Serapion the Younger
Serapion the Younger wrote The Book of Simple Medicaments, a medicinal-botany work dated to the 12th or 13th century. He is called “the Younger” to distinguish him from Serapion the Elder (Yahya ibn Sarafyun), an earlier medical writer with whom he was often confused.
The book was probably written in Arabic, but no Arabic copy survives and medieval Arabic writers do not reference it. It was translated into Latin in the late 13th century and became widely circulated among late medieval Latin doctors.
Parts of the Latin text match material from an Arabic work called Kitab al-Adwiya al-Mufrada attributed to Ibn Wafid (died around 1070). The entire Latin version relies heavily on medieval Arabic medical literature and is essentially a compilation, not a work originally written in Latin.
Very little is known about Serapion’s life. The book includes a quote from Ibn Wafid, which gives a latest possible date for its creation, suggesting the 12th century, though some think the 13th century is possible because the full book only shows up in records late.
The name Serapion might indicate a Christian background since “Serapion” is a Greek name, but this identity is unknown and the name could be pseudepigraphic, used to borrow authority from the elder Serapion. The distinction between the Younger and the Elder was added later by scholars, as pseudepigraphy was common in the medieval era.
In the title Simple Medicaments, “simple” means non-compound; the book is aimed at physicians and apothecaries. Its early sections classify substances by their medicinal properties, while the rest is a compendium of individual medicaments drawn from Dioscorides, Galen, and many medieval Arabic writers, with brief comments by Serapion.
A partial Hebrew copy survives. Some scholars, like Lucien Leclerc, have suggested the work might have been written in Hebrew despite its Arabic sources.
In Latin, the book circulated under several titles in the 14th and 15th centuries. A Latin-to-Italian manuscript from 1390–1404, the Carrara Herbal, contains many colored plant illustrations. In the Middle Ages the work was sometimes grouped with the elder Serapion’s writings, as if they were the same person.
After the printing press, Latin editions appeared in 1473 (Milan), 1479 (Venice), 1525 (Lyon), and 1531 (Strasburg), the 1531 edition overseen by the botanist Otto Brunfels. Much of Serapion’s material was recycled in Matthaeus Silvaticus’s encyclopedia (1317), which circulated widely in late medieval Latin literature and early printing.
In the early 16th century, major botany books by Schöffer, Fuchs, Dodoens, and others explicitly drew on Serapion’s work. The primary historical interest lies in how widely read Serapion’s book was in Latin between 1300 and 1550 and how it helped transmit medieval Arabic medicinal knowledge to Europe.
Today, Serapion the Younger’s book is considered inferior to Ibn al-Baitar’s Arabic Book of Simple Medicaments and Foods (from the 1240s), which itself was not translated into Latin during the medieval period.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 01:47 (CET).