Arnold of Villanova

Catalan physician and scholar

• Born: c. 1239
• Birthplace: Probably Valencia, Aragon (now in Spain)
• Died: September 6, 1311
• Place of death: At sea, near Genoa (now in Italy)

The first great figure of European medicine and physician to kings and popes, Arnold joined Arabic theory to European empiricism. His more than seventy scientific works and translations made him an influential medical theorist beyond the sixteenth century, just as his radical theology and stormy life made him lastingly controversial.

Early Life

France, Italy, and Spain have claimed Arnold as a native son. The name “Villanova” (vihl-luh-NOH-vuh) may have derived from Villeneuve-les-Vence, or else Villeneuve-Loubet, in Provence, where he had relatives. By one theory, his family were Jews who, on converting to Christianity, moved to Catalonia and then Valencia. Arnold himself said that he was “born of the soil, lowly and obscure” and called himself “an unlearned country-fellow.” Contemporaries called him a Catalan, which he accepted, and his early editors used that as an alternate surname. The only language in which he wrote, besides Latin, was Catalan. The kingdom of Valencia, just conquered from the Muslims by Catalonia-Aragon, always claimed Arnold for its own. The great fourteenth century Valencian writer Francesc Eiximenis took it as common knowledge, within a lifetime of Arnold's death, that the latter was a native of Valencia. The settlers in Valencia, and even those in Murcia to its south, were called “true Catalans” by the contemporary memoirist Ramón Muntaner; famous medieval Valencians such as Vicent Ferrer and the Borgia popes, as well as the Majorcan Anselm Turmeda, were also called Catalans. Thus, Arnold was probably born in Valencia, after the fall of its capital in 1238. Arnold had properties in Valencia and, more significant, was ordained as a cleric in minor orders in the Valencian diocese; his daughter Maria became a nun at Valencia city in 1291.

In 1982, John Benton published a note from a medieval manuscript archived in Pasadena, California, indicating that Arnold was born at Villanueva de Jilóca near Huesca in Aragon and that some of his relatives still lived there in the mid-fourteenth century. Benton suggested that Arnold learned his Arabic from the conquered Muslims there and was an Aragonese by early training. There is no evidence, however, that Arnold knew any Aragonese, while he is a major figure in Catalan literature. Moreover, it is unlikely that Aragon's acculturated Muslim farming communities, with their Arabic dialect, were the source of his classical Arabic and his knowledge of its literature. Valencia was an advanced Islamic society, barely come under colonial rule, with its Muslim aristocracy, savants, and schools intact during the long decades of Arnold's education. As a Valencian, Arnold's environment would have been multiethnic, among affluent Muslim and Jewish communities in a land of international ports, lush farmlands, and dangerous revolts on the part of the Muslim majority a far cry from the bleak and rocky uplands of Aragon.

Life's Work

Arnold of Villanova (Arnau de Vilanova in his native Catalan) was graduated around 1260 from the celebrated medical university in Montpellier, then part of the wider realms of Aragon-Catalonia. He may have done postdoctoral work at Naples under the physician Giovanni de Casamicciola. Presumably during his Montpellier sojourn, he married Agnès Blasi of that city, herself of a lineage of physicians. In the early 1280', he studied Hebrew and the Talmud under the Arabist-Hebraist Ramón Martí at the Dominican school in Barcelona. Famous by 1281, Arnold became the main physician to King Peter III of Aragon-Catalonia, receiving the huge stipend of two thousand Barcelonan sous on condition of living in Barcelona near the court (another indication that his home was not Catalonia but Valencia). Other gifts included the castle of Ollers. Arnold continued to enjoy royal support under Peter's successors, Alfonso III (r. 1285-1291) and James II (r. 1291-1327), and he was released to reside in Valencia, which he did from 1286 to 1289.

