermes and Plato are Hermann’s most venerable authorities: the “Emerald Tablet” of Hermes—the alchemists’ credo—is quoted (perhaps for the first time in Latin) and *Plato’s Timaeus provides the model for the structure of the work, as well as for the principles of the Same and the Different which are the prerequisite for change. On the Essences was completed in Béziers, which is where we find Hermann’s one known pupil, Rudolph of Bruges, composing a work on the use of the astrolabe in 1144. It is less likely that Hermann subsequently moved to Sicily and was responsible for a translation from Greek into Latin of the Almagest, which is attributed to him in one manuscript. Throughout his works Hermann is concerned with literary quality, and On the Essences is suffused with echoes of Latin poets and Classical mythology. The combination of myth and science, which was favored by the French Schools in the early twelfth century, was soon to be displaced by a drier scientific discourse, in which Aristotle’s works were central. But Hermann’s ideas lived on in extensive quotations of On the Essences in the work of the *Domingo Gundisalvo, while his translation of the Great Introduction to Astrology was printed three times in the Renaissance.

See also Aristotelianism; Astrolabes and quadrants; Quadrivium

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Abu Ma‘shar. Great Introduction, translated by Hermann of Carinthia. In Liber introductorii maioris ad scientiam judiciorum astrorum. Edited by Richard Lemay, 9 vols. Naples: Istituto Universtario Orientale, 1995–1996, vol. VIII.

Hermann of Carinthia. De essentiis. Edited and translated by Charles Burnett. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1982; Edited by Antun S. Kalenic. Pula: JAZU, 1990.

———. “The Liber imbrium, the Fatidica, and the De indagatione cordis.” Edited by Shiela Low-Beer. Unpub. Doctoral Diss., City University of New York, 1979.

Euclid. Elements, translated by Hermann of Carinthia. Edited by H.L.L. Busard, Books I–VI. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968. Books VII–XII. Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum, 1977.

Ptolemy. Planisphere, translated by Hermann of Carinthia. Edited by Johan L. Heiberg. In Ptolemaei opera astronomica minora. Leipzig: Teubner, 1907, pp. 225–259.

Secondary Sources

Burnett, Charles. “Hermann of Carinthia.” In A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy. Peter Dronke, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988: 386–406.

———. Arabic into Latin in Twelfth-Century Spain: the Works of Hermann of Carinthia. Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch (1978) 13: 100–134.

———. “The Blend of Latin and Arabic Sources in the Metaphysics of Adelard of Bath, Hermann of Carinthia and Gundisalvus.” In Metaphysics in the Twelfth Century: On the Relationship among Philosophy, Science and Theology. Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Alexander Fidora and Andreas Niederberger, eds. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004: 41–65.

Dadic, Zarko. Herman Dalmatin: Hermann of Dalmatia (Croatian and English). Zagreb: Skolska Knjiga, 1996.

Haskins, Charles Homer. Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927: 67–81.

CHARLES BURNETT

Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) led both a very conventional and a very unconventional life. Born into a well-connected family in the German Rhineland, at twelve she entered a Benedictine monastery. Seventy years later she died in a second Benedictine monastery no more than twenty miles from her birthplace. She took few trips, the longest only a few hundred miles from her monastery; her main supporters and friends were almost all relatives.

And yet Hildegard’s life was remarkable. In her early forties she began to experience complex spiritual visions; by fifty she had completed her first book, Scivias, a grandiose illuminated text on the theological and sometimes the political implications of these visions. Two years later, despite her monastic vows, she left her first monastery and, taking most of its nuns with her, founded a new monastery at Bingen on the Rhine. Over the next thirty years she wrote many works, among them two other illuminated texts of theology, a musical drama (possibly the first in Europe), more than seventy liturgical pieces, a commentary on the Benedictine Rule, two saints’ lives, and a glossary of a private language. By the end of her life she was well known, and her surviving letters include correspondence with most of the crowned heads of Europe, as well as numerous popes, archbishops, bishops, abbots, and abbesses.

Of greatest interest to historians of science, technology, and medicine are Hildegard’s two medico-botanical works, Physica and Causae et curae. Her sources are still unknown. The texts imply that she was familiar with Galenism, folk practice, and the new Arabic medicine, and that she had gained practical knowledge of medicine as the infirmarian at her first monastery.

Physica is essentially a nine-book natural science encyclopedia (on plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, reptiles, and metals) in the tradition of Pliny the Elder (23–79) and *Isidore of Seville, as well as of *lapidaries, *bestiaries, and *herbals. The work consists of short passages on the medicinal properties of thousands of substances. Many of its observations are original, and even when presenting traditional information Hildegard is always idiosyncratic.

By contrast, the five-book Causae et curae is more of a manual of practical medicine, probably composed for the nun-infirmarian of Hildegard’s new monastery at Bingen. Its first book summarizes natural science and cosmology; its second book presents an abbreviated human physiology; its third and fourth books provide medicinal recipes, and the fifth book has passages on prognostic techniques. Although sometimes confusing and still controversial, the text allows an unparalleled look at how one particular medieval practitioner assimilated the varied strands of medicine available—the Greco-Roman, the Christian, and the folk-oral.

For instance, Hildegard conflates three humoral ideas, while adding a few of her own. She takes a mainly Hippocratic view of the humors as bile, blood, melancholy, and phlegm, but sometimes assumes a rather more Galenic view, treating the humors as if they were identical with the qualities of hot and cold, wet and dry. At other times she treats “humor” as if it were the unique medicinal property of a plant—its sap—linguistically the original meaning of the Greek chymos (humor). None of this prevents her from also seeing humors idiosyncratically, as higher or lower, good or bad, in parallel with her concern with hierarchy and order. But it is Hildegard’s concept of viriditas (greenness) that has provided scholars with their most important insights into the medieval body. Viriditas was originally a botanical concept signifying green sap, often used as a metaphor for the fertility of spiritual qualities. Although Hildegard does use viriditas in both these ways, she uniquely finds it also inside the body, and with hormone-like qualities. Thus her viriditas is a substance that circulates in the blood, is modified by food, and affects secondary sexual characteristics. This unique usage suggests that for her there was an implicit overlap between medieval doctor and gardener—just as the job of the gardener was to cultivate the viriditas of the plant, so the job of the physician was to nurture the viriditas of the patient.

Taken together, Physica and Causae et curae can provide the scholar with special insights into the medieval body. Long neglected, and then studied without reference to its context, Hildegard’s work should instead be a reference point for many studies of medieval science, technology, and medicine—not just as “the woman’s voice,” or “the mystic’s voice,” or even “the genius’s voice,” but as the voice of an observant and pragmatic practitioner.

See also Dioscorides; Encyclopedias; Galen; Gynecology and midwifery; Hippocrates; Hospitals; Illustration, medical; Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical; Microcosm/macrocosm; Natural history; Pharmaceutic handbooks; Pharmacology; Pharmacy; Regimen sanitatis; Salerno; Translation movements; Women in science

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Hildegard of Bingen. Holistic Healing. Translated by Manfred Pawlik, translator of Latin text, Patrick Madigan, translator of German text, John Kulas, translator of foreword. Edited by Mary Palmquist and John Kulas. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996.

