Overview

The lore of the supposed magic and medical virtue of stones goes back to the Babylonians and peaks out in the lapidary literature of the Middle Ages. The famous work of Marbode of Rennes, which made lapidaries a very popular type of medieval scientific literature, was translated into numerous vernacular languages. The Jewish tradition, missing a particular lapidary literature of its own, absorbed non-Jewish works like that of Marbode. Several Anglo-Norman Marbode translations could be identified as the main source of the present edited Hebrew lapidary Ko’aḥ ha-Avanim, written by Berakhyah Ben Natronai ha-Nakdan around 1300. The edition is accompanied by an English translation, a source study, and a linguistic analysis of the Romance, mostly Anglo-Norman, terms featuring within the text in Hebrew spelling.

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9789004183100

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Gerrit Bos, Ph.D. (1989) in Semitic Studies, University of Amsterdam, is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne. He has published extensively on Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew scientific literature in the Middle Ages, including an edition and translation of Maimonides’ medical work. Julia Zwink is scientific assistant at the Free University of Berlin, department of Romance languages. She is doing a Ph.D. on Judeo-French medical literature in the Middle Ages including an edition, translation, and linguistic study of an anonymous Judeo-French treatise on fever diseases.

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