Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: the Canon and medical teaching in Italian universities after 1500

NANCY G. SIRAISI, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: the Canon and medical teaching in Italian universities after 1500, Princeton University Press, 1987, 8vo, pp. xii, 410, £31.40. "To what part of philosophy does it belong?" asked the medieval teacher, introducing a new text to his class. The book reviewer often has to do likewise. Here, the expectations of the reader might coincide with one of the motives of the author in seeing this book as an extension of her earlier work on medieval Italian medicine. But in fact it belongs to a different part of philosophy. Although furnished with the same impeccable scholarship as Taddeo it is about thefortuna of a book, not of people, and this brings it closer in nature to the bibliographical side of the industry, to the establishment of a Hippocrates, Galenus or Avicenna Latinus. In this way the book is like a commentary to its appendices, which list editions and commentaries of the Canon appearing after 1500. There is much to be said for the choice of topic. The Canon was a central text in medical education; it was used from 1300 to 1800; it was Arabic, and very large. On all counts, a history of its use in teaching links with most of the things we like to think about-humanism, scholasticism, philology, teaching, commentary, new anatomy and physiology, and the scientific revolution. As Siraisi points out, Renaissance medical commentary has remained largely unexamined and one goal of the book is to make such an examination "in an attempt to understand more clearly what it meant to study or to teach a text . .. by such a method". We would not expect from Siraisi anything less than first-rate scholarship, and we get it, in heaping measure, in an extensive apparatus. Many additions are made to other stories that were happening in the Renaissance, but the story of the Canon itself is, ultimately, not compelling. Partly this is due-quite properly-to the book's bibliographical function. Partly it is due to the immensity of the subject matter: Siraisi is obliged to limit her attention largely to the first part of the first book of the Canon and to a small selection of commentators. And it is partly due to the fact that the life of the Canon was given to it only by the people who used it. To make a comparative study of such usage tells us more about the users than the used. Or to employ the Canon as a "case study of the extent to which scholastic medical learning of the sixteenth century was capable of assimilating or initiating change" is to give it something of an artificial life, maintained by ancient authority and traditions. I think it is partly this, as well as the magnitude of the field, that contributes to the difficulty Siraisi feels in "weighing the significance of the material examined in the previous pages". But then this is not intended to be a book full ofanswers but of resources and questions. Taken as that "part of philosophy" the book will become indispensable.