Hildegard, Saint. Hildegard’s Healing Plants: From the Medieval Classic ‘Physica.’ Translated by Bruce W. Hozeski. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

Kaiser, Paul, ed. Hildegardis Cause et curae. Leipzig: Teubner, 1903.

Migne, Jacques-Paul, ed. S. Hildegardis Abbatissae Opera Omnia. Vol. 197, Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Latina. Paris: Garnier, 1855.

Moulinier, Laurence, ed. Beate Hildegardis Bingensis Causae et cure. Vol. 1. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003. Patrologia Latina Database (CD-Rom). Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Latina. Alexandria, VA: Chadwick-Healey, Inc., 1995.

Throop, Priscilla. Hildegard Von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing. Rochester, VT:.Healing Arts Press, 1998.

Tombeur, Paul. “The Cetedoc Library of Christian Latin Texts: Cdrorn.” Turnhout: Brepols, 2002.

Secondary Sources

Berger, Margret. Hildegard of Bingen: On Natural Philosophy and Medicine. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999.

Twentieth-century rendition of a thirteenth-century Lucca manuscript illustration of Hildegard of Bingen. (Lebrecht Music and Arts Picture Library/John Minnion)

Burnett, Charles and Peter Dronke, eds. Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of Her Thought and Art. London: Warburg Institute, 1998.

Flanagan, Sabina. Hildegard of Bingen, 1098–1179: A Visionary Life. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1998.

McInerney, Maud Burnett, ed. Hildegard of Bingen: A Book of Essays. London: Garland Press, 1998.

Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 (1987).

——— ed. Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Singer, Charles. “The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard (1098–1179).” In Studies in the History and Method of Science, edited by Charles Singer, 155. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.

Sweet, Victoria. “Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1999) 73: 381–403.

———. “Body as Plant, Doctor as Gardener: Premodem Medicine in Hildegard of Bingen’s Causes and Cures.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California San Francisco, 2003.

VICTORIA SWEET

Hospitals

The Oxford English Dictionary provides several definitions of the term hospital, including: “a house or hostel for the reception and entertainment of pilgrims, travelers, and strangers; a hospice,” “a charitable institution for the housing and maintenance of the needy,” “an asylum for the destitute, infirm, or aged,” as well as our more modern definition of “an institution or establishment for the care of the sick or wounded, or of those who require medical treatment.” An understanding of the development of the hospital as an institution, from its roots in Byzantium and the Dar al-Islam to its flowering in the medieval West, requires that we utilize these broader definitions of the structures, missions, and types of care provided by such institutions. While a majority of Byzantine and Islamic institutions provided advanced medical care administered by trained physicians, many early European medieval hostels and hospices did not. Such non-medicalized institutions are vital to the history of the hospital because they offered compassionate spiritual and physical care to the suffering, and this desire to alleviate pain is the fundamental mission behind the hospital as an institution, whether ancient, medieval, or modern.

Byzantine Hospitals

The first hospitals in Byzantium were modeled on Christian charitable institutions that had developed throughout the third and fourth centuries C.E. to house and feed the needy. Xenones, or hospices, provided food or shelter, while nosokomeion, or hospitals, provided medical care for the physically and mentally ill. St. Basil the Great founded one of the earliest hospitals at Caesarea, Cappadocia, c. 372 C.E. The nosokomeion and the surrounding complex, which became known as the Basileias, not only ministered to needy wayfarers as they passed through the province and provided spiritual care to those in crisis, but also offered therapeutic medical treatment delivered by trained physicians for those suffering in body and mind. The complex further contained areas dedicated to the care of the chronically ill, including the aged and the leprous.

St. Basil’s was only one of the earliest in a long tradition of Byzantine hospitals. Healing institutions similar to those in Alexandria, Thessalonica, Ephesus, and Constantinople were opened throughout the empire, and continued to develop well into the Middle Ages. While both the Byzantine Church, through its network of metropolitans and bishops, and wealthy individuals founded hospitals, many more were established and funded by the imperial government. In 1136, Empress Irene Komnenos founded the hospital complex of the Pantocrator of Constantinople, the typikon, or charter, of which has survived. The Pantocrator contained specialized areas for surgery, a central hearth-altar, separate chambers for men and women, areas for the chronically ill, the mentally deranged, the aged, a leprosarium, a dormitory for hospital staff, a medical school, an out-patient area, and several chapels with elaborate mosaics. Staffing at the Pantocrator was hierarchical, with the archiatros, or head physician, acting as director of thirty-five physicians, several midwives, surgeons, and pharmacists, together with a sizeable nursing staff composed of men and women. The archiatros was also responsible for managing the non-medical staff of the hospital, including cooks, launderers, groundskeepers, and provisioners. The architecture of this hospital was based on that of the monastery at Meteora, and served to reinforce the theological assertion that every illness, whether physical or mental, was spiritual in origin; the healing process, therefore, began with a cleansing of the soul, administered primarily through contact with Christ and His Saints in the sacred space of the hospital.

Hospitals in the Dar al-Islam

The development of the hospital in Islam can be attributed to contact with Greek medical texts and institutions, the growing need for medical care in the rapidly developing cities of the Islamic empire, and the practice of charity and hospitality inherent in Islamic culture. The rise of Islam in the seventh century and its phenomenal expansion brought intellectuals into contact with the textual traditions of the West. By the sixth century, medical treatises had already been disseminated to the edges of the eastern Byzantine empire. Nestorian Christians, fleeing persecution by the Byzantine Church, brought libraries of medical texts eastward into Syria, and established centers of learning, such as the famed medical school at Gondeshapur. Muslim physicians not only made use of the Greek-to-Syriac translations produced at these centers, but also gathered Greek medical treatises from Byzantine cities, such as Alexandria, which had been absorbed into the Islamic Empire. Contact with Byzantine medical culture provided Islam with the institutional foundations for the development of the bimaristan, the Islamic hospital.

Islamic culture has at its core the fundamental belief that charity and hospitality are vital practices for both the individual and the community as a whole. Muhammad called on his people to care for widows, orphans, and the destitute. Since those suffering from illness were often incapacitated to the point where they could not support themselves, they were also to be provided for by the Muslim community. Individuals, through tithing and bequests (zaqat and waqf), contributed to the support of hospitals. Ultimately, the caliphs would found hospitals and their functioning would be supported and managed by the state. Islamic hospitals were predominantly secular in orientation, in contrast to those of Byzantium. Some of the most prominent bimaristans in the Islamic empire included the leprosarium at Damascus founded by the Umayyad caliph Ibn Walid, the hospital at Rayy at which *al-Razi practiced his art, the al-Baghdadi hospital founded by Harun al-Rashid and managed by the Bakhtishu family of Gundishapur, the Mansuria Hospital in Egypt, and the Egyptian Hospital of Ibn Tulun, the functioning of which is described in detail in the memoirs of Ibn Jubayr.