Called to teach at Montpellier for a decade, Arnold began to publish apocalyptic religious works, prophesying the coming of Antichrist in 1345 (later revised to 1368) and demanding moral reform. When James II sent the respected doctor on a diplomatic mission to Philip IV of France, Arnold spread his radical theology so passionately that the theologians of the University of Paris had him tried and condemned in 1299. Pope Boniface VIII and King Philip secured his release. Grateful for Arnold's cure of his renal affliction, the pope lent him the castle of Scorcola near Anagni as a retreat in which to study and write. Arnold returned to his post with the royal family in 1302. He soon became embroiled in a theological battle with the Dominicans of Gerona and Castellón de Ampurias, and he disputed before the archbishop at Lérida and the king at Barcelona. At Valencia, his polemics prompted the Inquisition to excommunicate him. His patient and protector Boniface VIII died in 1303, but the new pope (Benedict XI, whom Arnold treated for gallstones) shielded him. Further religious polemic got Arnold imprisoned briefly at Perugia in Italy. Under the protection of Frederick III of Sicily, however, he continued his religious writings at Messina.

In 1305, Arnold returned to Barcelona to exhort James II to crusade against Islamic Almería. Continuing to write on medical and religious topics, and by now the European leader of the visionary evangelical movement called the Spirituals, Arnold went to Narbonne and Marseilles; in 1308, he was in Messina, where he interpreted an obsessive dream for King Frederick. In 1309, he was at the court of his friend and patient Pope Clement V in Avignon; in 1310, he was back with Frederick III briefly and in the siege of Almería and then at Messina again. Journeying by sea to Avignon, he died near Genoa and was buried there in 1311.

During all these travels, he had enthusiastically propagated the astrological, alchemical, and occult themes then popular in Islam. His method of exegesis by symbolic letters, borrowed from the Jewish Cabalists, disturbed some contemporaries. Suspected of converting to Judaism, he was in reality an anti-Judaic proselytizer. In 1316, the Inquisition at Tarragona condemned a number of his religious approaches. At the same time, he was hailed internationally as a great physician.

In later medieval Mediterranean Europe (as distinguished from the inland and northern regions), a physician was a prestigious personage, expected to be a general savant, a repository of philosophical and even theological ancient knowledge, and also a man active in public affairs. He was a welcome decoration in the courts of the powerful. This model echoes the Islamic hakim, extending to the Jews with Arabist training who functioned at the court of the kings of Aragon-Catalonia. Training of physicians in Europe, though often still accomplished through private apprenticeship, had become a university function, so that the university title “doctor” and the renown of the universities themselves were reflecting more glory on the profession. Seen in this light, Arnold's almost comic embroilment in the Spirituals’ cause makes more sense; it was then the premier public polemic in Europe. Arnold's diplomatic projects are also thus explained. He never lost sight, however, of his own priorities: He was a physician, in an era of revolutionary advances in surgery, anatomy, and the professionalization of medical work.

Arnold's medical theory has been summed up as “Galen Arabicized.” He not only translated Arabic medical works into Latin, including those of the Valencian Abū Salt, but also revered the classic Muslim physicians and integrated their findings with Western medical knowledge and practice. His Aphorismi de gradibus (aphorisms on the degrees), completed in the late 1290', revolutionized the study of pharmacology with its theory of compound medicines and its application of mathematics. It organized traditional knowledge into one unified field, while rejecting previous forms of classification. Arnold composed some seventy medical books and treatises in Latin, over a wide range of topics. His work on preventive medicine and hygiene, Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum (1307; Regimen sanitatis Salerni: This Booke Teachyng All People to Governe Them in Health, 1575), enjoyed great popular success; the queen of Aragon ordered a version translated into Romance for wider diffusion, and a Hebrew version appeared. In all, Arnold wrote eleven such books. He also wrote a book titled De conservatione juventutis et retardatione senectutis (1290; The Conservation of Youth and Defense of Age, 1544). Other works specialized in bleeding, fevers, poisons, sexual intercourse, conception, sterility, dreams, food for the sick, eye troubles, epilepsy, wines, waters, antidotes, leprosy and contagious diseases, the heart, meat-eating, and medical theory. He discoursed on the value of bathing, kinds of baths, and their effects. He also took up questions on surgery, an art being revolutionized by the treatise of Abulcassis (al-Zahrawi) that he had translated and by pioneering theories on disease as anatomically focused.

