The Medieval Appropriation of Maimonides

Between 1295 and 1305 two rather diff erent individuals —one the nephew of Arnau de Vilanova, an academic physician trained at Montpellier, the other a Jew converted to Christianity and practicing at the papal court— undertook independently to translate into Latin all the medical works of Maimonides, above all his short works on asthma, on poisons, on coitus, and on hemorrhoids. In these works, taken as a whole, Maimonides passed along details drawn from the whole spectrum of life in Egypt in his day, ca. 1200. A comparative study of the translations of these two individuals allows us to study the kind of picture of Islamic life that they chose to present, and how they depicted Maimonides himself, to a European readership.