From Kitāb al-Nabāt to Liber de Plantis: The Translation of the Liber de Plantis as a Vehicle for the Transmission of the Arabic Lexicon of Plants into Medieval Latin
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/alqantara.2025.814Keywords:
Kitāb al-Nabāt, Liber de Plantis, Arabic lexicon in Latin, history of science, translations from Arabic into LatinAbstract
Mainly during the 12th and 13th centuries, the rediscovery of the so-called Graeco-Arabic legacy led to the emergence of an academic translation movement of enormous proportions in Europe. One of the key places in this translation process was the Iberian Peninsula, where numerous translations were made, mainly from Arabic into Latin. Among the works translated within this territory, the Latin version of the Liber de Plantis stands out, not only due to its influence on medieval botany, but also given the number of times this Latin version itself was translated.
Another peculiarity that distinguishes the Latin translation of the Liber de Plantis is the use of Arabic words, sometimes in their closest version to Hispanic Arabic, and at times not necessarily so. In this article, we have extracted and analysed the Arabic words that refer to the lexicon of plants and, by examining some later Latin commentaries, we have established the continuity of these Arabic words in late medieval Latin, that is, their incorporation into the scientific language of the time. We have also been able to confirm the persistence of some of these terms in the current scientific language. Given the presence of the Liber de Plantis in academic collections, and the continuity of these Arabisms in later commentaries of the De plantis, we consider that this translation may have played an important role in the transmission of the Arabic lexicon of plants to medieval scientific Latin.
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