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translations introduced a renewed medical corpus to the Latin West, creat-
ing a flow of ideas that had a decisive influence on intellectual thought and
science in Europe.4 Consequently, interaction with this new information
stimulated the production of additional medical writings, both practical
and theoretical, which drew upon the translated canonical works. One
of the notable figures of the translation movement was Constantine the
African (d. before 1099), who was associated with the medical school in
Salerno, Italy, which soon became one of the most important sources of
medical knowledge in Europe.5 Constantine’s translations were copied
and circulated in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, both as separate
treatises and as parts of compilations of medical texts. One of the “medi-
cal bestsellers” of the long twelfth century, Monica Green concludes, was
Constantine’s Latin translation of an Arabic text, De gradibus (On the
Degrees of Medicines), by the Tunisian physician Ibn al-Jazzar.6 Marius
Kristensen has shown that De gradibus was transmitted to Scandinavia
through the Danish translations and adaptations of the physician Henrik
Harpestræng (d. 1244).7 Some of Harpestræng’s herbal pharmacology was
subsequently translated into Old Norse, of which the two-leaved fragment
4 Literature on the translation movement and the transformation of Europe in the long
twelfth century is ubiquitous; see, e.g., Thomas F. X. Noble and John Van Engen, eds.,
European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2012); Johann P. Arnason and Björn Wittrock, eds., Eurasian Transformations,
Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances (Leiden: Brill,
2004).
5 On Constantine, see Charles Burnett and Danielle Jacquart, eds., Constantine the African
and ʻAlī ibn al-ʻAbbās al-Mağūsi ̄: The Pantegni and Related Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1994). A
recommended introductory reading on medieval medicine is by Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval
and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990).
6 Monica H. Green, “Medical Books,” in The European Book in the Twelfth Century, ed. Erik
Kwakkel and Rodney Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 281.
7 Marius Kristensen, ed., Harpestræng: Gamle danske urtebøger, stenbøger og kogebøger, ud-
givne for Universitets-jubilæets samfund (Copenhagen: Thieles, 1908–1920), xi, xxii.
Harpestræng’s work survives in two main manuscripts, both from c. 1300; NKS 66 8vo
(Copenhagen, Royal Library) and K 48 (Stockholm, National Library), published by
Marius Kristensen in ibid. A table showing the corresponding chapters and examples
can be found in ibid., xix–xxii. Harpestræng is thought to have been the canon of
Roskilde and a royal Danish physician, who possibly studied or worked in Orléans. Among
Harpestræng’s other identified main sources was the widely read Latin medical poem De
viribus herbarum, written under the pseudonym Macer.