Ten Centuries of Celsus’s De Medicina: Practical Histories of Medical Humanism

This dissertation explores singular cases of reception of Cornelius Celsus’s De medicina between the tenth and the nineteenth century to revise accepted definitions of medical humanism and show how ancient texts spurred the development of medicine at intellectual and practical levels across ten centuries. While considered virtually unknown in the Middle Ages, Celsus’s first-century CE medical textbook has been marginally addressed in the history of Renaissance medicine for its sophisticated Latin style, which provided humanists a rich repository of technical vocabulary to produce new translations of ancient Greek texts. Studying manuscript and printed sources in English, French, Italian, and Latin, my dissertation uses the reception of De medicina to question the binomial pairs learned-vernacular and intellectual-practical knowledge in the history of medieval and early modern medicine. In the dissertation, I provide a case study of a tenth-century antipope who used Celsus’s work to orient his understanding of medicine, while crafting an eclectic miscellany that merges ancient Greek learning to hands-on instructions to prepare plasters and use cauteries. I then focus on the Renaissance vernacular translations of De medicina to argue for a more dynamic circulation of ancient medical works, which have been considered as pertaining only to university physicians and élite Latinate readers. In chapter 3, I explore how early modern surgeons developed techniques and technologies by bringing together the words of ancient authors like Celsus and the tools of the artisans, thus bridging the scholarship of medical humanism and the mechanical arts. Finally, I explore the concurrent development of early nineteenth-century anatomy and philology in Leonardo Targa’s editorial work on De medicina, showing that a focus on his practices of dissection of texts and bodies reveals symmetrical forms of thinking in the premodern sciences and humanities.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Marchiori, Silvia Maria

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Margócsy, Dániel

• History of medicine
• History of scholarship
• Book history
• Medieval and early modern Europe
• Classical reception

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c1e09707-5380-4059-ab8a-be9e0fb45d17/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0009-0000-5132-138X

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/393059