Islamic hospitals, although based on the institutions of Byzantium, were not mere reproductions of a received tradition; instead, Muslim physicians used Byzantine models to create distinctly Islamic institutions. Islamic hospitals were staffed by trained physicians and nurses under the guidance of a head physician; an individual appointed by the caliph oversaw the funding and management of non-medical aspects of the institution. Within the differentiated space of the Islamic hospital were areas for internal medicine, osteopathy, ophthalmology, and surgery, as well as separate wards for men, women, and the chronically ill. The hospital also contained a medical school, with a library and classrooms, a pharmacy, baths, an outpatient area, and a mosque. One significant contribution of Muslim physicians to the design of the hospital was a ward designated solely for the treatment of the mentally ill. These wards were open to the public, and allowed patients to continue to participate in the daily life of the community.

Hospitals in the Medieval Christian West

Roman hospitals of the third and fourth centuries were Christian charitable foundations established, primarily by bishops, to provide food, shelter, and basic care to the destitute. These foundations functioned as hospices, and while providing spiritual care and the alleviation of suffering, did not offer medical treatment. Unlike Byzantine institutions of the same period, which contained specialized rooms for different types of treatment, Roman hospices generally consisted of one room, an undifferentiated space within which the sick, the poor, and the transient co-existed. This sacred space might be imagined as a small chapel in which beds and pallets of straw were arranged. Throughout the sixth century, the pope exhorted bishops to continue to found hospices; Caesarius of Arles erected such a structure for the benefit of his flock. Many of these early foundations did not survive the urban decline of the seventh century and were left to decay. Charlemagne, in the ninth century, advocated the founding of hospices for the care of pilgrims and the infirm; however, many of these institutions were destroyed by subsequent barbarian invasions and political dissolution.

In addition to the Roman type of hospice was the monastic infirmary. The Rule of Saint Benedict called for the charitable care of the destitute and infirm. In response to this demand, Benedictine monasteries housed infirmaries for the care of sick inmates, and when necessary, people in the surrounding community. Both body and soul were treated simultaneously in the monastic infirmary. The infirmarian, acting as physician, utilized medicaments, such as salves and purgatives, as well as therapeutics, such as dietary regimens and massage, to treat bodily illness. The monastic community helped to heal the souls of the suffering through prayer, liturgy, and communion; the proximity of saintly relics also provided physical and spiritual benefits. In some cases music was allowed in the infirmary to help soothe the souls of the sick, thereby facilitating the healing process. The monastic infirmary was originally an undifferentiated space; however, by the ninth and tenth centuries a level of differentiation had been achieved, with the infirmary being divided into an area for the acutely ill, a pharmacy used for the concoction of medicines and blood-letting, a bath area, and a garden for growing medicinal herbs.

The medieval hospital advanced as a medical institution due to the reception of Eastern medical traditions via the translation of medical texts, as well as through contact with eastern hospitals during the Crusades. Early translations were made at the Benedictine monastery of *Monte Cassino, where *Constantine the African (fl. 1065–1085) rendered Arabic treatises, such as the Pantegni of *‘Ali ibn al’Abbas al-Majusi, into Latin. In the twelfth century, scholars such as *Gerard of Cremona traveled to Spain in search of medical treatises, carrying them northward to monasteries, cathedral schools, and universities. The dissemination of medical texts, the development of the university, and a demand for medical care by the elite contributed to the development of the medical profession. By the thirteenth century, the physician was a recognizable member within the community. While private practice was predominant, physicians also donated their time for the sake of charity, and brought learned medical practice into the medieval hospital.

The Crusades brought Europeans into direct contact with Eastern hospitals, such as that of Saint John of Jerusalem. The structure of Saint John’s Hospital was Byzantine, with differentiated areas for specialized activities. It was staffed by trained physicians and nurses who cared for the inmates. In 1125, the Knights of Saint John’s Hospital, or the Hospitallers, were recognized as an official order, and were placed in charge of Saint John’s. As the order expanded, the Hospitallers founded and staffed hospitals throughout the Mediterranean and Europe.

The Hospitallers were only the most prominent of a myriad of orders dedicated to the care of the sick. Religious confraternities and lay brotherhoods, particularly the Augustinian Canons, offered their services both by running hospices and by nursing in hospitals. This desire to care for the destitute and the suffering came in response to the needs produced by the rapid urbanization of the twelfth century; overcrowding, poverty, and unsanitary conditions combined to create an environment rife with disease. In the twelfth century, there was not only a physical and social need for hospital care, but also a spiritual desire to offer health care as a form of charity. During this period, Christ’s humanity, and the suffering of His flesh, became powerful religious concepts. As Christians meditated on the suffering of Christ, they were called to alleviate the suffering of their fellow Christians. In response, people not only supported hospitals through almsgiving, but also by performing the arduous tasks involved in nursing. In the thirteenth century, the Beguines of the Lowland countries were vital suppliers of nurses for urban hospitals.

Late-period Problems

The fourteenth century marked a period of decline for the medieval hospital. Increased urban poverty taxed funding institutions beyond their means. And while hospitals continued to function, the quality of care offered in them was compromised not only by the high demand for trained physicians outside the hospital, especially during the Black Death, but also by the waning of pious charity among the general population. Ultimately, hospitals would fall under secular control and offer far lower amounts of compassionate care than institutions of the twelfth century. Specialized facilities, such as those for the housing of orphans, the aged, and the insane, came to dominate. In general, the inmates of these facilities were neither incorporated into the broader Christian community nor treated as objects of compassion. Instead they were categorized as “the sick,” and thus sequestered from the “healthy” for the protection of society.

See also Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical; Surgery

Bibliography

Brodman, James. Charity and Welfare: Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Byrd, Jessalynn. “Medicine for Body and Soul.” In Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Edited by Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler. Leeds: Leeds University Press, 2001.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.

Grmek, Mirko, ed. Western Medical thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Translated by Antony Shugaar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Gutas, Dimitri. Greek Thought, Arab Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society. London: Routledge, 1998.

Horden, Peregrine. “Music in Medieval Hospitals.” In Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Edited by Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler. Leeds: Leeds University Press, 2001.

Lindberg, David. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.

Miller, Timothy S. The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

Miller, Timothy S. The Knights of Saint John and the Hospitals of the Latin West. Speculum (1978) 53: 709–733.

Numbers, Ronald and Daryl Amundsen, eds. Caring and Curing. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Rawcliffe, Carole. Medicine for the Soul: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of an English Medieval Hospital. Gloucester: Sutton Publishing, 1999.

