Averroes in the Catena aurea entium of Henry of Herford

Our analysis of the explicit references to Averroes in the CAE shows that Henry of Herford developed an articulated strategy for assimilating Averroes’ ideas based on the use of a diverse body of sources. What strikes us more is Henry’s interest in Averroes’ medical learning. This is evident in quantitative terms, with a large number of explicit quotations taken from the Colliget (129 quotations) and, to a lesser extent, from the Commentary on Avicenna’s Poem on Medicine (5 quotations). However, it is not just a question of numbers. Henry’s approach to Averroes’ medical thought is far from generic, since he quotes almost only from Book 5 of the Colliget, which deals with pharmacology. Moreover, some quotations indicate that he is familiar with some of the most controversial and innovative points of Averroes’ medical teaching (the scientific status of medicine, the concept of fever, and the operations arising from the substantial form of drugs). Finally, far from merely copying Averroes’ texts, some of the cases we have examined reveal an authorial attitude, with Henry often reworking the original passages, adapting them to the context of the CAE and conflating them with other texts. The second most conspicuous aspect of Henry’s reception of Averroes is the scarcity of direct quotations from philosophical commentaries (6 quotations). Henry seems to be more interested in the way in which some of the natural-philosophical and medical doctrines of Averroes (the nature of the celestial spheres, the internal senses, the asexual generation of animals, the cardiac anatomy and physiology, etc.) were assimilated, looked at, and debated by Latin writers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries rather than in the text of his Aristotelian commentaries. For this reason, he quotes (19 times) those intermediate Latin sources (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Peter of Abano, Nicholas of Strasbourg) that outlined the medieval doctrinal debates shaped by Averroes’ teaching, presenting Averroes’ positions in a dialectic form, contrasting, combining and interweaving them with those of other thinkers.