Details

Subjects:

Medicine -- Early works to 1800.
Medicine.
Medicine, Arab.
Jews -- Italy -- Sicily -- History -- Sources.
Jews.
History.
Italy -- Sicily.

Form/Genre:

Manuscripts, Judeo-Arabic -- 15th century.
Manuscripts, Hebrew -- 15th century.
Manuscripts, Samaritan -- 15th century.
Manuscripts, Renaissance.
codices (bound manuscripts)
treatises.
Sources.

Language:

Judeo-Arabic, with a brief work in Hebrew (f. 25r-39v); notes in Samaritan (f. 1v-7v, 21r-22v, 3 bifolia laid in after f. 22v, marginal notes as on f. 281v), Arabic (f. 1r, marginal notes on Samaritan bifolia), and Latin letters (f. 20v, 25v, 238r, 239v).

Summary:

15th-century Sicilian medical miscellany in Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew, and Arabic, compiled by David ben Shalom, likely a Jewish physician. The most significant work is a Judeo-Arabic copy of al-Majūsī's Kāmil al-sināʻah al-tibbīyah, which comprises most of the volume; this is an overview of medicine, arranged in five chapters on anatomy, five chapters on symptoms, nine chapters on treatment, and one chapter on surgery (f. 40r-307v). Preceding and following the al-Majūsī text are contemporaneous notes and medical works (f. 15v-20v, 25r-39v, 40r-52v, 211r-307v), including a Judeo-Arabic transcription of Saʻid ibn Hibat Allāh ibn al-Ḥusayn's Mughnī fī tadbīr al-amrāḍ (a reference work giving the name, etiology, symptoms, and treatment of various diseases) copied in Catania probably in 1443 by Abū al-Ḥasan Sa'ad ben Hibat Alla ben al-Ḥasan the physician (al-ṭabīb); and a Hebrew translation of part of Avicenna's treatise on cardiac drugs (the ninth chapter of the first book of the treatise and the beginning of the second) employing Arabic medical, botanical, and pharmaceutical terminology. When the volume was rebound (and misbound; some gatherings out of order after the fourth gathering and some folios missing between f. 277-278) in the 19th-century, probably in modern Israel, a group of smaller leaves of notes, not on medical topics, in Arabic, Samaritan, and Hebrew were bound into the front of the volume (f. 1r-14v), upside down.

Contents:

1. f.1r-12r: [Notes in Arabic, Samaritan, and Hebrew]
2. f. 12v: [Fragment of Hebrew commentary on Talmudic tractate on engagement for marriage]
3. f. 13v: [Fragment of work on Jewish dietary norms]
4. f. 14v: [Decorated notebook title page]
5. f. 15r-18v: [Mughnī fī tadbīr al-amrāḍ / Saʻid ibn Hibat Allāh ibn al-Ḥusayn]
6. f. 19r-20v: [Notes in Judeo-Arabic, Arabic, and roman letters]
7. f. 21r-22v, i recto-vi verso, 23r-24v [Samaritan text]
8. f. 25r-39v: [Hebrew translation of Adwiya al-qalbiyya / Abū ʻAlī ibn Sīnā (Avicenna)]
9. f. 40r-52v: [Mughnī fī tadbīr al-amrāḍ / Saʻid ibn Hibat Allāh ibn al-Ḥusayn]
10. f. 53r-210v: [Kāmil al-sināʻah al-tibbīyah / ʻAlī ibn al-ʻAbbās al-Majūsī]
11. f. 211r-307v: [Mughnī fī tadbīr al-amrāḍ / Saʻid ibn Hibat Allāh ibn al-Ḥusayn]

Notes:

Ms. codex.
Title for manuscript from title for predominant work supplied by cataloger.
Foliation: Paper, ii (20th-century library cloth and card) + early board + ii (19th-century paper) + 307 + i (20th-century library cloth); 1²⁶ 2²⁰ 3-4¹⁴ 5²⁴ 6-7¹⁴ 8²⁰ 9¹⁴ 10¹⁵ 11-14¹⁴ 15²⁰ 16-19¹⁴ (Les Enluminures); [1-22, i-vi (bifolia laid in), 23-38, 40-245, 245-307]; modern foliation in pencil, upper left recto; foliation with Hebrew characters in ink, upper left recto (f. 40r-278r), reflecting missing and misbound folios. Catchwords in the lower margin of most versos of the al-Majūsī text.
Layout: Predominant work written in 27 long lines, with headings in a larger script (f. 40r-307v).
Script: Written in Sephardic semi-cursive script with headings in square script (Les Enluminures), partly in the hand of Abū al-Ḥasan Sa'ad ben Hibat Alla ben al-Ḥasan the physician (f. 17v).
Decoration: Manicules (f. 130r, 246r, 271r); some text in red ink and decorative borders in red and black ink in 19th-century Samaritan notes (f. 1v-7v); title page for a small notebook with decorative ink border, dated 1810 (f. 14v).
Watermarks: Pirie's Old Style, 19th-century Samaritan bifolia (f. 21-22, 3 bifolia laid in); unidentified bell watermark on some leaves (Les Enluminures).
Binding: Modern library cloth, 20th century; one board of 19th-century binding inside modern flyleaves at front of volume, with colored, patterned paper pastedown.
Origin: One section written in Catania, Sicily, in 1443 (f. 17v; determined from a chronogram by Tzvi Langermann); predominant text includes a date of 1452 (f. 169v; suggested from a chronogram by Les Enluminures).

Penn Provenance:

Sold by Les Enluminures (Paris and Chicago), 2014.

Publications about:

Langermann, Y. Tzvi. "Transcription, translation, and annotation: observations on three medieval Islamicate texts in University of Pennsylvania Libraries MS Codex 1649." Manuscript studies: a journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 1.1 (Spring 2016), 135-150.
Schorch, Stefan. "An unknown and unique Samaritan Arabic introductory prayer by Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ṣūrī (11th century)" in Jan Dusek, ed., The Samaritans in historical, cultural and linguistic perspectives (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 131–62.

Cited as:

ʻAlī ibn al-ʻAbbās al-Majūsī, Kāmil al-sināʻah al-tibbīyah (Ms. Codex 1649). Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

Contributor:

Abū al-Ḥasan Sa'ad, scribe.
David ben Shalom, compiler.

Contains:

Saʻīd ibn Hibat Allāh ibn al-Ḥusayn, 1004-1101. Mughnī fī tadbīr al-amrāḍ.
Avicenna, 980-1037. Maqālah fī aḥkām al-adwīyah al-qalbīyah. Latin

OCLC:

895187612