Risse, Guenter. Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

BRENDA GARDENOUR

House Building, Housing

The first-century-C.E. Roman historian Tacitus described in his work Germania the living conditions and communities of a tribe of people living to the north of Rome: the Germans. Included in Germania are examples of different types of German houses. Two of these houses would become popular throughout Europe and endure throughout most of the Middle Ages. The first was the sunken hut. This consisted of a pit, approximately three feet (0.9 m) deep and covered with a roof of animal dung or a mixture of leaves, twigs, and mud. These houses were typically small, with an area of approximately thirty square feet (2.8 sq m) and were used for many purposes, including storage, living space, and as workshops.

Tacitus also described the timber-framed house. This type of dwelling was much more common than the sunken hut, and gradually replaced it. It had an important architectural feature, known as a cruck, which allowed for high ceilings. A cruck consists of a tree trunk and its lowest branch: the wood was split horizontally and the halves were placed opposite each other, forming a type of arch. The trunk served as part of the wall frame and the branch as part of the roof frame. A beam ran horizontally along the top of the cruck arch to form the peak of the roof. The vertical tree trunks were squared off and placed into post holes dug in the earth, which allowed for a snug fit between the wall and the ground and provided greater protection from the elements. In addition, the beams were portable and often were reused in the construction of new houses. Over time, stone pads were placed at the bottom of the post holes to allow the frame of the house to rest on a solid base; such stability proved very important in the rainy climate of northern Europe.

Medieval timber-framed houses ranged in size from as little as approximately two hundred square feet (18.6 sq m) to more than twelve hundred square feet (111.5 sq m). House size was often described by indicating the number of bays a house possessed; a bay is the space between the vertical beams. A small cottage would have one bay, while a larger house would have as many as three or four. Bays were laid on a single axis, producing very narrow buildings: consequently, the largest houses are often referred to as long houses (longa domus) and are perhaps the most famous type of medieval house. Long houses are also called mixed houses, as domesticated animals were often allowed to inhabit a portion of the dwelling: the animals were usually separated from the human occupants by a partition. Despite their size, the typical long house rarely contained more than one or two rooms.

The walls of timber-framed houses were made either of cob or of wattle and daub. Cob is a combination of mud, straw, and chalk that dries extremely hard. Because it is not baked, however, it is very susceptible to water, which causes it to erode. Wattle and daub is a woven mat of twigs and branches covered with mud. Neither cob nor wattle and daub are very durable, and medieval timber-framed houses were not built to last. Their building materials guaranteed their impermanence, and houses often became uninhabitable after less than twenty years. In addition, wattle and daub walls were so weak that the crime of housebreaking—entering a house through the wall itself—was not uncommon.

The roof of a timber-framed house was usually thatched with reeds, sticks, or straw. A hole was cut into the roof to provide ventilation for the stone hearth in the house; to avoid fires, the hole was often surrounded by tiles. Roof material was not only very susceptible to fire, but also rotted in the rain and provided a breeding ground for insects, birds, and rats; the latter were especially dangerous in a society where plague was common.

Regional varieties existed throughout Europe. In Italy, for example, the poor lived in similar one-room cob houses with thatched roofs. Wealthier farmers, however, used brick or stone for walls, and roofs were made with clay tiles. These houses were larger than timber-framed houses, and often were divided into several rooms. In Spain, the poorer people living in Muslim kingdoms inhabited what later Christian settlers called casas moriscas. The walls were of cob or tabby (Spanish, tapia: earth mixed either with pebbles or some other aggregate, with straw as a binding agent) packed down in a mold and built up in courses. Casas moriscas had two stories: the lower story contained a bedroom or living room along with a kitchen and a corral, and the upper story usually served as a storehouse agricultural products.

By the end of the Middle Ages better building material was increasingly available, and village houses frequently had masonry foundations, were larger, and were built on stronger frames.

Cities

The bulk of medieval urban housing was also of the timber-frame variety, although stone houses were much more common in cities than they were in the countryside. Stone and brick were usually reserved for the wealthy, however, and the houses of the poor were typically constructed from cob and had thatched roofs. Urban houses possessed multiple stories. The size of these houses often caused their frames to sag and lean as they grew older. It was not uncommon for poorer families to inhabit a single room in a house, or for a house to have several families residing in it. The wealthier were able to afford an entire house.

The first floor of a wealthy house usually served as a place of business, and a staircase in the back led up to the family domain. The second floor was dominated by the solar, a large open dining and living room. Connected to the rear of the solar was the kitchen, and the two rooms shared a large, common fireplace. The third stories and above served as bedrooms.

The windows of these houses were covered with oiled parchment, *paper, or fabric, as glass was not a readily available commodity; shutters were often an added protection from the elements. Consequently, these houses could be quite dark, and candles, lamps, and the hearth provided most of the light.

Bibliography

Duby, Georges, ed. A History of Private Life. Vol. II: Revelations of the Medieval World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Gies, Joseph and Frances Gies. Life in a Medieval City. New York: Harper Collins, 1981.

———. Life in a Medieval Village. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

Glick, Thomas F. From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Hanawalt, Barbara A. The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

ANDREW DONNELLY

Hugh of Saint-Victor

Hugh of Saint-Victor (d. 1141) was born in Saxony, perhaps c. 1096, and initially educated at Hammersleben, in the diocese of Halberstadt. In 1115, Hugh traveled to France in the company of his uncle, the archdeacon of Halberstadt, ending up at the newly founded abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris. This abbey, initially established in 1108–1109 as a community of Augustinian canons by William of Champeaux (d. 1122), quickly became a major stimulus for reform of the church in France under its first abbot, Gilduin. Hugh of Saint-Victor soon emerged as the abbey’s leading teacher, making Saint-Victor famous as a center of intellectual and spiritual life, rivaling the schools of Notre-Dame and Sainte-Geneviève.

Hugh of Saint-Victor. Unattributed engraving in Vrais portraits et vies des hommes illustres (1584) by André Thevet (c. 1516–1592). (Mary Evans Picture Library)

Hugh was always fascinated by the relationship between the material world and the spiritual life. One of Hugh’s earliest major writings is De tribus diebus, a meditation on how physical creation manifests the power, wisdom, and benignity of God, thus leading humanity to reflect on the trinitarian nature of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because *Peter Abelard argued that the three persons of the Trinity were names given to signify these three divine attributes in the Theologia ‘Summi boni’ (c. 1120), it has traditionally been assumed that Hugh must have drawn on the work in De tribus diebus. Reversing this view, Dominique Poirel has argued that Hugh may have written De tribus diebus before Abelard’s first discussion of the Trinity, perhaps c. 1118–1119. Whatever the exact relationship between these two writings, Hugh was much more interested than Abelard in the physical attributes of the sensible world, which he describes as being like a book through which God’s power, wisdom, and benignity are revealed. He was more interested in the tradition of Plato’s Timaeus than in the writings of Aristotle about language.

