ABSTRACT
The eleventh century saw the rise of Arabic tabulated works on medicine and pharmacology, including texts that became prototypes of tabulated works on medicine and pharmacology across medieval and early modern Eurasia. The appeal of such tabular works, this essay suggests, arose from a particular epistemic stance regarding the ways that experience of nature was studied and recorded. Focusing on three medieval Arabic and Persian works, Ibn Buṭlān’s Taqwīm al-ṣiḥḥa and Ibn Jazla’s Taqwīm al-abdān and Rashīd al-Dīn’s Tanksūqnāma, the essay examines the means by which tabular medical works represented and reproduced medical experience and discusses some of the cognitive practices required for reading such texts. In particular, it suggests that tables and their parameters produced a liminal space between rational reasoning and personal experience, and thus provided a suitable textual bearing for the Galenic idea of “qualified experience.” Through their rubrication and embedded information, tables offered great flexibility in the framing of medical experience, its thematic anchors, and its authorities. They thereby created a suitable space for compilers and readers to produce commensurability across different languages, epistemologies, and practices.
