From the Treatise to the Stable – Care and Cure of Horses in XIII Century Italy: an Example from Perugia.

Animals are a multifaced subject of historical investigation. In medieval history, however, this topic has long been addressed essentially from a cultural perspective: until recently, animals have mainly been studied in iconography, literature and bestiaries (i.e. from a symbolic point of view). ‘Real’ animals and their agency have only recently gained a rightful place in Environmental History, in what has been called an “animal turn”. Of all creatures, horses are, for obvious reasons, amongst the better documented ones and therefore possess a prominent place in the existing literature. If, at first, military history has reasonably been the main field for medieval horse studies to thrive, broader perspectives are now being adopted. Equine veterinary medicine, for example, is particularly promising for its intersections of science, medicine, and culture. This paper looks at one particular text of equine veterinary medicine that cuts across these intersections particularly well. Jordanus Ruffus’s De Medicina Equorum (1250-60 ca.), written at the court of Emperor Frederick II in Southern Italy, is considered the earliest known work on ‘actual’ veterinary medicine. Ruffus’s treatise has been previously studied for its innovative ‘scientific’ approach, its immediate fortune all over Europe, and its influence as indisputable auctoritas until at least the XVI century. However, the work has never been linked to contemporary written evidence of practical, daily-life use. In this regard, at the Archive of the Commune of Perugia, relevant evidence exists in registers dating between 1276 and 1292. This paper argues that the same hippiatric expertise can be found in Ruffus’s De Medicina Equorum and in the archival documents of Perugia. A shared specific knowledge in these two, complimentary primary sources, sheds new light on both the understanding of practical horse veterinary and on the circulation of specialist knowledge in the Italian Peninsula at the end of XIII century.