The publication of handbooks and companions usually signals that their subject matter has attracted sufficient interest to warrant not only its development into an independent subfield but also incorporation into mainstream disciplinary curricula. While Galen of Pergamum (d. c. 217 ce) is now a standard feature of undergraduate courses on ancient medicine and the topic of recent monographs and conferences, his remarkably global reception, as the editors of the book under review note, has received little systematic attention since O. Temkin's Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (1973). Bouras-Vallianatos and Zipser should be commended for collecting into one sizeable volume contributions that cross so many temporal and geographical lines – taking the reader from imperial Rome to various locales such as pre-modern Armenia, Ayyūbid Cairo, Mughal India and Weimar Germany. Their scope exceeds Temkin's, who focuses on the late antique and medieval Greek East and Latin West in addition to parts of the Middle East, areas that are covered in the companion too; even so, there is no mention of the Americas, which admittedly seems to be a lacuna endemic to the specialism of Galenic Reception Studies as a whole.
The editors divide the thirty-one papers into five sections: the first three treat ‘three significant medieval environments’ (p. 2) (‘Late Antiquity and Byzantium’, the ‘Medieval Islamic World’ and the ‘Medieval West’); the fourth concentrates on Western Europe and moves chronologically from the Renaissance to the modern period; and the final category (‘Galen in Other Cultures’) is a potpourri of subjects – alchemy, medieval portraiture, Hebrew scientific writings, and Galen's presence in Armenia and Central and South Asia. The chief strength of the companion, the diversity of its contributions, has presented the editors with an organisational challenge. Nonetheless, their decision to utilise a scheme that has served Western-centric narratives and reduces a group of cultures to an ‘other’ merits an address for the ethical problems it raises as well as the chronological misunderstandings it may generate in students, whom they envision as a target readership (p. 2). The sequence Byzantium–Medieval Islamic World–Medieval West, recurrent in history of medicine textbooks, gives the impression of a neat transfer of ancient knowledge, via the ‘East’ (eastern Mediterranean and Middle East) to the ‘West’, which excludes in this case southern Iberia (Chapter 13, ‘Islamic World’) and the Jewish communities of Provence and Rome (Chapter 27, ‘Galen in Other Cultures’). The papers themselves make clear that the actual chronology of the Galenic encounters constituting the volume is more entangled than the sequence suggests: for example, the Latin translators Constantine the African (eleventh century), Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187) and Burgundio of Pisa (c. 1111–1193) – the subjects of Chapters 17–19, 21 – died before the births of Ibn al-Nafīs (d. 1288) (Chapter 14) and Ibn Abī Usaybiʿa (d. 1270) (Chapter 15).
The medial position of the group of papers on the Islamic world seems to flatten the contribution of the thinkers who lived there; no culture should be seen as a stepping stone to another. Many of the chapters in this section show a variety of responses to the Galenic corpus and Galen's authority, from criticism to appropriation – and this creative agency is regrettably undermined by later descriptions of Arabic texts as ‘conveyor[s] of Galenic information’ (p. 402) and Arabic translators as being succeeded by their ‘Latin heirs’ (p. 177), both of whom produced ‘pale shadows of [Galen's] original production’ (p. 426) that were ‘not perfect vessels for the transmission of Galenic medicine’ (p. 347). Similarly, the isolation of the papers on Armenia (Chapter 28) and Asia (Chapter 30) – to take two conspicuous examples – exoticises these cultural areas by implying that they are peripheral to what has gone before, when they had lasting connections with the Byzantine Empire and the Islamicate world. The editors’ choice not to include the chapter on Hebrew medieval scientific writings (Chapter 27) in either the Islamic World or Medieval West sections is also puzzling. It caused me to wonder about their notion of ‘Islamic World’: does it designate areas with a majority Muslim population rather than functioning as a stand-in for ‘Muslim’, as they categorise as ‘Islamic’ papers on Syriac translators from the Church of the East (Chapter 8) and the Jewish intellectual Maimonides (Chapter 13)? Perhaps, a more generative way to structure the papers would have been to order them chronologically, thus encouraging the reader to draw cross-cultural comparisons between the dynamic approaches to Galen happening around the same time.
