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Gabriele Ferrario, The Book on Alums and Salts of Pseudo-Rāzī: The Arabic and Hebrew Traditions New York: Routledge, 2024. Pp. 220. ISBN 978-1-032-86940-7. £32.00 (paperback).

Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Gabriele Ferrario's edition and translation of the Arabic and Hebrew versions of the chemical treatise On Alums and Salts is a praiseworthy contribution to history of medieval and early modern science.Composed in Arabic in eleventh-century Iberia, according to Julius Ruska (p.9), the treatise was attributed to the famous Arabophone medical and chemical author Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī (d.925 or 935), apparently by its twelfth-century Latin translator Gerard of Cremona (p. 6).The treatise's recipes and characterizations of chemical materials and operations circulated widely in Western Europe in Latin and Hebrew.Ferrario presents the editio princeps of the unique Hebrew manuscript, alongside a re-edition of the unique Arabic manuscript, previously edited by Ruska, with accompanying English translations.The book will be indispensable for future research on this text.An introduction addresses the text's significance, past scholarship, attribution to al-Rāzī, Arabic and Latin textual traditions, and chemistry (concerned with much more than making gold), plus the Arabic manuscript and, finally, the Hebrew manuscript (tentatively dated to 'the first half of the seventeenth century' -pp.42-5), text and paratexts.Within this last and most significant section, Ferrario offers a fascinating account of the Hebrew translator's many Italian words and phrases, along with Arabic and Latin terms.The meticulous editions and translations themselves follow, with a series of helpful tables and indexes, and an appendix on the Latin manuscripts.Overall, this is an outstanding piece of work.The Arabic edition/translation is generally good (though it could be more literal at times, e.g.§48, p. 93, wa-ghsilhā 'and dip them' > 'and wash them'), with a helpful apparatus.On a first reading, typos are few (e.g.§48, p. 92, line 12, frqqhʾ > frqhʾ = farriqhā), though the transliteration of technical terms could occasionally be improved (p. 67, n. 198 et passim, rāsḫat > rāsuḫt?), and at least one emendation suggests itself (e.g.p. 60, line 4, al-thālithah > al-thābitah?).But Ferrario's re-edition represents a great advance.The Hebrew editio princeps allows non-specialists to encounter this text for the first time.Ferrario is perhaps too quick to presume that transliterated terms in the Hebrew derive from Arabic.This proves crucial for Ferrario's proposed reconstruction of the text's multilingual history.In particular, he tentatively accepts Patai's view (against Steinschneider's) that the Hebrew text derives not from the Latin translation but from Arabic (in a different version from the extant Arabic text) based on 'the very strong presence of Arabic words in Hebrew transliteration' in his new edition of the Hebrew (p.42).But the evidence is less decisive.For example, where the Hebrew reads ʾunqy, Ferrario's translation consistently
DOI: 10.1017/s0007087425000263
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4414217557
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