Translating disease: the vernacular medical treatise in the late medieval kingdom of Aragon

Abstract

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Kingdom of Aragon experienced a remarkable upsurge in the amount of practical medical advice available to readers in the vernacular. Translations of health compendiums, herbals, treatises on the plague, and gynecological manual s provided for nonprofessionals the basic principies of health preservation. In 1305 Arnau de Vilanova wrote an abbreviated version of his Liber de regimine sanitatis (1299) for the king of Aragon, Jaume 11, which was subsequently translated into Catalan at the request of the king's wife, Blanca who could not read Latin. In 1339 with the plague virtually knocking on the door of Catalunya, Jacme d'Agramont wrote his Regiment de preservacio de pestilencia, recognized as one of the first treatises in the vernacular to inform citizens of the threat of pestilence and epidemic. Later during the early 15th century an anonymous Catalan or Valencian writer translated and emended a 13th century Latin treatise on sexual hygiene, Liber minor de coitu, which he named, perhaps scandalously from modern standards, the Specu/um a/ foderi. In that same century an unidentified physician named Mestre Joan translated one of 91 the Trotula taxts on female hygiene, gynecology, and cosrnetics.' We have today fifteenth-century translations of Galen's treatise on urina, De coneixensa de les orines and his work on foods Trectet de les viandes. We have translations of Arabic medical works such as the Llibre d'Almassor and several Catalan translations of Peter of Spain's enormously popular Tesar de pobre, a work orginally written to guide the sick who could not afford professional medical attention. There are CatalanNalencian translations of Macer's herbal and a fifteenth-century translation of Arnau de Vilanova's Aforismes de conservacio de la memoria (Beaujouan)