Probably in the early part of his teaching career, Hugh completed a series of introductions to the liberal arts. His treatise De grammatica was largely dependent on Donatus and *Isidore of Seville, and did not develop any speculative issues about the meaning of words, such as fascinated William of Champeaux and Peter Abelard. Instead, he transferred his attention to questions relating to the visible world. In his treatise on the practice of geometry (Practica Geometriae), Hugh investigates measuring height (altimetria), measuring distance (planimetria), and measuring the size of the cosmos (cosmimetria). Hugh does not claim to advance new ideas in this treatise, only to bring together scattered ideas of great thinkers of the past. He draws in particular on the Geometria attributed to *Gerbert of Aurillac, and above all on the commentary of *Macrobius on The Dream of Scipio, to reflect on a range of practical issues, above all the relationship between the diameter of the Earth and the diameter of the Sun, and the role of a curved horizon. We do not know if Hugh ever completed the treatise he promised at the end of the Practica Geometria, about the movements of the heavens, perhaps also inspired by Macrobius. Hugh did complete, however, a treatise De mappa mundi, in which he uses a physical image of the world to draw out a spiritual theme about the true Jerusalem.

Hugh was also very original in the way he integrated mechanical arts into his vision of philosophy. In his Epitome Dindimi in philosophiam, he expands the traditional three-fold division of logica, physica, and ethica (attributed to Plato by Augustine in De civitate Dei VIII.4), into a four-fold system by dividing physica into theorica and mechanica. This imitated an Aristotelian distinction between the theoretical and the practical, transmitted by *Boethius in the first version of his commentary on Porphyry. Drawing on a statement in Boethius’s De trinitate, Hugh further divides theorica into mathematica, physica, and theologia, while mechanica he defines as fabric-making, tool-making (armatura, sometimes mistranslated as “armament”), commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and theatrics. While Isidore had identified mechanica as one of seven branches of physica (alongside arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, astrology, and medicine), no previous writer had related practical skills to philosophy in such detail. Hugh argues that as human actions have a moderating wisdom, without which they cannot accept form, they should not be considered completely apart from philosophy (Epitome, ed. Baron, p. 196).

Hugh expands this system in greater detail in Didascalicon, written perhaps c. 1127 as a manual explaining how all the liberal arts relate to philosophy. Here he explains that logica was the last of the arts to be discovered, and leaves this to the end of his treatise. He gives attention first to the theoretical or speculative arts, namely theology and mathematica, dealing with abstract quantity and embracing the *quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy), and then to the various crafts that come under mechanica. Hugh’s account is remarkable for the absence of negative remarks about all of these practical skills, including professions such as commerce, medicine, and theater, which were elsewhere often regarded as inferior because of their worldly nature. Hugh is aware of the works of the major pagan authors on each of these skills, but does not go into detail. His larger theme is to compare their practical wisdom to the sacred wisdom of Holy Scripture, which needs to be studied both at a historical and tropological level.

After writing the Didascalicon, Hugh seems to have devoted his attention to theological issues. While he had written extensively on the meaning of the books of the Old Testament, it is only in his De sacramentis, written in the 1130s, that he developed the theological synthesis for which he became famous. Hugh’s major theme was that the history of salvation is one of creation and restoration. The process of restoration is achieved through the notion of sacrament, understood as a material symbol becoming charged with sacred significance, and thus leading humanity back to God. While there were the equivalent of sacraments before Christ, it is only with the incarnation that God has become fully accessible to humanity.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Gautier-Dalché, Patrick, ed. La ‘Descriptio mappe mundi’ de Hugues de Saint-Victor: texte inédit avec introduction et commentaire. Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1988.

Hugh of Saint-Victor. Hugonis de Sancto Victore Opera Propaedeutica. Edited by Roger Baron. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966. [Practica geometriae, De grammatica, Epitome Dindimi in philosophiam]

Hugh of Saint-Victor. Practical geometry. Practica geometriae. Translated with notes by Frederick A. Homann. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1991.

Sicard, Patrice, ed. Hugues de Saint-Victor et son école. Turnhout: Brepols, 1991.

The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: a medieval guide to the arts. Translated with notes by Jerome Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.

Secondary Sources

Allard, Guy H. “Les arts mécaniques aux yeux de l’idéologie médiévale.” In Les arts mécanique au moyen âge, ed. G. H. Allard and S. Lusignan. Montréal-Paris: Bellarmin-Vrin, 1982. pp. 13–31.

Baron, Roger. Sur l’introduction en Occident des terms geometria, theorica et practica. Revue d’histoire des sciences (1955) 8: 298–302.

Coolman, Boyd Taylor. Pulchrum Esse: The Beauty of Scripture, the Beauty of the Soul, and the Art of Exegesis in Hugh of St. Victor. Traditio (2003) 58: 175–200.

Poirel, Dominique. Hugues de Saint-Victor. Paris: Cerf, 1998.

Vallin, Pierre. ‘Mechanica’ et ‘Philosophia’ selon Hugues de Saint-Victor. Revue d’histoire de la spiritualité (1973) 49: 257–288.

Vermeirre, André. “La navigation d’après Hugues de Saint-Victor et d’après la pratique du XIe siècle.” in Les arts mécaniques au moyen âge, pp. 51–61.

Whitney, Elspeth. “The Artes Mechanicae, Craftmanship and Moral Value of Technology.” In Design and Production in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Bradford Blaine, ed. Nancy van Deusen. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1998. pp. 75–87.

