Andres Laguna y el humanismo medico: Estudio filologico & Entre la imitacion y elpiagic: Fuentes e influencias en el Dioscorides de Andres Laguna.

Miguel Angel Gonzalez Manjarres. Andres Laguna y el humanismo medico: Estudio filologico.

(Estudios de historia de la ciencia y de la tecnica, 15.) Valladolid: Junta de Casrilla y Leon, 2000. 320 pp. index, append. bibl. [euro]21.04. ISBN: 84-7846-939-7.

Miguel Angel Gonzalez Manjarres. Entre la imitacion y elpiagic: Fuentes e influencias en el Dioscorides de Andres Laguna.

(Colleccion Becas de Investigacion Caja Segovia.) Segovia: Caja Segovia--Obra Social y Cultural, 2000. 192 pp. + 2 color and 6 b/w pis. index. bibl. [euro]6.01. ISBN: 84-89711-51-8.

The Spaniard Andres Laguna (ca. 1511 [?]-59) needs nor to be presented: his translation from Greek into Castillan of Dioscorides' (1st cent. A.D.) De materia medica, first published in 1555 in Anvers, gave him a fame comparable to that of the Sienese Pietro-Andrea Martioli (1501-77), who translated Dioscorides' treatise into Italian. Laguna had an abundant literary production, not limited to Dioscorides' translation, however: he translated into Latin several authentic or spurious Greek works, literary (Lucian) or scientific (Aristotle, Physiognomica, De mundo, De natura stirpium [in fact, De plantis], De virtutibus; Galen, De urinis, De philosophica historia; and the Byzantine Geoponica), also commenting on these and other works (Galen's commentaries on Hippocrates) or their translations by other Renaissance scholars. Furthermore, he authored a biography of Galen and a summary of his works (Epitomes omnium Galeni operum), personal medical treatises, in Latin (Anatomica methodus, Compendium curationis, De vict us et exercitiorum ratione, De articulari morbo, Methodus cognoscendi, extirpandique excrecentes in vesicae collo carunculas) and in Spanish (Discurso... de la Pestilencia), and historical works in Latin (De origine rerum Thrcarum, Europa). Last but not least, he translated into Spanish Cicero's Catilinarias. Though abundant, this production is little known, mainly because historical research focused on Laguna's translation of Dioscorides, even during the recent celebration of the 500th anniversary of his birthday. The present studies, aimed at analyzing Laguna's entire production (especially the medical treatises) and situating it in the scientific and literary production of the epoch, are thus received with great interest.

Of the two studies under analysis, Andres Laguna y el humanismo medico (henceforth Laguna) was probably published first, being quoted in the second work (see the bibliography, 181). A revision of the author's Ph.D. thesis, it is mainly a literary and philological analysis, with a study of four aspects of Laguna's production (particularly the medical works): literary typology, method of textual critics and translation, use of sources, and use of the Latin language. This study is introduced by four chapters aimed at situating Laguna's production in its context: Renaissance and humanism, medical humanism with special reference to Spain, Laguna's biography, and literary production.

The second work (henceforth Fuentes) focuses on a specific problem: the sources and fortuna of Dioscorides' translation into Castillan by Laguna. It includes two chapters constituting the context of the analysis: a large presentation of Dioscorides' De materia medica, with the history of botany prior to Dioscorides, Dioscorides' biography and the textual tradition of De materia medica in Greek, Arabic, and Latin, and during the Renaissance; and a description of Laguna's works on Dioscorides. The overview of the sources leads to a more detailed comparison of Laguna's translation with those of Mattioli and Cornarius.

