Couleurs des urines et plantes tinctoriales dans le De Urinis Theophili
Résumé
The aim of this article is to draw the attention of scholars of ancient medicine to the need to
take account of the works of humanists in interpreting and editing medical treatises. In fact,
humanists, especially those who had studied medicine and botany in the Italian universities,
had acquired both a theoretical knowledge of ancient writings on medicine and a practical expertise in botany that allowed them to identify the plants mentioned in the major ancient sources such as Dioscorides, Theophrastus, Pliny and to understand their lexical uses in the byzantine treatises on Uroscopy. Such is the case for the word chyménè, completely misunderstood today, as I have established from my study of the De urinis of Theophilus Protospatharius VII-IXe siècle). That word, though still obscure for the first translators of the urins’s treatises, such as Ambrogio Leone (1519), was then correctly interpreted by the humanists Onorio Belli (1593), and later Claude Saumaise (1629) and Bodaeus A Stapel (1644) who also give us to understand, for the first time, that the Latin version ofTheophilus’s treatise on Urins had been contaminated in the course of the centuries.