ABSTRACT
The categorization of flavors, first attempted during Antiquity by Aristotle and Galen, was completed in the field of Arabic medicine and then transmitted to the Latin West. This chapter asks how the doctrine of flavors developed, examining Aristotle’s De sensu and De anima, Galen’s De simplicibus medicamentibus ac facultatibus, Isaac Israeli’s De diaetis universalibus, and Avicenna’s Canon, all of which were sources for Albert the Great’s thirteenth-century De vegetabilibus. Albert explicitly connects the term sapor with the term experimentum, on the basis of this long medical and philosophical tradition: flavor is the surest path to an experimentum—experience or experiment—of plants and their virtues. Flavors here are not regarded as simple sensible perceptions, but as signs of the temperament or complexio of the object in which they are tasted. In this respect, flavors were an epistemological instrument for medical research.
