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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2016
The disease of love (amor hereos) proved a topic of longstanding interest at the medical school of Montpellier between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. From Arnald of Villanova and Bernard of Gordon in the late thirteenth century to Valescus of Taranta and Jacques Angeli in the fifteenth, generations of Montpellier masters and students studied, expounded, and debated the lover's malady. Gerard of Solo, who received his master's degree in medicine from Montpellier in 1335, and who remained at the university to become a leading figure of medical scholasticism, compiled a university exercise on lovesickness, the Determinatio de amore hereos. Though best known to students of lovesickness as the author of a commentary on the ninth book of al-Rāzī's Liber ad almansorem, Gerard's Determinatio, which is probably his magisterial version of a disputation on love, treats the subject more systematically than does the commentary on al-Rāzī. The Determinatio, which represents how the topic of lovesickness was taught outside the framework of textual commentary, provides a useful summary of fourteenth-century scholastic medical doctrine on love.
1 Arnald of Villanova's Tractatus de amore heroico has been edited recently by Mc Vaugh, Michael R., Opera omnia Arnaldi de Villanova 3 (Barcelona 1985), who includes an excellent introduction on Arnald's place within the tradition of lovesickness and his contributions to its development at Montpellier. Bernard of Gordon, Gerard of Solo, John of Tornamira, and Valescus of Taranta, Montpellier physicians who wrote about lovesickness, are all surveyed by Lowes, John L., The Loveres Maladye of Hereos,’ Modern Philology 11 (1913–14) 491–546. Danielle Jacquart briefly discusses Jacques Angeli's Puncta medicinae in ‘La maladie et le remède d'amour dans quelques écrits médicaux au moyen ǎge,’ in Amour, mariage et transgression au moyen ǎge, Université de Picardie, Centre d'Études Médiévales, Actes du Colloque des 24–27 mars 1983 (Göppingen 1984) 93–101, and in Les questions disputées et les questions quodlibétiques dans les facultés de théologie, de droit, et de médecine, edd. Bernardo Bazàn et al., Typologie des sources du moyen ǎge occidental, fasc. 44–45 (Turnhout 1985) 296–97. On medical education at Montpellier see Demaitre, Luke, ‘Theory and Practice in Medical Education at Montpellier in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,’ Journal of the History of Medicine 30 (1975) 103–23.Google Scholar
2 Guénon, Anne-Sylvie, ‘Gérard de Solo, maǐtre de l'université de médecine de Montpellier et praticien du XIVe siècle,’ École Nationale des Chartes, Positions des thèses (1982) 75–82 summarizes available biographical information. She edited the Determinatio in her unpublished thesis for the École des Chartes, 1982. Because theses of the École des Chartes may only be consulted in Paris with the permission of the author and the director of the library, publication here of a more accessible edition of the Determinatio will serve the needs of researchers without liberal travel allowances. The Determinatio is preserved in a medical miscellany of the fourteenth century, MS Erfurt, Wissenschaftliche Allgemeinbibliothek CA F270, fols. 77v–78v. The manuscript is described by Schum, Wilhelm, Beschriebendes Verzeichniss der amplonianischen Handschriften-Sammlung zu Erfurt (1887).Google Scholar
3 McVaugh, , Tractatus 34–37, offers a résumé of the Determination contents and briefly compares it to the commentary on the ninth book of Ad almansorem. Because the chronology of Gerard's career is obscure, it is not yet possible to tell which of his two works on lovesickness is the earlier. The notes to the edition of the Determinatio below signal parallels with the commentary on al-Rāzī.Google Scholar
4 Many of the surviving medieval discussions of lovesickness written by Western physicians are in the form of commentaries on the Arabic texts in Latin translation studied in the medical schools. For a study of one such text and its commentaries, see Wack, Mary, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia 1990).Google Scholar
5 Jacquart in Bazàn, Questions 310–11.Google Scholar
6 Sources and parallels are indicated in the notes to the edition. Gerard's indebtedness to Peter of Spain's Questiones super Viaticum is extensive: not only does he take as the theme of the dispute a question Peter had used, but he uses many of Peter's arguments as well. Like Peter, he collocates discussion of appetite for food, sexual appetite, men's and women's pleasure in intercourse, and the physiology of sexual pleasure. While it is possible that another writer (e.g., Bernard of Gordon in his lost commentary on the Viaticum as well as in the Lilium medicinae) served as intermediary between Peter of Spain and Gerard of Solo, the similarities are so extensive as to make Gerard's direct knowledge of Peter's Questiones likely, especially since manuscripts of the Questiones were copied at Montpellier in the first half of the fourteenth century (see Wack, , Lovesickness, ch. 5 for description of the manuscripts and for editions of the A and B versions of Peter's commentary on the Viaticum's chapter on lovesickness).Google Scholar
7 Jacquart, Questions 296 notes that Montpellier masters of medicine used the quaestio as a pedagogical tool. Gerard of Solo's Determinationes ‘manifestent davantage le désir d'inculquer une méthode que de résoudre un problème doctrinal. Le raissonement scolastique y est fort lourd et le recours aux catégories aristotéliciennes constant. La dispute recontra donc à Montpellier un particulier développement en tant qu'exercise scolaire.’Google Scholar
8 On the tradition of medicine as a ‘second philosophy’ or ‘philosophy of the body’ (Isidore) see Talbot, Charles, ‘Medicine’ in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David Lindberg (Madison 1978) 401–4 and 425 n. 27; Oskar Kristeller, Paul, ‘Philosophy and Medicine in Medieval and Renaissance Italy,’ in Organism, Medicine, and Metaphysics, ed. Spicker, S. F. (Dordrecht 1978) 29–40; and Siraisi, Nancy, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils (Princeton 1981) ch. 6: ‘The Uses of Philosophy: Reconciling the Philosophers and the Physicians.’Google Scholar
9 Roman de la Rose, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris 1974) lines 4377–84 (Raison speaks):Google Scholar
Amors, se bien sui apensee,
C'est maladie de pensee
Entre deus persones anexes,
Franches entr'eus, de divers sexes,
Venans as gens par ardor nee,
Par avision desordenee,
Por eus acoler et baisier
Et por eus charnelment aisier.
