Overview

The Sefer Almansur contains a pharmacopeia of about 250 medicinal ingredients with their Arabic names (in Hebrew characters), their Romance (Old Occitan) and occasionally Hebrew equivalents. The pharmacopeia, which describes the properties and therapeutical uses of simple drugs featured at the end of Book Three of the Sefer Almansur. This work was translated into Hebrew from the Arabic Kitāb al-Manṣūrī (written by al-Rāzī) by Shem Tov ben Isaac of Tortosa, who worked in Marseille in the 13th century. Gerrit Bos, Guido Mensching and Julia Zwink supply a critical edition of the Hebrew text, an English translation and an analysis of the Romance and Latin terminology in Hebrew transcription. The authors show the pharmaceutical terminological innovation of Hebrew and of the vernacular, and give us proof of the important role of medieval Jews in preserving and transferring medical knowledge.

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Gerrit Bos is Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne. He has published extensively on Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew medical literature in the Middle Ages, including the critical edition and translation of Maimonides’ medical works and three volumes on novel Hebrew medical terminology. Guido Mensching, Ph.D. (1992), University of Cologne, habil. (1997), is Professor of Romance linguistics at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. He has published extensively on Romance medical terminology with a special focus on Judeo-Romance texts and on synonym literature, as well as on the syntax of Romance languages. He is also a specialist in Sardinian. Julia Zwink, Ph.D. (2016), Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, is research fellow in Romance linguistics at the University of Göttingen. Her Ph.D. thesis is an edition and analysis of an Old French treatise on fever written in Hebrew characters. In her publications, she focusses mainly on medieval Romance medical texts.

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