ABSTRACT
In this essay I have prepared a brief survey of authors who versied Constantine’s Liber graduum, with some examples of their poems compared with their prose source. I have included as an appendix a catalogue of all the poems I have found so far which are based on the Liber graduum. I hope this will be of use both to scholars of Constantine the African in tracing his inuence and to scholars of medieval verse when approached with that odd chimera of the times, the medical poem. As will become clear, these poet-physicians variously supplemented and glossed Constantine’s text as they saw t, as oen as they confused, simplied, replaced, or removed some of his more technical descriptions of maladies and remedies. e nal poems, while still in essence based on the Liber graduum, oered in some cases medical texts diering signicantly from Constantine’s original meaning, sometimes improving on the original and sometimes clearly failing in their attempt to improve on the master. Before I approach the individual poems directly, a few comments on the genre of medical verse are needed.
