How to do it: guides to good living for Renaissance Italians

is a "part" of the body? is the simplest of the questions involved. The semantic problems generated by the different origins of many terms invited a number of strategies. Medical men involved in the identification of simple medicines invented "synonyms" as a genre of Latin literature within materia medica as early as the fourteenth century. Expositors of medical texts, like those of law in AngloNorman England, used couplets of explanatory terms, in order that either one of a pair would be intelligible to a major cultural group of the community. The corresponding danger in anatomy was that "involuntary" couplets from two different textual traditions often forced the anatomists to describe two different structures in the body when one only was physically there. The historian of anatomy will also recognize some of the principles that are the concern of this related field. Names have a certain durability because they are lexical items of some authority marked on the vellum or paper studied by the anatomist. Parts of the body seem also to offer some constancy, because we think that the body has not changed (but we have to remember that important figures like Vesalius' teacher Sylvius thought otherwise). But these two are not tightly linked in a cultural sense. Parts need names, which are generally supplied from the vernacular. But any specialized knowledge needs a technical language, which is met in a number of ways: appropriation of vernacular terms, or adaption, translation or transliteration of foreign terms. By the time covered by this book any technical terms could be derived directly or indirectly from the ambient vernacular or the ancient Greek or Latin, French or Arabic. Appendices cover a specimen database entry, foreign terms, terms unique to each group of sources and explicatory devices in the texts.