A Significant Medical Manuscript Belonging to Valla: the Mutinensis α.U.9.4 (gr. 61).

Abstract

The Mutinensis α.U.9.4 (gr. 61) is a 15th century manuscript containing several classical and Byzantine medical texts and excerpts. It is well-known that it was used by Valla for his Latin translation of Symeon Seth’s Syntagma de alimentorum facultatibus. But the volume itself received insufficient scholarly interest, whether it be from a codicological or a philological point of view, especially as far as the other medical texts are concerned. This contribution aims at examining in detail the entire manuscript and Valla’s reading of it in order to show that the Mutinensis can be replaced in a flourishing context of other manuscripts, scribes and readers and that it thus represents a key moment in medical humanism. In particular, the relationship between the Mutinensis (and its copyist, Emmanuel Zacharides) and volumes copied by Demetrios Damilas, sheds a new light on connections that hadn’t been insisted upon in previous studies.