The works of Galen of Pergamum (c. 129-216 CE) were fundamental in the shaping of medicine, philosophy and neighbouring areas of knowledge, from antiquity through to the middle ages and early modern times, across a variety of languages and cultures. Yet, as early as Galen's own lifetime, spurious treatises crept into the body of his authentic works, in spite of his best efforts to provide the public with a catalogue of his own production (De libris propriis). For centuries, readers have used a fluid body of Galenic works, shaped by changing intellectual frameworks and social-cultural contexts. Several inauthentic works have enjoyed remarkable popularity. But this has had consequences in modern scholarship. The current reference edition (Kühn, 1821-1833) fails to distinguish clearly between authentic and inauthentic texts; many works lack any critical study, which makes navigating the corpus unusually difficult.
This volume, arising from a conference held in 2015 at the Warburg Institute and funded by the Wellcome Trust, will provide much-needed clarification about the boundaries of the Galenic corpus, identifying and analysing the works that do not genuinely belong to Galen's production.
Pseudo-Galenica : The Formation of the Galenic Corpus from Antiquity to the Renaissance
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Author Description
Caroline Petit is Director of Graduate Studies and assistant professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick. Petit is an associate member of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. She has a special interest in ancient medical texts, especially Galen and the Galenic corpus. Simon Swain is professor of classics at the University of Warwick. Swain is also the Vice-President for Research and Higher Education Policy at the British Academy. He specializes in the reception and development of Greek thought in the Islamic Middle Ages, and the social and cultural history of the Greek East in the Roman period and after. Klaus-Dietrich Fischer is a classical philologist, medical historian, and lecturer at the Institute for History, Theory and Ethics of Medicine at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. Fischer also coordinates the Old Medicine Working Group, an international forum for research into early healing practices of different cultures.