CONSTANT J. MEWS

Hugh of Santalla

Hugh of Santalla was a translator of texts on astronomy, *astrology, and magic, who lived in Tarazona in the mid-twelfth century. “Santalla” is a common place name in the northwest of Spain, especially in Galicia. Hugh is attested in 1145 as a “magister” in the entourage of Michael, bishop of Tarazona from 1119 until 1151, to whom he dedicated all those translations that have dedications. He may have still been alive in 1179, if he can be identified with a “magister Ugo” who attested a document of one of Michael’s successors in that year (Juan Frontín, bishop of Tarazona, on January 20, 1179). He benefited from the presence of the library of the last Muslim rulers of Saragossa in the neighboring stronghold of Rueda Jalón, in the “inner recesses” of which his bishop found a commentary on astronomical tables. This fortress was ceded by Sayf al-Dawla to Alfonso VII of Castile in 1140–1141, but it is not clear whether the manuscripts came into Michael’s hands at this time, or were already available before, thanks to the friendly relations between the Castilian and Saragossan monarchs. Hugh’s prefaces to his translations, which tell us a lot about his attitude and methodology, give the impression that he is discovering sciences among the Arabs that have hitherto been kept secret from the Latins. These include the methods of shoulder-blade divination and sand divination (called by him “geomancy”), the first giving instructions on how to “read” various marks on the shoulder blade of a sheep from which the flesh has been removed by boiling, the second involving constructing and interpreting three-tier figures of one or two dots each, created by randomly drawing lines of dots. He was the first to reveal the sacred credo of the alchemists—the Emerald Tablet of Hermes—which was destined to have a long and illustrious history. The Emerald Tablet is reproduced at the end of Hugh’s translation of Pseudo-Apollonius’s On the Secrets of Nature. Apollonius claims to have discovered both this book and the tablet in the hands of Hermes in an underground cavern. The Secrets of Nature provides a *cosmology and an account of animals, vegetables, and minerals, in which alchemical principles of male and female, generation, and bonds between the constituents of the universe predominate. Hugh also came across a bibliography of more than two hundred books on astrology whose essence had been distilled in a large work attributed to Aristotle: the Book of Aristotle Containing the Totality of All Questions, both Genethlialogical and Revolutionary, drawn from the 255 Volumes of the Indians. This book, which he translated, is apparently a version of a lost Arabic text by *Masha’allah, which would have been one of the earliest Arabic compendia on astrology and is based on both Greek (Rhetorius, Vettius Valens, *Ptolemy, and Dorotheus) and Middle Persian (Andarzaghar) sources. Hugh’s most ambitious project appears to have been to select and translate from Arabic the works of ten leading authorities on judicial astrology. It is presumably from these translations that the compendia known as the Book of the Three Judges and the Book of the Nine Judges were compiled, perhaps with the aid of his fellow translator, *Hermann of Carinthia. His astrological works, including the Book of the Nine Judges, were copied together in a series of twelfth-century manuscripts once belonging to St. Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, and subsequently copied into Oxford, Bodleian Library, Savile 15. The Book of the Nine Judges was translated into French, and was printed in 1509, but Hugh’s most influential work was on weather forecasting—a translation of a text attributed to Hermes, and “abbreviated” by “Jafar Indus”—which exploits the division of the sky into twenty-eight lunar mansions rather than the twelve signs of the zodiac, and which has survived in more than thirty manuscripts and two printed editions (Peter Liechtenstein, Venice 1507, and Jacques Kerver, Paris 1540).

Bibliography

Primary Sources

The Liber Aristotilis of Hugo of Santalla. C. Burnett and D. Pingree, eds. London: Warburg Institute, 1997.

Jafar Indus. In C. Burnett, Lunar Astrology: The Varieties of Texts Using Lunar Mansions, with Emphasis on Jafar Indus. Micrologus, (2004), 12:. 43–133 (on pp. 86–116).

El comentario de Ibn al-Mutanna a las Tablas Astronómicas de al-Jwarizmi. E. Millás Vendrell, ed. Madrid-Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1963.

Liber Amblaudii et Hermetis de spatula. C. Burnett, ed. In Hermes Trismegistus, Astrologia et divinatoria. P. Lucentini et al., eds. Turnhout: Brepols, 2001: 265–272.

Ps.-Apollonius de Tyane (Balinus). De secretis naturæ (Kitab sirr al-haliqa). F. Hudry, ed. Chrysopœia, (1997–1999) 6: 1–154.

Secondary Sources

C. H. Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927: 67–81.

Burnett, C. “The Establishment of Medieval Hermeticism.” In The Medieval World. P. Linehan and J. L. Nelson, eds. London and New York: Routledge, 2001: 111–130.

———. “A Hermetic Programme of Astrology and Divination in mid-Twelfth Century Aragon: The Hidden Preface in the Liber novem iudicum.” In Magic and the Classical Tradition. C. Burnett and W. F. Ryan, eds. London: Warburg Institute, 2005.

CHARLES BURNETT

Hunayn Ibn Ishaq

Hunayn ibn Ishaq (808–873) was born at Hira, near Najaf (part of modern Iraq). Trained in medicine, which he occasionally practiced, he is best known as a translator of Greek medical texts, especially works of *Galen, into Syriac and Arabic. Medieval biobiblio-graphical sources report that his father, an apothecary by profession, was a ‘Ibadi, a member of one of the Arab tribes that had embraced Christianity. It is likely that his family origins would have made him at least bilingual (Arabic and Syriac), with probably some knowledge of liturgical Greek.

As a young man, Hunayn journeyed to Baghdad, the Abbasid capital, where he attended the majlis (salon) of Abu Zakariyya’ Yahunna ibn Masawayh, court physician to caliphs al-Ma’mun, al-Mu‘tasim, al-Wathiq, and al-Mutawakkil. One day, irritated at the young man’s persistence in seeking answers, Yahunna is reported to have ejected him from the company, saying: “What connection do people from Hira have with medicine…? Go change money in the streets.” Yahunna, from Gundishapur, the old Nestorian center of medical learning, may have regarded Hunayn as an interloper ambitious to acquire knowledge that would help him to usurp positions traditionally held by another socio-political group. Moreover, there are reports that Yahunna had been commissioned by al-Ma’mun to organize and lead translation activity in Baghdad. Considerable money and prestige could be earned from such pursuits, and he may have regarded his precocious student as a serious rival. Thus rebuffed, Hunayn set off for Byzantium, where he stayed for several years, during which he developed a considerable facility in Greek. On his return, Yahunna was forced to recognize his abilities and eventually apologized. It was Hunayn’s first, but not his last, encounter with competition for court patronage and jealous colleagues. Such competition fueled the translation movement in Arabic for several generations.

Hunayn made his first translation at about the age of seventeen, preparing a Syriac version of *Galen’s De facultatibus naturalibus for Jibril ibn Bakhtishtu‘, a powerful court figure. It was Jibril’s son, Bakhtishtu‘, who later conspired against Hunayn, perhaps feeling threatened by Hunayn’s increasing prestige in the court of al-Mutawakkil, and engineered his fall from grace. Hunayn was imprisoned and his library sequestered. Although later restored to his position following his medical intervention on behalf of the caliph, the episode again illustrates the deep rivalries for patronage and power that beset the Abbasid court and influenced the transmission of Greek learning into Islamic culture.

It was during this fall from favor that Hunayn wrote, in 856, to ‘Ali ibn Yahya, another powerful courtier, beseeching assistance. In his letter, he mentions one hundred twenty-nine works of Galen with which he was familiar, describes their basic contents, and notes various translations into Syriac and Arabic which he had either made himself or which he had supervised or corrected. That he could write in such detail, relying solely on memory, indicates a thorough familiarity with the Galenic corpus, both in Greek and in its various translations.

The often-cited description of the translation process given by al-Safadi (d. 1363), differentiates two basic techniques: (1) A literal, ad verbum, style in which the translator replaces each successive term in the original with an equivalent term in the new language; and (2) A less literal, ad sensum, style in which the translator attempts to understand the meaning of a phrase or sentence in the original and then renders that meaning into the new language. The former technique has often been criticized for producing a stilted and awkward translation at best and a completely incomprehensible document at worst, while the second, if properly done, yields a true and comprehensible rendition of the author’s intention. Al-Safadi explicitly associates the second technique with the work of Hunayn. Although too simplistic to be of much use to historians, this neat dichotomy does serve to explicate Hunayn’s goal as translator. Frequently, this ad sensum translation required the development of new technical *vocabulary and terminology. Hunayn’s “scientific” procedure also involved collecting several manuscripts of a text and collating them in order to arrive at a text which would then serve as the basis for translation.

