Warburg Institute Colloquia- Pseudo-Galenica The Formation of the Galenic Corpus from Antiquity to the Renaissance

The works of Galen of Pergamum (c. 129-216 CE) were fundamental in the shaping of medicine, philosophy, and neighboring areas of knowledge from antiquity through to the middle ages and early modern times, across a variety of languages and cultures. Yet as early as Galen&;s own lifetime, spurious treatises crept into the body of his authentic works, despite his best efforts to provide the public with a catalogue of his own production (De libris propriis). For centuries, readers and scholars have used a fluid body of Galenic works, shaped by changing intellectual frameworks and social-cultural contexts. Several inauthentic works have enjoyed remarkable popularity, but this has had consequences in modern scholarship. The current reference edition of Galenic works (Kühn, 1821-1833) fails to distinguish clearly between authentic and inauthentic texts, and many works lack any critical study, which makes navigating the corpus unusually difficult. This new volume, arising from a conference held in 2015 at the Warburg Institute at the University of London and funded by the Wellcome Trust, will provide much-needed clarification about the boundaries of the Galenic corpus, identifying and analyzing the works that do not genuinely belong to Galen&;s production.