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.The medical writers thus bring into focus several issues that haverun through the earlier chapters of this study, such as the relationshipbetween learned discussions of magic and popular practices, ideas about thedefinition and legitimacy of magical cures, and theories about how magicworked.Their views of these subjects often differ in interesting ways fromthose offered by writers in other genres, giving us a fuller perspective onattitudes to magically-caused impotence and its cures in the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries.Medical discussions of magically-caused impotence were always sporadiccompared with those in canon law and theology, because the physicians didnot comment on a set textbook which included it in the same way as thecanonists and theologians did.Indeed, perhaps the most influential medi-cal textbook of the period, the Canon of Medicine by the tenth-centuryArab physician Avicenna, which was translated into Latin in the twelfthcentury, explained impotence without referring to magic at all.¹ A numberof later medical writers similarly offered purely non-magical explanationsfor impotence, including Constantine the African in his treatise De Coituand William of Saliceto, a thirteenth-century surgeon and physician.²¹ Avicenna, Liber Canonis (Venice, 1507, repr.Hildesheim: G.Olms, 1964), bk.3, fen.20,ch.15.² Constantini Liber de Coitu, ed.Enrique Montero Cartelle (Santiago de Compostela:Universidad de Santiago, 1983); Gulielmus de Saliceto, Summa Conservationis et Curationis(Venice, 1489), ch.156. Medicine, 1240 1400 161However, the first explicit references to the chapter on magically-causedimpotence in the Pantegni of Constantine the African appear in the midthirteenth century, and from this time onwards a small but steady streamof medical writers did discuss the subject.Most of these discussions of magically-caused impotence occurred in aparticular genre of medical writing, the practicae or medical compendia,large works that discussed the treatment of individual illnesses, rather thanthe general principles of medicine.³ The second half of the Pantegni ofConstantine the African, known as the Practica , is an early example, butthe compendia appear in larger numbers from the mid thirteenth centuryonwards.Although compendia were written by university-educatedauthors and contain medical theory as well as recipes for cures, they can beseen as intermediaries between academic medicine and medical practice.tTheir authors were sometimes willing to quote remedies that were used bynon-learned practitioners; and equally, some compendia were translatedinto vernacular languages or had their prescriptions incorporated intorecipe collections, and so reached a wider audience.u The presence ofmagically-caused impotence in these texts, with their emphasis on practiceand individual cases, rather than in more theoretical works, suggests thatthe physicians believed that it was an illness that their readers mightencounter in the world around them.In taking impotence magic seriouslyas a problem that existed outside the universities, the physicians sharedthe approach of many contemporary theologians, canonists, and pastoralwriters, even though they disagreed with these writers on many otherpoints.A few medical writers also discussed magically-caused impotence inother contexts.In the years around 1300, Arnold of Villanova and Peterof Abano mentioned the subject when they discussed the influence ofthe stars on the physical world.There also existed a separate treatise onthe causes of and cures for magically-caused impotence, which began tocirculate some time after the late thirteenth century, sometimes under³ Luke Demaitre, Scholasticism in Compendia of Practical Medicine , Manuscripta 20(1976), 82.t Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, Edocere Medicos: Medicina scolastica nei secoliXIII XV (Naples: Guerini e associati, 1988), 167; Demaitre, Scholasticism , 83 5.u Tony Hunt, Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Brewer,1990), 26; Faye Getz, Healing and Society in Medieval England (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1991), p.xv. 162 Medicine, 1240 1400the title Remedies Against Magic.This was based on the Pantegni ofConstantine the African, but some manuscripts also include recipes fromlater medical compendia, and from other unknown sources.The changesmade by successive copyists, and the manuscript contexts in which thetext is found, can tell us about how magically-caused impotence and itscures were seen over several centuries.This chapter is divided into four sections.The first focuses on thesources of the medical discussions of magically-caused impotence which,as in other genres, included both written texts and the authors ownobservations.The second section will focus on what the medical writerssay about an issue which interested many writers about magically-causedimpotence in all disciplines: the definition and legitimacy of magicalcures.The third section will also focus on the relationship between magicand medicine, but will look at the works of Arnold of Villanova andPeter of Abano, who both offered alternative explanations for the kind ofimpotence that most medical writers blamed on maleficium.In the fourthsection I will discuss the treatise Remedies Against Magic separately, as acase study that brings these themes together, looking particularly at whatthis text says about the relationship between magic and medicine and therelationship between written sources and medical practice.THE PHYSICIANS AND THEIR SOURCESThe first thirteenth-century medical writer to discuss magically-causedimpotence in detail is a shadowy figure.Gilbertus Anglicusv was probablyphysician to King John of England in 1207.It is not clear whether he everstudied or taught medicine in a university, but he probably wrote hismedical compendium, the Compendium of Medicine, in around 1240.When he discussed impotence, Gilbertus began with its causes,w startingwith physical problems such as defects in various organs, or an excess ofhot or cold humours.At the end of this section, he suggested (in a phraseborrowed from the twelfth-century writer Roger de Barone) that if therev See Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1998), 39 42.w Gilbertus Anglicus, Compendium Medicine (Lyons, 1510), bk.7, De Approximeron,282r 6r. Medicine, 1240 1400 163were no signs of a physical problem, then the impotence might be causedby maleficium
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