Il Necessario di Samuel Esperel trascritto da Yosef Catelan: Edizione e commento linguistico del codice Vat. ebr. 372

The aim of this thesis is analysing a group of texts in Portuguese language and Hebrew script, considering the broader spectrum of the medieval Portuguese corpus in Hebrew characters. These texts are included in the Vat ebr. 372 codex, a fifteenth-century manuscript of Portuguese origin belonging to the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. The codex is composed by three parts: two in Hebrew script and and one in Latin characters. The three of them are related to medical issues. In the first part of the manuscript there is the transcription of the Necessario, a medical-surgical treatise attributed to the Cordovan physician Samuel Esperel and addressed to David surgeon of Jaen. The text was transcribed in Portuguese by the physician Yosef Catelan for personal use. The Necessario does not give a great scientific contribution since it contains theories and practices rather known at that time, that reflect the teachings of the great masters of medicine. Some of these authors are mentioned, like Galen, Avicenna, Abulcassis, Ugo and Teodorico de’ Borgognoni. The biographical information about the author are scarce. However it is assumed that this physician was well known and appreciated in the medieval scientific environment, especially in the Jewish context, since some of his recipes are also found in the final part of another codex: the ms. 14 FA of the Municipal Library of Porto. In this thesis will be transcribed also these recipes, both in Hebrew and Latin characters, with the aim of providing a larger number of documents recording the work of Samuel Esperel as a physician and scholar. The second part of the manuscript contains a recipe book transcribed by the same Yosef Catelan for personal use. In this section are quoted again Avicenna and Teodorico de’ Borgognoni, but there are references also to Lanfranco of Milan and Demostene Filalete. There are clear references that show the authorship of some recipes: these physicians are Guy de Chauliac and Isaac Israelite, also known as Isaac Iudaeus. In order to acquire a wider perspective concerning the corpus, the Necessario will be compared to other two texts: the Livro de como se fazen as cores and Libro de Magica, both from the fifteenth century, in archaic Portuguese and Hebrew characters. A linguistic analysis will be carried out, with the aim of studying the diatopic and diachronic variants of these texts, pointing out the the aspects of contact and divergence. The analysis of the texts included in the Vat. ebr. 372 allows to reflect on the complex situation concerning the Portuguese language in XV century: a highly unstable language that is undergoing continuous changes, both phonological and graphic.