The historian of Spanish medieval medicine Luis García-Ballester sees Arnold as a frontier phenomenon, a fusion of Arabic, Jewish, and European medical traditions that flowered until supplanted by the Scholastic model of the Italians. Arnold was an academician, and his talent was for joining practice to theory. A catalog of his library survives, affording insights into his intellectual tastes. He was not interested, for example, in Islamic theology. He collected not only Arabic books but also works in Greek, a language he learned only late in life.

Significance

Arnold was the greatest physician in the West since ancient Rome. Physician and spiritual adviser to four kings, physician to three popes, and for a decade the most celebrated teacher at Europe's greatest medical university, Montpellier, Arnold was a tireless author and translator of medical works. More than any medieval figure, he represents the juncture of Arabic with European medicine, theory with practice. At the same time, he was a major figure in public affairs, from diplomatic missions to crusade propaganda; he became the leader of the apocalyptic Spirituals movement then agitating Europe. His writings show his contribution to the evolution of the Catalan language and literature. He had close associations with the Jewish community in southern France, partly to borrow Cabalistic knowledge and partly with proselytizing intent. His incessant travel, and the explosive energies visible both in his production of books and in the disputations that made him leader of the Spirituals (and landed him in prison several times), made him one of the best-known public men of his age.

Bibliography

Amundsen, Darrel W., ed. Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Covers the connections between medicine and religious faith, canon law on medical practice, medical ethics, and more.

Arnold of Villanova. Arnaldi de Villanova: Opera Medica Omnia. Vols. 2 and 16. Edited by Michael R. McVaugh. Granada, Spain: Seminarium Historiae Medicae Granatensis, 1975. Despite the work’s Latin title and edited text, the introductions to these volumes are in English, written by a major authority on Arnold. The second volume, Aphorismi de gradibus, has 143 pages in English on Arnold’s contribution to medieval pharmacology.

Benton, John F. “The Birthplace of Arnau de Vilanova: A Case for Villanueva de Jilóca near Daroca.” In Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Vol. 13. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. An exciting contribution to the study of Arnold’s early years, though controversial in its interpretation. Contains additional information on his career and a bibliography in notes.

Burns, Robert I. “The Medieval Crossbow as Surgical Instrument: An Illustrated Case History.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 48 (September, 1972): 983-989. Reprinted as chapter 7 of Burns’s Moors and Crusaders in Mediterranean Spain (London: Variorum, 1978). Six thirteenth century panels illustrate a surgical procedure, including the preparation of the patient beforehand by assistants and the formal dress of physicians. The case is explained from contemporary surgical manuals, with relevant bibliography.

García-Ballester, Luís. Medicine in a Multicultural Society: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Practitioners in the Spanish Kingdoms, 1222-1610. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001. A history of medicine, medical practice, and religion in Arnold’s time. Includes an index.

Kibre, Pearl. Studies in Medieval Science: Alchemy, Astrology, Mathematics, and Medicine. London: Hambledon Press, 1984. Discusses treatises by medieval medical writers found in the medieval libraries of Western Europe.

Kotek, Samuel S., and Luís García-Ballester, eds. Medicine and Medical Ethics in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: An Intercultural Approach. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996. Discusses Jewish medical practitioners in Spain and the ethics of patient-doctor relations at the time of Arnold.

McVaugh, Michael R. “Quantified Medical Theory and Practice at Fourteenth-Century Montpellier.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 43 (September-October, 1969): 397-413. An early presentation of themes expanded by the author in his later introduction to Arnold’s works on mathematical formulas applied to compound medicines.

Siraisi, Nancy G. Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. An excellent introduction to the new medicine of the thirteenth century, a panoramic and profound examination of a Mediterranean region then vying with Arnold’s Montpellier and Catalonia. Includes an extensive bibliography.

Ziegler, Joseph. Medicine and Religion, Circa 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Covers medicine in the context of religion and religious speculation, “a sermon for students of medicine,” and more.