Antonio de Tornay ( fl . 1483–1493),physician to the Duke of Brittany,the Duke of Alba,and the city of Vitoria

Abstract

Antonio de Tornay has been a subject of study in the last decade, in particular his medical work designed to treat the ailments of García Álvarez de Toledo, 1st Duke of Alba. Of the series of texts written for this purpose, the one named Opúsculo de cozinas stands out. It is an ambitious project that completes a consilium and a regimen sanitatis written previously for the same figure. The brief treatise was originally divided into five parts, but only the first one, on the subject of different types of meat, survives. It includes a brief section on the way to carve meat in the French style. The objective of this study is to reconstruct the intellectual figure of Tornay and analyse his work from a medical and a historical perspective. These texts, far from anecdotal, exemplify some fundamental types of Hippocratic-Galenic medicine in the vernacular, aimed at treating specific ailments by adapting them to the needs of the courtly elites.