From: Charles Gavette <chaosmosis-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Constantinus Africanus' Viaticum
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 1999 06:13:18 PDT


            The Viaticum's Popularity And Influence

  With its flourishing scriptorium and its proximity to the medical school 
at Salerno, Montecassino was well-placed for the difffusion of Constantine's 
translations. Although the degree of Constantine's immediate impact on 
Salernitan medicine has been controversial, recent scholarship has affirmed 
his early influence on Salernitan writers. (The most recent contribution to 
this debate is Green [1989b]: Constantinus Africanus and the Conflict 
between Religion and Science, in The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic 
and European Traditions, ed. Gordon Dunstan, London: Duckworth) The sheer 
number of surviving manuscripts is telling. I have located 123 manuscripts 
of the Viaticum earlier than 1400, and I beleive that a thorough search of 
European libraries would uncover more.
   Johannes Afflacius may have been instrumental in introducing his mentor's 
works to the Salernitans. Constantine's other student, Atto, who was 
chaplain to empress Agnes, also helped the diffusion of his master's works 
by either paraphrasing them in Latin or translating them into the 
vernacular. Though none of these versions appears to have survived(unless 
the Liber de hereos morbo is the joint work of Johannes and Atto), they 
suggest an immediate interest in the newly available medical learning on the 
part of lay readers as well as physicians.

   Through imperial courtiers like Atto and through Montecassino's 
wide-ranging ties in Europe the new Constantinian corpus spread relatively 
quickly throughout the West. His works are found as early as 1130's in 
Chartres, 1161 in Hildesheim, and appear in twelfth-century library 
catalogues in St. Amand and Durham. In the first half of the thirteenth 
century, Richard de Fournival listed the liber passionarius quem Viaticum 
vocat in his library catalogue, and in the fourteenth century Simeon Bredon, 
a physician and Fellow of Merton College(d.1372). bequeathed a glossed copy 
to Roger Aswardby, asking him to return it to the owner; if the owner could 
not be found, he was to give it to any physician who lacked it, which 
suggests that many doctors were expected to own a copy. The German 
physician, Amplonius Ratinck(d. ca.1434), whose library is now at Erfurt, 
owned five glossed copies of the Viaticum. Private owners of the work are 
well attested in England, where they have been traced through donations to 
libraries.
   With the rise of more formal medical education at the medieval 
universities, the Viaticum entered the standard medical curriculum. 
Alexander Neckham's list of textbooks shows that the Viaticum was read at 
Paris by the end of the twelfth century, and in the statutes of 1270-74, the 
bachelor of medicine was required to hear it in order to be licensed.


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