A 15th-century medico-botanical synonym list in Hebrew characters from central Italy

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Gerrit Bos; Professor Dr. Guido Mensching; Dr. Frank Savelsberg
• Subject Area: Religious Studies and Jewish Studies ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 430923012

Codex Florence, Bibliotheca Medicea Laurenziana Or. 17 contains, on fols 68r-92v, a medico-botanical synonym list in Hebrew characters that is arranged according to mainly Arabic lemmata. Each entry usually includes several Romance equivalents for terms of the materia medica. A fundamentally new aspect is that these lexical items transmitted in Hebrew characters are Italo-Romance, whereas most other medieval Jewish synonym lists of this type stem from the Occitan or Ibero-Romance linguistic areas, which have consequently been the focus of research so far. The aim of the project is to edit and extensively comment on this synonym list, especially with respect to its Romance lexical material. For Arabic Studies and the History of Medicine, the interest of this list is mostly due to the fact that it is an elaboration of an index to the 2nd part of Avicenna's Canon. Of particular interest for Jewish Studies is the reconstruction of the way of transmission of this list in addition to the novel Hebrew technical terminology. The synonym list is entitled (in Hebrew) "On the several terms that are called 'sinonimi'" and contains more than 1700 entries. According to a note in the manuscript itself, it was written or copied in 1464, in Anagni, a locality in what is nowadays the province Frosinone in the region of Lazio. Within our preliminary work, we were able to confirm that the Italo-Romance words, in many cases, do belong tothe respective dialect group (Central-Lazio). Since the vernacular medical texts known so far from medieval and early-modern Italy stem from other regions, our list, for the first time, quite extensively documents older lexical material (in particular of the flora and fauna) from Lazio. Therefore, these Italo-Romance dialect terms have a special focus within the project. Moreover, the Arabic and partially Hebrew equivalents allow to quite exactly determine the meaning of the Romance words. In addition, the list contains words that are definitely Occitan. This is ultimately due to the fact that it was mostly in Southern France that Jewish physicians and scholars studied Arabic medicine and produced a large number of such word lists. Thus, the synonym list from ms. Florence Or. 17 appears to be based on an unknown manuscript from Southern France, whose Occitan vocabulary was partially preserved and supplemented with Italo-Romance words. In our preliminary work, we were able to corroborate this hypothesis by studying two other versions of this list, extant in mss. Munich, Cod. hebr. 8 and Vatican, ebr. 550: the latter contains only Occitan equivalents, whereas the former, like our list from ms. Florence Or 17, also includes Italo-Romance. These two manuscripts will also be transcribed within the project and used for the purpose of comparison.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants