This book is the revised version of the author’s doctoral thesis, and offers an exploration of selected medieval texts with an aim to understand better the theory and practice of respiratory illness in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The author is a life sciences graduate turned historian: a bold move that was rewarded with two prizes upon completion of the thesis. The sources selected by the author encompass commentaries to Avicenna by Gentile da Foligno and Jacques Despars, Islamic works (by Avicenna and Averroes) translated into Latin, and smaller and later (but influential) works such as Bernard de Gordon’s Lilium medicinae. Most were relevant to early Renaissance medicine, either as university set texts or through repeated printings. The rationale of the selected sources is not perfectly clear, but Loviconi succeeds in enticing the reader into the fascinating, little-known intellectual world of Despars and Foligno, her main sources.

The book falls into three main parts: the first (and shortest) section explores core medieval ideas about respiration (anatomy and physiology); the second section gives an account of respiratory diseases known to the authors under scrutiny; and the third exposes the treatments on offer in the selected texts. Loviconi is thorough and quotes her sources abundantly, revealing discrepancies, misunderstandings, and disagreements among physicians, but also varying levels of faith toward ancient authorities, a facet of medieval medical thought that is not often highlighted. The author’s perspective is clearly medical historical rather than philological, yet the very choice of this topic entailed quite detailed analysis of medieval Latin texts. To an extent, Loviconi’s effort is a tour de force, offering a clear navigation through difficult, not very accessible texts. Her study is supplemented by a substantial set of annexes comprising her key sources (in Latin), an index, and a bibliography. Her study of therapeutics is enriched by research from neighboring fields, allowing her to highlight a number of innovations borrowed from the Islamic world (the use of sugar and many animal substances in new remedies for respiratory ailments). To my knowledge, she is covering new ground, and there is no equivalent to this book on this topic—although it would have been clearer, perhaps, to mention Foligno and Despars in the title, as the main focus of the book.

For all its fascinating erudition, the book is not without its limitations. The introduction gives no insight about the rationale of this research and how it fits within the current scholarly context. It is to Loviconi’s credit not to give in to any trendy topic or approach, focusing instead on texts to extract their substance, but it would have been useful for her (and the reader) to situate her research from a methodological angle more clearly, in order to engage an international readership. A preliminary review of the historiography on her topic would have gone a long way toward achieving this. Tackling recent histories of respiratory diseases, such as Mark Jackson’s well-received Asthma: The Biography (2009), would also have helped. An accurate description of the medieval authors’ relationship with their Greek and Islamic sources is lacking. The name of Galen appears on every page, yet it is clear that his works are known to the author only through medieval commentaries, Daremberg’s nineteenth-century translations, or the outdated and unreliable Kühn edition, or even through secondary studies like Debru’s Le corps respirant (1996). None of the modern critical editions (let alone commentaries) have been used, although they provide extensive information about the transmission of Galen’s works in medieval Latin. Medieval texts, in turn, are known through early printed editions rather than manuscripts—questions surrounding the circulation of translations of Galen, Avicenna, or Averroes are never touched upon. The reader is left wondering if medieval authors represent Galen accurately, on the basis of what text(s) and through which medium. Galen’s texts available in Latin were scarce enough in this period to be able to trace them with relative accuracy: Nutton’s recent analyses of the Latin tradition of Galen, with its different families of manuscripts and readerships, however, do not seem known to Loviconi; nor do the detailed philological inquiries into the Galenic texts she is using or speculating about (De constitutione artis medicae or De locis affectis).

The book shows a firm grounding in Parisian scholarship (Jacquard and her pupils), but there are glaring omissions in the bibliography (Nutton, Burnett, Fortuna, Ventura, Zipser, and many others). The thesis does mention quite a few recent studies, but ignores a lot, too.