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Thesis

French

ID: <

10670/1.kry3xe

>

Where these data come from
Investigations on the Manuscript Transmission of the Greek Version of Ibn al-Ǧazzār’s Provisions of the Traveller

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation composed of two main parts offers, for the first time, a thorough philological and historical analysis of the Greek manuscript transmission of the Provisions of the Traveller (Ἐφόδια τοῦ ἀποδημοῦντος), a medical handbook written in Arabic by the Kairouan doctor Ibn al-Ǧazzār (d. 979). The first part of the thesis consists in an updated presentation of the Arabic version, its author, and its Latin, Hebrew and Greek translations. The latter makes up the core of this study : translated in southern Italy in the second half of the 11th century, the Greek text represents a very faithful and literal rendering of the Arabic original. Nevertheless, it was soon re-worked from a philological perspective, with the addition of some external material as compared with the original Arabic text. Even though this translation enjoyed great success (no less than forty-eight copies are preserved to this day), the Greek text still lacks any critical edition and a very few studies - of which the thesis provides an analysis - have tackled the issues of its manuscript transmission. In the second part, the dissertation gives a material and philological description of forty-one codices (i.e. the totality of the manuscript transmission up to the end of the 16th century) that can be grouped into four families. Although the Greek translation was made in southern Italy and the oldest testimonies were copied in that region, it was in Byzantium, especially in the 14th and 15th centuries, that the text earned its reputation as an essential medical handbook. Its importance as a reference is clear from the number of codices copied in a limited amount of time (more than half of them in less than two hundred years) as well as the existence of a revised version of the translation indicating the will of Byzantine doctors to render this original Arabic text a Byzantine work. The detailed study of the manuscript testimonies and the illustration of the relationships between them result in a comprehensive and conclusive summary of the manuscript transmission of the Provisions of the Traveller which draws together the central themes of this thesis.

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