The Intellectual Interests Reflected in Libraries of the Fourteenth and ...

FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURY LBRARIES 289
who had three books on music in his library also accorded musicians
his appreciative attention.'4'
Of the more practical arts or sciences, medical treatises, which
Richard of Furnival in the thirteenth century had listed along with
works on civil and canon law as belonging to the lucrative sciences,'42
were the most prominent. No library appears to have been
complete without a number of books on this subject. Even that of
Pico della Mirandola whose writings reflected slight interest in the
subject had a large number of medical tracts.143 It is difficult to
determine to what extent this popularity of the medical writings
was due to the general interest that many laymen had in the subject
or was the result of more practical needs. There was a leaning
toward collections of hygienic rules for maintaining health as well
as toward treatises on preventive medicine. Many of these were
recent works which had been composed under the stimulus of the
devastating ravages of the Black death in the fourteenth century
and its recurrences in the fifteenth. But still others were the older
works that had provided the medical reading matter during the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Particularly prominent in the
latter category were the treatises by Hippocrates and Galen in the
Latin translations by Constantinus Africanus made by way of the
Arabic in the early twelfth century, together with the more recent
humanistic renderings directly from the Greek by Theodorus Gaza,
Lorenzo Laurenziano, and others. The fifteenth-century libraries
also frequently included the medical treatise of the Roman physician,
Cornelius Celsus, whose work, although known in the middle
ages since the extant manuscripts date from the tenth, eleventh,
and twelfth centuries, is seldom listed in inventories of libraries
before the fifteenth century. It was "found" by Poggio during his
systematic search of the monastic establishments while he was presumably
attending the council of Constance.'44 Most of the works
of Arabic physicians in Latin dress that had been current in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries are included in these fourteenthand
fifteenth-century libraries, among them Albucasis, Averroes,
141 Vespasiano, Vite, III, 57; Piccolomini, in Archivio storico ital., ser. 3, XXI
(1875), 111, for the inventory of 1456.
142 "Bibliomanie de Richard de Furnival," printed in Delisle, Le cabinet des
manuscrits, II, 521: "Sequens areola libros continet de quibusdam scientiis luerativis.
. .."
143 P. Kibre, op. cit., 10 i
144 P. Kibre, op. cit., 52-53; Vespasiano, Vite, II, 203.
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