Hunayn trained a number of younger scholars to assist him in his translation of the Galenic medicine. Among them were his son, Ishaq ibn Hunayn, and his nephew, Hubaysh ibn al-Hasan al-A‘sam. Because the members of this “school” of translators adhere to much the same general principles and often edited one another’s work, the contributions of each may be distinguished only through detailed philological study. The problem has been compounded by later copyists who have attributed works to Hunayn, as the leader of the school. The name of Hubaysh, for example, is very similar in Arabic orthography to that of Hunayn. Evidence indicates that later copyists have tended to “correct” the name of the nephew and thus ascribe to Hunayn the work of the younger man. In a somewhat similar vein, the name of Hunayn has come to be attached to several manuscripts of Ishaq’s Arabic version of Euclid’s Elements. Whether Hunayn actually assisted Ishaq in creating this translation is not yet known, but the preponderance of evidence ascribes the basic effort to Ishaq, rather than to Hunayn.

Some of Hunayn’s translations of Galenic works found their way into the Latin tradition. Among those who translated them was *Gerard of Cremona, who produced Latin versions of the Expositiones super librum Ypocratis de regimine acutarum egritudinem and De expositione libri Ypocratis in prognosticatione, as well as the Pseudo-Galen De secretis. Most important was his translation of the Tegne (or Ars Parva), which Gerard knew in the form of a commentary by ‘Ali ibn Ridwan. Hunayn’s translation of Galen’s De tactu pulsus was translated by *Mark of Toledo. These became part of the basis for the Galenic character of Latin medieval medicine.

Hunayn also wrote several original medical treatises of his own. His approach was largely based on Greek, and especially Galenic, sources. Perhaps the best known was al-Masa’il fi’l-Tibb (Questions concerning Medicine), a summary of key ideas of the Galen on health and medical science in the form of questions and answers. It was one of the earliest Arabic works to enter Latin, as the Isagoge Iohanitii ad Tegni Galeni (*Constantine the African). It was later translated (Mark of Toledo) as Liber isagogorum and yet again (Rufus of Alexandria) as Liber questionum medicalium discentium in medicina. Its influence on the practice of medicine in the Latin West, as well as in the Islamic world, is difficult to overestimate. It was one of the first works to divide medicine into theoretical and practical aspects. This distinction helped medicine to move beyond its former place in the practical arts, but also tended to discourage experiment and innovation. His al-‘Ashar Maqalat fi’l-‘Ayn (Ten Treatises on the Eye) discusses both the theoretical and practical medical aspects of ophthalmology. It entered Latin under two different, and confusing, titles: Galeni liber de oculis translatus a Demetrio and Liber de oculis Constantini Africani, and continued to influence Western thought, at least indirectly, until the sixteenth century. Thus Hunayn played an important role in two different *translation movements. Although many of his translations of Galenic works did not reach the Latin West, those that did played a significant role in establishing the study of medicine.

A twelfth-century manuscript copied from the original ninth-century text of Hunayn’s al-‘Ashar Maqalat fi’l-‘Ayn (Ten Treatises on the Eye). (Science Museum Library)

See also Medicine, practical; Medicine theoretical; Patronage of science; Translation norms and practices

Bibliography

Bergsträsser, G. Hunain ibn Ishak und seine Schule. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1913.

De Young, G. Ishaq ibn Hunayn, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and the Third Arabic Translation of Euclid’s Elements. Historia Mathematica (1992) 19: 188–199.

Ghalioungui, P. Questions on Medicine for Scholars by Hunayn ibn Ishaq. Cairo: Al-Ahram Center for Scientific Translation, 1980.

Gutas, D. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Greco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society. London: Routledge, 1998.

Jacquart, D. “Les traductiones médicales de Gérard de Crémone.” In P. Pizzamiglio, ed., Gerardo da Cremona. Cremona: Biblioteca statale e libraria civica di Cremona, 1992, pp. 45–56.

Lindberg, D. Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Maurach, G. Johanicius, Isagoge and Techne Galenieni. Sudhoffs Archiv (1978) 62: 148–179.

Meyerhof, M. The Book of the Ten Treatises on the Eye Ascribed to Hunain ibn Ishaq. Cairo: Government Press, 1928.

———. New Light on Hunain ibn Ishak and his Period. Isis (1928) 8: 685–724.

Saliba, G. Competition and the Transmission of the Foreign Sciences: Hunayn at the Abbasid Court. Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (2000) 2: 85–101.

GREGG DE YOUNG

Hylomorphism

During the Middle Ages most of the theories of matter that proliferated in *universities and other locales of learned culture depended on the concept of hylomorphism. Medieval hylomorphism derived from Aristotle’s writings; the term refers to the concept that substances are composites of matter and form. While the precise meanings of matter and form were debated, acceptance of these principles entailed the rejection of atomistic positions which held that substances are composed of discrete indivisible particles separated by empty spaces or voids, and that the differences in the qualities of substances depend only on the position, shape, and motion of these particles. Rather, substances are composed of a matter, continuous and potentially divisible throughout, that acts as a substrate for substantial forms that define the essence of the substance and for accidental qualities that explain the non-essential characteristics of a given substance. Both the essential forms and the accidental qualities inhere to the matter. While there were notable exceptions, such as the mutakallimun in the Islamic world, almost all of medieval learned culture subscribed to one or another version of hylomorphism, and rejected atomism and the existence of voids.

Aristotle’s hylomorphism accounts for the composition of substances as well as the metaphysics of change, whereby change comprised both the alteration of qualities and the transformations into a new substance. In the Physics, Aristotle used the principles of matter, form, and privation to explain change. Matter is the underlying substrate that persists when a substance goes from not having a given quality or form (privation) to having this quality or form. Using Aristotle’s example of a marble statue, the marble, or the matter, persists while it begins as a chunk of stone, not having a defined form, and, in the end, the marble takes on the shape or form of Hermes. Matter and form can also be considered in terms of potency and act. According to this framework, matter, or what persists through change, can potentially, while it is unformed, receive suitable forms. Thus the block of marble, or some other substance with a suitable disposition, is potentially a statue, and after the sculptor has chipped away at it, in actuality it is a statue. Form and matter are mutually dependent; they are not separable. Neither can exist without the other, as Aristotle rejected not only *Plato’s contention that forms were eternal substances in themselves that can exist independently of matter but also the idea that formless matter could exist.

Interpreters of Aristotle, from late antiquity to well past the Middle Ages, understood hylomorphism in terms of a continuum from prime matter to pure form. Prime matter was thought to be the most basic underlying substrate of all corporeal substances; it was without any form or quality, and equivalent to pure potency. Pure form was considered analogous to pure actuality and was frequently considered to be equivalent to God. Accordingly, every substance is a composite of prime matter and a substantial form that defines its essence.

