Resumen de The Nachlässe of Arnau de Vilanova
A variety of evidence indicates that at his death in 1311 Arnau de Vilanova left copies or drafts of his medical writings among his papers in the various centers where he had lived and worked. Many of them had never circulated in his lifetime, and are still unpublished. The detailed inventory of his possessions in Valencia (his early home) made in 1318 demonstrates this directly. There is strong indirect evidence that the same was true in Montpellier, where he had lived and taught for so long: the authenticity of unique copies of works ascribed to him and found together in a Munich manuscript is confi rmed by his own citations of them in well-known works or by their thematic and verbal overlap with others of his genuine writings, which suggests that they descend from papers found in Montpellier by his executors. Evidence of another sort from a Paris manuscript indicates that some of its contents descend from Arnau's personal copies of some of his known works, discovered at Montpellier after his death and recopied by admirers. Comparable arguments are used to propose that still other texts on which he had begun to work in Sicily in 1310-1311 were inherited by his surgeon-nephew Joan Blasi in Naples and thence passed, still incomplete, into European circulation. Recognizing how chance has in this way brought about the survival of so many genuinely Arnaldian writings implies that the rarity of a text ascribed to him is by itself no good argument against its authenticity.