10 Noted by McVaugh, , Tractatus 36.Google Scholar
11 ‘The Development of a Critical Temper: New Approaches and Modes of Analysis in Fourteenth-Century Philosophy, Science, and Theology,’ Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1975) 56–57.Google Scholar
12 On the quantification of sexual pleasure, see my article The Measure of Pleasure: Peter of Spain on Men, Women, and Lovesickness,’ Viator 17 (1986) 173–96, printed in revised form in Wack, Lovesickness, ch. 6.Google Scholar
13 See note 6 above for Gerard's indebtedness to Peter of Spain. In this regard it is worth noting that the Italian physician Dino del Garbo († 1327) wrote a long medical-philosophical commentary on Cavalcanti's love poem ‘Donna me prega.’ It is most recently edited by G. Favati, ‘La Glossa latina di Dino del Garbo a “Donna me prega” del Cavalcanti,’ Annali delta scuola normale superior di Pisa. Lettere, storia e filosofia, ser. 2,21 (1952) 70–103.Google Scholar
14 E.g., Constantine the African, Viaticum 1.20 defines love as a morbus of the brain; his commentator Gerard of Berry (ca. 1200) attributes the causa huius passionis to an error virtutis estimative, and the fourteenth-century commentator Bona Fortuna defines amor hereos as an ‘incitatio cogitationum circa speciei humane formam et figuram individualem sive singularem sollicitudini melancolice persimilis, adiuvantibus desiderio et concupiscentia inexpletis.’ He further notes that the principal cause is an ‘extrinsecum apprehensum quod putatur conveniens et amicum … quod movet fantasiam vel intellectum.’ In contrast, Arnald of Villanova, Tractatus de amore heroico, declares that amor is, properly speaking, not a morbus but an accidens (McVaugh 45–46).Google Scholar
15 Murdoch, , ‘Critical Temper’ and ‘From Social into Intellectual Factors: An Aspect of the Unitary Character of Late Medieval Learning’ in The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, edd. John Murdoch and Edith Sylla (Dordrecht 1975) 271–339.Google Scholar
16 See Wack, , ‘Measure’ (n. 12 above).Google Scholar
17 This development is traced in Wack, Mary, ‘From Mental Faculties to Magical Philters: The Entry of Magic into Academic Medical Writing on Lovesickness, 13th–17th Centuries,’ in Eros and Anteros in the Renaissance, edd. Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (forthcoming).Google Scholar
18 On this subject, see the comprehensive treatment of Katherine Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics 1250–1345 (Leiden 1988). For instances of the optical illusion of the colors in a dove's neck, see the index s.v. ‘experience.’Google Scholar
19 Urso's theory of imaginative desire is outlined in Wack, Mary, ‘Imagination, Rhetoric, and Medicine in the De amore of Andreas Capellanus,’ in Magister Regis: Studies in Honor of Robert Earl Kaske, ed. Arthur Groos (New York 1986) 101–15. The original texts may be found in Creutz, Rudolph, Die medizinisch-naturphilosophischen Aphorismen und Kommentare des Magister Urso Salernitanus (Berlin 1936).Google Scholar
20 See Giedke, Adalheid, Die Liebe als Krankheit in der Geschichte der Medizin (diss. Düsseldorf 1982) on Renaissance case histories of lovesickness. Eduard Seidler, Die Heilkunde des ausgehenden Mittelalters in Paris: Studien zur Struktur spätscholastischen Medizin (Wiesbaden 1967) 90, has remarked of pathography that, in the wake of later medieval philosophical developments, the real and concrete person became the protagonist of his story of illness. On Boccaccio's use of the tradition of lovesickness, see Ciavolella, Massimo, ‘La tradizione dell’ “aegritudo amoris” nel “Decameron”,’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 147 (1970) 496–517, and Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The World at Play in Boccaccio's DECAMERON (Princeton 1986) 13–46. On Chaucer's use of lovesickness, see Lowes, , ‘Loveres Maladye’; Edward Schweitzer, ‘Fate and Freedom in the Knight's Tale,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981) 13–45; and Wack, Mary, ‘Lovesickness in Troilus,’ Pacific Coast Philology 19 (1984) 55–61.Google Scholar
