#avicenna

Coffee With A Codex is an informal lunch or coffee time to meet virtually with Kislak curators and talk about one of the manuscripts from Penn's collections. Each week we'll feature a different manuscript and the expertise of one of our curators. Everyone is welcome to attend.

On February 12, curator Dot Porter will bring out LJS 426, a 14th century copy of the first book of Avicenna's medical encyclopedia in Arabic.

Register here:

tl;dr / standard disclaimer - I am not a scholar, just a nerd who dabbles in thinking about troubadours occasionally for fun. Sharing thoughts, resources, and snark about this topic below.

If you like longing for someone from afar or otherwise get a kick out of simping for someone who doesn't notice you, consider writing poetic songs. You can sing them in Occitan and be all swoony too!

For those on the fem end of the spectrum, you can be a trobairitz. We don't have a lot of existing records about lady troubadours but there are some.

There's also regular degular troubadouring for the dudely folks. We have a lot more of their songs and histories preserved than compared to trobairitz which is not a surprise, but it's definitely a bummer. I bet they didn't mope around about their fair liege ladies as much as troubadours.

Can Vei La Lauzeta, also known as Quan Vey La Lauzeta, is a very famous song by Bernart de Ventadorn. Two versions are below -- the first in English, the second in Occitan.

What is Occitan, you ask? Well, let me tell you, it's a language much, much more romantic than Latin, that's for sure. The troubadours sang in the language of the people about people, a marked difference from sacred and stuffy Latin masses about God or rough-and-tumble tavern songs (although some of the troubadours wrote pretty raunchy lyrics).

Even Dante dabbled with Occitan which you can learn more about from the below video.

Trobar.org has quite a collection of troubadour music. Some of it is available in English translation, some offer sound samples of the melody, and some you just have to sit back and imagine (or suffer through extremely patchy translation using Google Translate or similar sites). I would literally die of happiness if there was a good translation of Aissi quo - l pres que s'en cuja fugir out there.

I'm not joking about the pining/simping either. These dudes were out there singing shit like this:

D'aquest' amor suy tan cochos Que quant ieu vau ves lieys corren Vejaire m'es qu'a reversos M'en torn e que lieys n'an fugen. E mos cavals i vai tan len e greu cug mais que y atenha, S'ilha no·s vol arretener.

I am so gripped by this love that when I run towards her I feel like I am walking backwards and like she is fleeing from me. And my horse keeps so slow a pace, that I think I'll never reach her unless she wants to wait for me.

All their swooning had a point though -- troubadours brought the concept of courtly love to the forefront. It was a different love than church-sanctified love or familial love, and that was a big innovation for the time. It is likely that these concepts came from Arabic poetry, something that scholars have discussed for many years. Wikipedia frames it as more speculation, but other articles frame it as fact. See Ibn Sina & Courtly Love from a 1952 journal.

Okay I'm tired so I'll conclude now. I hope you learned something new or got a cool new hyperfixation out of my post. <3

 Illuminated opening of the first book of the Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb (The Canon on Medicine) by Ibn Sina. Undated, probably Iran, beginning of 15th century.

First page of the Latin translation of the Canon: Liber Canonis, de Medicinis Cordialibus et Cantica, iam olim quidem a Gerardo Carmonensi ex arabico in latinum conversa

Source: https://muslimheritage.com/ibn-sinas-the-canon-of-medicine/

The Canon of Medicine (Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb) of Abu Ali al-Husayn bin Abdallah Ibn Sina (Avicenna) was a reference for several centuries for physicians in both the Muslim East and the Christian West.

But of course, besides being the best physician of his age, the Iranian Ibn Sina, widely known as al-Sheikh al-Rais (Leader among the wise men), was above all the greatest and the most influential among the falasifah, the Aristotelian-Neoplatonist Muslim philosophers. I think that from this category of thinkers only Al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) could be compared to him; moreover, Ibn Sina's influence was very important even on thinkers who were critical toward aspects of his Peripateticism, like the major "Illuminationist" Iranian philosopher Yahia Suhrawardi.

Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment

Ibn Sina and Biruni were two of the most outstanding thinkers to have lived between ancient Greece and the European Renaissance. These two giants of a lost era of enlightenment were born in Central Asia about the year 980. For six hundred years Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine defined the field of medicine from Europe to India, while his thoughts on God and philosophy influenced Muslims, Jews, and Christians, including St. Thomas Aquinas.