Among the many topics dealt with in these two works, one could mention Laguna's detailed biography, mainly relying on a close scrutiny of his whole production (Laguna, 37-73); the inventory, description, and analysis of Laguna's works of any kind, presented by coherent groups (for instance the corpus Aristotelicum, the corpus Dioscorideum and the corpus Galenicum) with full quotation of the titles and, for the works of which only rare copies are currently conserved, their call number in European libraries (Laguna, 75-139; for the corpus Dioscorideum, see also Fuentes, 51-70); the close analysis of Dioscorides' translation leading, among others, to determine that Laguna used Mattioli and was used by Cornarius (Fuentes); the typological analysis of Laguna's works, with four main types: the epitome of didactic nature (Laguna, 144-53), the critical castigationes and annotationes (Laguna, 153-62), the commentary (Laguna, 162-69), and the monographic treatise (Laguna, 169-79); the identification of Laguna's method of textual criticism (Laguna, 181-99), progressively constituted in three steps and culminated with the analysis, translation of, and commentary on Dioscorides' De materia medica (Laguna, 183-99); the analysis of Laguna's theoretical considerations on translation (Laguna, 203-09) and his use of translating as a tool for textual criticism (Laguna, 209-13); the method of citation of his sources by Laguna (Laguna, 218-56) and the identification of the sources, ancient (218-23; see also Fuentes, 72-74, For the Dioscorides), medieval (223-26; Fuentes, 74-76), and contemporary authors (226-32; Fuentes, 76-80), as well as biblical (233-35) and literary citations (235-39), references to Laguna's works (239-43) and plagiarism, that is, citations not identified as such by Laguna (243-55); in this matter, the author convincingly identifies in Laguna's works passages textually reproduced from scholars as different as Guillaume Bude, for example, Erasmus and Rota, not to speak of Mattioli in the translation of Dioscorides (Laguna, 253-55; Fuentes, 81-114); a detailed analysis of Laguna's usage of Latin (Laguna, 266-90), distinguishing phonetic and orthography (266-69), morphology (with a typology of Laguna's new usages compared with classical Latin) (269-72), syntax, and style (with Laguna's peculiarities) (272-82) and lexicon (characterized both by a classical usage conform to that of Poliziano, for example, and neologisms, in fact hellenisms) (282-90); last but not least, the contemporary uses of Laguna's Dioscorides, that is, its plagiarism by Cornarius (Fuentes, 115-73). To that, one could add the repeated effort to insert data into their context by means of historical notices on ancient botany (Fuentes, 23-26), Dioscorides' biography (Fuentes, 26-30), the textual tradition of Dioscorides' text (Fuentes, 30-50), medieval and Renaissance medical literature (Laguna, 141-44), translation in the Middle Ages (Laguna, 199-203), the use of sources in Renaissance literature (Laguna, 2 15-18), humanistic Latin (Laguna, 257-62), an d a historical analysis of Latin (Laguna, 261-64).

On the basis of these micro-analyses, the author describes Laguna as a contradictory character echoing in fact the divergent tendencies of Renaissance: a strong interest for classical sources and the birth of textual criticism, an interest for the studia humanitatis and the writing of practical works, a high level of scholarship and the production of medical works without erudite ambition, a classicist Latinism and the rise of vernacular languages (Laguna), a strong personality and a silent use of others' works (Fuentes).

However well informed and brilliant they might seem, these works are particularly misleading and will have to be used with extreme caution. They suffer from severe limitations that strongly contrast with the author's claim in the Lagunds preface to have made a pioneering work, fully documented, exhaustive, and definitive (see, for instance, 10 "mis aportaciones. . . se derivaran sobre todo de los datos obtenidos deprimera mano de Las obras de Laguna que aquellos investigadores [that is, T. Hernando, M. Bataillon and C. Dubler] nunca consultaron"; 11 "con el presente trabajo considero que la importancia y la significacion ... . de Andres Laguna . . . quedan exhaustivamente analizadas, su produccion literaria y cientigfica definitivamente fijada y su postura humanistica debidamente aquilatada").

Although they provide the reader with a great many of details about Laguna's production and Renaissance literacy, these works fall short in their claim to give an exhaustive presentation of Laguna's scientific enterprise. Literary aspects were without doubt important in Renaissance scientific activity, but they constituted the core of Laguna's work. In the matter of pharmacology, indeed, Laguna's contribution did not consist in trying to fill the gap introduced into the field by Nicolao Leoniceno (1428-1524). By fostering a return to ancient sources (instead of their medieval updated versions), Leoniceno cut pharmacology from its actual practice, thus provoking a backward movement. It was the merit of Laguna's generation to bridge this gap by restoring a link between text and practice. Mattioli and Laguna chose different and perhaps opposite strategies: Mattioli, working as an indoor scholar, relied on textual sources, mainly using reports from other scholars to know plants; Laguna, instead, personally practi ced pharmacology throughout Europe, collecting data from a wide range of sources, not only texts but also--if not above all--practitioners of any kind, from healers to witches. From the viewpoint of the history of Renaissance science, Gonzalez Manjarres thus misses the point. This results from his starting definition of humanism (including medical humanism) as a restoration of the studia humanitatis, which reduces Renaissance scientific enterprise to a rather formal activity.