The editors propose alternatively that the volume can be read thematically. Apart from their citation of L. Hardwick and C. Stray's definition of ‘reception’ from A Companion to Classical Receptions (2008) in a footnote (p. 2 n. 6), the editors’ division of the themes into ‘textual transmission and dissemination’, ‘reception of Galen in medical practice’ and ‘Galen in non-medical contexts’ (p. 3) provides the only glimpse into their conception of the term and what they think is distinctive about Galen's afterlife in comparison with other Graeco-Roman authors. The posthumous paper of P. Tassinari (Chapter 26), ‘Galen into the Modern World’, helps to explain what emerges from the book as the principal research agenda of Galenic Reception Studies: textual analysis and the examination of manuscripts. Tassinari associates the migration of Galen from ‘the dominion of learned doctors to that of professional philologists’ (p. 509) with the publication of Karl Gottlob Kühn's overly maligned edition of the ‘complete Galen’ (1821–33), on which textual critics since Charles Daremberg (1817–72) and Johannes Marquardt (1847–1915) have been trying to improve. Furthermore, although it makes sense to investigate the impact of a doctor on doctors, the disproportionate attention accorded in the companion to Galen's medical as opposed to his philosophical reception – the subject of only three contributions (Chapters 10–11, 13) – may itself be a legacy of the assessments of nineteenth-century historians of philosophy such as Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), who dismissed Galen as ‘representative of an unsophisticated empiricism more interested in practical medical problems than in theoretical investigations … who by refraining from taking a definite stance on vital speculative themes such as the substance of the soul failed to show any philosophical originality’ (p. 520).
On the editors’ calculation, 25 of the 31 papers deal with the ‘textual transmission and dissemination’ of Galen (pp. 3–5). All of them, at least to this reviewer, seem to demonstrate an impressive command of their primary source materials, whether they are medieval manuscripts or early modern print editions, that is predicated on hours of granular research. S. Bhayro's chapter (8), ‘The Reception of Galen in the Syriac Tradition’, makes the interpretative stakes of this demanding philological work most clear. After offering the well-taken qualification that the Syriac tradition is not monolithic but consists of three strands, Bhayro illustrates how recent textual discoveries such as the Syriac Galen Palimpsest, whose undertext preserves a Syriac version of Galen's On the Capacities of Simple Drugs (SMT) by Sergius of Resh ʿAina (d. 536), have led to the revision of long-standing assumptions about the quality of this translator's output and the Syriac translation movement in general. The Palimpsest furnishes counter-evidence against the claim that Sergius deployed an ad verbum (or literal) rather than ad sensum approach to translation, which appears to trace back to Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq's self-aggrandising comparison of his skills to those of prior translators. This and other textual findings also call into question the supposed decline of Syriac as a scientific language during the ʿAbbāsid period and the link of the ‘poor’ quality of Sergius’ translations to insufficient financial backing.
While the volume rests on the assumption of Galen's importance to medicine and literature, evidently beginning during Galen's own lifetime, as A. Pietrobelli's paper ‘Galen's Early Reception (Second–Third Centuries)’ (Chapter 1) insists, a handful of contributions dispute the extent of his ‘influence’. In Chapter 16 L. Chipman provocatively shows the irrelevance of Galenic pharmacology to Jewish pharmacists working in Cairo, who, much like Galen himself, preferred more contemporary recipes and tailored them to patients’ humoural make-up. The conclusion of S. Lazaris's survey of medieval portraits of Galen (Chapter 31) also suggests a limit to his popularity, for, unlike other ancient authorities, a distinctive iconography never developed for his image. Besides the fact that no representation of Galen's physical appearance survives from his lifetime, Lazaris attributes this lack of distinguishing features to miniaturists’ and painters’ desire ‘to promote the excellence of his work rather than the individual’ (p. 624). Even so, it would have been intriguing to see Lazaris reflect on whether the mutability in Galen's representation in western and eastern art reveals something idiosyncratic about his reception – the ease of Galen's acculturation.
Along the same lines, V. Nutton (Chapter 24) and R. Yoeli-Tlalim (Chapter 30) make good points about the murkiness of the label ‘Galenic’. Notwithstanding Galen's attempt to spell out his views in On My Own Opinions, their papers expose how writers both in and outside the medical field renegotiated the meaning of the term, which in one of its weakest senses merely denoted a humoural theory of the body (p. 473), to define their own position in relation to the past. Yoeli-Tlalim's short but insightful discussion of Galen in India highlights the political motives underlying the links that individuals or groups drew between themselves and Galen, who often metonymically represented Greek medicine. As she explains, Indo-Muslim physicians in the nineteenth century presented Unani Tibb as a continuation of Galenic/Greek medicine to stress their connection to European culture and thus legitimate their practice in their rivalry with the ‘modern’ medicine of the British Raj (p. 600).
Since C. Martindale's Redeeming the Text (1993) the notion of reception as a two-way flow that illuminates aspects of not only the ‘receiving’ culture but also the ‘received’ text has become almost proverbial. There are excellent papers in this collection, such as those from P. Koetschet (Chapter 10), N. Fancy (Chapter 14) and many of the authors mentioned above, from which I learned a lot about the cultures reimagining Galen as well as what attracted them to him in the first place. The majority of the contributions, however, focus on what their ‘receiving’ cultures could read of the ‘original’ Galen, and neither supply enough historical context to ascertain the sociocultural and intellectual ambitions of the translators, patrons and readers who found Galen relevant, nor ask how Galen establishes his authority over the subjects in which these later individuals are interested. In their introduction, the editors express the wish for the companion to stimulate more research on Galen's reception (p. 2). Their volume lays the foundation for such work and most importantly encourages a global approach to Galen.
