De l’écume au sperme : Hypothèses médiévales sur l’ambre de baleine

• Main Author: Buquet, Thierry
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: French
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: médecine; baleine; ambre gris; cachalot; histoire naturelle; transmission des savoirs; medicine; whale; Ambergris; knowledge transmission; natural history; sperm whale; hist; relig; Baleine; Sperm whale
• Online Access: http://www.cairn.info/article.php?ID_ARTICLE=MEDIE_080_0099

The origin of ambergris has been debated for a long time, from the Middle Ages to modern times. The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of Arabic scholarship on knowledge about ambergris in the medieval West, particularly as transmitted by the medical literature produced in the Salerno school of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Persian and Arabic texts written from the ninth century CE included many hypotheses on the origin of this substance: it was seen as a bitumen, a plant, some kind of solidified sea foam or the excrement of a sea animal; in fact, in each of these cases, the actual process of its transformation was not fully understood (it was not before the eighteenth century). In the Latin world, these explanations were spread by various translations of medical literature, as ambergris was used in perfumes and in medication. Beginning in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a new conjecture spread in Europe, without any reference to Arabic sources, describing ambergris as the sperm of the whale. Here we try to understand the origin of this legend, in relation to medieval knowledge on organic matters extracted from whales (spermaceti, oil), and possibly linked to other hypotheses mentioned by Arabic authors. L’origine de l’ambre de baleine (ambre gris) a longtemps été débattue, du Moyen Âge jusqu’à l’époque moderne. Le propos de cet article est d’étudier l’influence des savoirs arabes sur la connaissance de l’ambre dans l’Occident médiéval, notamment à travers les traductions des xiie et xiiie siècles de l’arabe vers le latin – des savoirs principalement transmis par la littérature médicale issue de l’école de Salerne. Dans les textes arabo-persans, depuis le ixe siècle de notre ère, plusieurs hypothèses sur l’origine de cette matière se concurrencent : elle est présentée comme un bitume, un végétal, de l’écume de mer solidifiée ou l’excrément d’un animal marin, mais sans que le processus réel de sa transformation ne soit réellement compris (il ne le sera qu’au xviiie siècle). En ...