Even under this viewpoint, Gonzalez Manjarres contribution will not be accepted without severe restrictions. It is obliterated by innumerous conceptual and methodological inadequacies, information and bibliographical shortcomings, and multiple approximations and mistakes of any kind leading to put in doubt the author's accuracy, the exactness of his data and, hence, the validity of his thesis. To quote but a few and not even the most significant examples, in one of the rare mentions of Leoniceno, his De Plinii aliorumque in medicina erroribus is dated 1497 instead of 1492 (Fuentes, 19, note 17). In the presentation of the two treatises of toxicology ascribed to Dioscorides and entitled as his sixth and seventh books, reference is made only to Kurt Sprengel's edition (Leipzig, 1830), while there is recent bibliography (A. Touwaide, "L'authenticite et l'origine des deux traites de toxicologie attributes Dioscoride. I. Historique de la question. II. Apport de l'histoire du texte," Janus, 38 [1984], 1-53, and ide m, "Les deux traites de toxicologie attribues a Dioscoride--Tradition manuscrite, etablissement du texte et critique d'authgenticite," Tradizione e ecdotica dei testi medici tardo-antichi e bizantini, Atti del Convegno internazionale, Anacapri, 29-31 ottobre 1990, A. Garzya ed. [Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992], 29 1-339). Latin is repeatedly defined as the "language from Latium" (Fuentes, 13), the name of the Dutch town Middelburg is written Mittelburg (Laguna, 53), Matrioli is called on the same page Mattioli and Marhiolo (Fuentes, 97), the German town of Zwickau is spelled once correctly and once Swickau in two consecutive pages (Fuentes, 120 and 121), in Fuentes, 121, appears an unknown personage called Morbades; is he Marbodes of Rennes or Nicolao Monardes? Very rare are the Greek texts without mistakes (see for example Fuentes, 99, 146, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155). In Laguna, 86, appears a point e) that does not follow any a), b), c), and d). A geographical oddity: according to the author, Laguna stayed i n Viterbo (barely 100 km from Rome) and then stopped in Bologna (some 400 km North of Rome) on his way to Rome (Laguna, 60: "Ya en zona italiana, Laguna para a descansar en Viterbo... La siguiente parada de Laguna en su camino hacia Roma fue Bolonia"). In the presentation of Dioscorides' De materia medica textual tradition, the manuscript Escorial R III 3 is quoted III R 3 (Fuentes, 32 among others), the manuscript Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, graecus 2183 is identified as 2138 (Fuentes, 32), that of Mount Athos, Lavra Monastery W 75 becomes W 75 (Fuentes, 32) and the Vaticanus graecus 284 receives the shelf mark Vaticanus Palatinus Graecus 284. Not to speak of the history of the text itself, full of wrong information. In Fuentes, I 23, a Renaissance text is quoted from a recently published article and not directly from the original (see note 15, where the title of the article contains a typo). Last but not least, this methodological consideration in the final evaluation of Laguna's work (I transl ate): "Laguna. .. took advantage of a previous work, completing it with his own contribution. This means that he applied the same method that, mutatis murandis, we all currently use in our research" (Fuentes, 177: Laguna... aprovecho un trabajo que ya estaba hecho ... y lo complemento con sus propias aportaciones. Es decir, puso en practica el mismo metodo de trabajo que, mutatis mutandis, todos empleamos hoy dia en nuestras investigaciones). Whatever the validity of this principle, it has to be hoped that Gonzalez Manjarres' works won't be used as a basis for any further research on Laguna, since this topic still has to be investigated in spite of the author's claim of definitiveness.