The Literature of Hebrew Medical Synonyms: Romance and Latin Terms and their Identification

This paper surveys several medico-botanical synonym lists that have not been described adequately in the bibliographical literature so far. We pay special attention to their vernacular component, addressing the problem of identifying the languages involved, which—aside from Latin—are different varieties of Romance. In much of the existing literature and many catalogues, the specific Romance language is usually either not identified or misidentified. Notably, the vernacular is often said to be Spanish or Italian, ignoring other languages like Occitan and Catalan. We show that the latter two languages are particularly frequent in this genre of multilingual medico-botanical synonym lists.