Two major problems that faced proponents of hylo-morphism and interpreters of Aristotle were the question of precisely which substances are composites of matter and form and which are not, and the question of how the disposition of matter relates to the acceptance of a substantial form. Debates over these questions primarily are found not only in medieval commentaries and questions on Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, De caelo, Meteorologica, and De generatione et corruptione, but also in some quodlibetal questions, commentaries on Genesis, and commentaries on *Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Typically these works were written in conjunction with lectures given at universities.

Sublunary, Celestial, and Incorporeal Substances

What limits Aristotle set on hylomorphism were unclear to medieval thinkers; we find three representative positions among *Ibn Sina (Avicenna), an eleventh-century Persian, *Ibn Rushd (Averroes), a twelfth-century Andalusi, and *Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), a twelfth-century Jew who lived in Islamic Spain. Their three stances were key to framing subsequent debates on the issue. Avicenna maintained that all corporeal and only corporeal substances are composites of matter and form. Thus among hylomorphic composites he included celestial bodies, but excluded spiritual substances. In On the Substance of the Orbs, Averroes argued directly against Avicenna, claiming that only sublunary bodies are composite. Emphasizing the role of matter as a substrate for change, he interpreted matter as being a potentiality with respect to a substantial form. Thus he believed that matter existed only in bodies that are capable of changing into a new substance. Or in other words, matter only exists in substances subject to generation and corruption. As a result he denied that celestial bodies were composites of matter and form because they only undergo change with respect to place, or locomotion, an accidental not substantial change. Avicebron, in his Fons vitae, promoted a position that is sometimes called universal hylomorphism, whereby all created substances, inclusive of intelligences, spiritual beings, and both celestial and sublu-nary bodies are composites of matter and form. Avicebron’s position holds some affinities with Augustine’s doctrine of seminal reasons. According to this doctrine, during the creation of the world, God introduced the forms of all natural beings that would eventually develop after creation into matter, which was in a state of unshaped chaos before creation. In this manner God sowed the seeds of all created beings that would eventually come into existence. By shifting the meaning of potency from meaning possibility to power or virtue, Avicebron saw matter as endowed with an active potency that would lead to the realization of the undeveloped form, or inchoate form, with which it was endowed by God. Since each substance has its identity, or eventual substantial form, imprinted in its matter, matter and form become universal principles for all created substances. While Avicebron’s views influenced many within the Franciscan tradition, such as Bonaventure, other scholars in the Latin West, such as *Albertus Magnus, *Thomas Aquinas, and *Giles of Rome, criticized the concepts of active potency of matter and inchoate form, claiming that proponents of these doctrines confused the ideas of matter as a substrate and as a potency. Thus, harking back to the views of Averroes and Avicenna, they concluded that matter is not the same for corruptible and incorruptible bodies, and that these terms are used only in an equivocal or homonymous sense.

Substantial Transformation and Mixture

The second major issue surrounding hylomorphism regards the relation of matter to substantial form. According to the typical medieval interpretation of Aristotle there exists in the sublunary region a hierarchy of matter and form, from the most simple substances to the more complex ones. Thus it is possible to understand the various levels of matter and form to be comprised of: prime matter, the prime qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry), the four elements (earth, water, air, fire), homeomerous or homogeneous mixtures of the elements (metal, rock, blood, flesh), anhomeomerous or heterogeneous natural parts or organs (liver, root, heart, etc.), and finally full organisms. The hierarchy functions so that the lower level substances become the matter for the higher ones. Thus the prime qualities are the matter of the elements, which in turn are the matter for mixtures, which in turn are the matter for the organs, and so on. The problem which arises is to reconcile the view that argues that mixtures are composed of the elements, and the view that all mixtures are a composite between a substantial form of the mixture (forma mixti) and prime matter. A true mixture, according to Aristotelian doctrine, is the union of different substances into a new substance. A mixture differs from what has been called a chemical combination, or mixtum ad sensum (mixture according to sense), in which the various substances appear to be mixed but in reality are divided into small parts that are juxtaposed. The precise question that was frequently raised was: what happens to the substantial forms of the elements when they become part of a mixture? Again the debate depended in part on the concept of potency, because the Aristotelian text demanded that the elements that formed the new substance remain potentially in the newly formed substance.

Three views are representative of debates over this question during the years 1000 to 1600; in this case the positions are those of Avicenna, Averroes, and Thomas Aquinas. Avicenna contended that the substantial forms of the elements remain unchanged in a mixture. Rather their qualities undergo a remission. This remission of the qualities created what Latin scholars dubbed a complexio or temperament, which had a significant role not only in medieval natural philosophy but also in medical theory. This temperament composed of reduced qualities was thus prepared to receive the new substantial form of the mixture, which was given directly from God, in this case called dator formae (giver of form). As a result, the new substantial form supervenes over the substantial forms of the elements, which remain in the new substance although with their powers blunted. Directly attacking Avicenna, Averroes argued that not only the qualities of the elements undergo a remission but also their substantial forms are weakened. The broken-down or diminished forms then unite to create the new substantial form. Averroes’s position provoked much criticism among scholars in the Latin West. In particular they attacked the view that substantial forms could undergo remission. While it was widely held that qualities could change with respect to degree, as was developed and broadly applied in the doctrine of the *latitude of forms, substantial forms could not. A diminished substantial form would result in the impossible existence of a form that was neither substantial nor accidental but somewhere in the middle. Thomas Aquinas offered an alternative to both Avicenna’s and Averroes’s views. Thomas argued that the substantial forms of the elements are destroyed. However, the elements remain potentially in the substance because their virtues—that is their active and passive qualities, combined in a new proportion—remain in the new mixture and are subordinate to the new substantial form of the mixture. Versions of Thomas’s position were common throughout the late Middle Ages including in the work of *Duns Scotus.

The composite of matter and form remained the framework for defining substances and explaining change, at least for bodies in the sublunary world, well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when atomism became a viable alternative. Nevertheless even many of the early matter theories that relied on the motion and position of small particles to explain the characteristics of matter relied on hylomorphism, as they maintained that even the minute corpuscles that composed the world were composites of matter and form.

See also Aristotelianism; God in Christianity; God in Islam

Bibliography

Des Chene, Dennis. Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Emerton, Norma E. The Scientific Reinterpretation of Form. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Gill, Mary Louise. Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Lüthy, Christoph and William R. Newman, eds. The Fate of Hylomorphism: ‘Matter’ and ‘Form’ in Early Modern Science. Special issue of Early Science and Medicine (1997) 2: 215–352.

Lüthy, Christoph, William R. Newman, and John E. Murdoch, eds. Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2001.

McMullin, Ernan, ed. The Concept of Matter in Greek and Medieval Philosophy. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1965.

Maier, Analiese. On the Threshold of Exact Science. Edited and translated by Steven D. Sargent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

CRAIG MARTIN

H

Henri de Mondeville

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Hunayn Ibn Ishaq

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Hylomorphism

Sublunary, Celestial, and Incorporeal Substances

Substantial Transformation and Mixture

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