The Figures

Arnau de Vilanova (Arnald of Villanova)

Arnau de Vilanova (in English often Arnald of Villanova; in Latin, Arnaldus de Villanova; in Spanish, Arnaldo de Vilanova; c. 1240-1311) was a physician who studied and taught at Montpellier and served the kings of Aragon and the popes. From the fourteenth century onwards some twenty alchemical treatises circulated under his name, and because of them tradition placed him beside Hermes among the great masters of the art. Specialists now agree that the alchemical activity attributed to him is false (Arnau DB, “A false alchemist”). This profile separates three things: what he wrote, what was attributed to him and what was told about him.

Who was Arnau de Vilanova? The documented physician

Arnau de Vilanova was a physician who studied and taught at Montpellier, served Peter III and James II of Aragon and Popes Boniface VIII and Clement V, and died during a sea voyage in 1311. The timeline of the digital corpus of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Arnau DB) has him born around 1240, probably in Valencia, a city to which many documents tie him. Valencia, Catalonia, Languedoc and Provence claimed him as their son for centuries, and a later source has him born in Villanueva de Jiloca, in Aragon, a report that Juan Antonio Paniagua, in the Diccionario Biográfico Español, considers credible. There is no consensus (Arnau DB, “His origins”; DBE). He studied medicine at Montpellier around 1260-1270. From 1281 he was physician to Peter III of Aragon and, in Barcelona, he studied with Ramon Martí. In 1282, in Barcelona, he translated Galen’s treatise De rigore et tremore et iectigatione et spasmo from Arabic into Latin. Before that, probably in the 1270s and perhaps in Valencia, he had translated into Latin the treatise on simple medicines by Abu-l-Salt (Albuzale), an Arab polymath born in Denia (Arnau DB, “Translations and rewrites”; critical edition in AVOMO XVII).

Around 1290-1300 he taught medicine at Montpellier; in 1297 he became physician to James II. In 1299-1300 he argued with the theologians of Paris over whether it was possible to know when the Antichrist and the end of the world would come. In 1301, at Anagni, Boniface VIII asked him not to write on theology, although the pope was satisfied with his medical care; in 1309 Clement V, whose physician he also was, reformed medical studies at Montpellier on his advice. He died in 1311 during a sea voyage, off the coast of Genoa, and in 1316 a sentence issued in Tarragona condemned several theses from his spiritual writings (Arnau DB, “Timeline”).

What did Arnau de Vilanova actually write?

Arnau’s authentic writings are on medicine and theology, and both have critical editions. The Arnaldi de Villanova Opera Medica Omnia (AVOMO) have been published in Barcelona since 1975, the year in which M. R. McVaugh edited the Aphorismi de gradibus; other volumes include the Regimen sanitatis ad regem Aragonum (1996) and his two translations from Arabic. The Opera Theologica Omnia (AVOThO) collect his theological writings (Arnau DB, “Basic bibliography”). One volume of the medical series contradicts one of the legends about him: volume VII.1, edited by Sebastià Giralt in 2005, is the Epistola de reprobacione nigromantice ficcionis, a full-scale attack on the intellectual foundations of necromancy. He did, however, recommend placing astrological seals on the painful part of the body, as he did for the stone that afflicted Boniface VIII, on the basis of melothesia, the doctrine that assigns each part of the body to a sign of the zodiac; but such remedies played a very minor role in a medicine based on diet and compound medicines (Arnau DB, “Natural magic and astrology”). If you have come here from the Picatrix, you will not find a manual of astral magic in Arnau, and we have no evidence that he read that book.

What was Arnau de Vilanova’s medical doctrine?

Arnau was a Galenist physician: in that tradition most diseases arise from an imbalance of the four humours, and the physician must restore the balance, first through the regimen of life, then with medicines and only as a last resort with surgery. The humours themselves arise in the body from four qualities (hot, cold, dry and moist). According to the Arnau DB, he was the main architect at Montpellier of the renewal brought about by works of Galen and of Arab Galenism previously unknown in the West, the so-called “new Galen” (Arnau DB, “Galenism”). His most original contribution is the Aphorismi de gradibus, written between 1295 and 1300, on the degrees of medicines, that is, the intensity of their qualities, and on how their components interact. Against Averroes, Arnau defended al-Kindi’s mathematical method as the authentic interpretation of Galen: to obtain from simples a compound of a given degree, the proportion between hot and cold grows geometrically while the degree increases arithmetically. The aphorisms remained in use at Montpellier for fifty years (Arnau DB, “Aphorisms”).

Two works show the two ends of that medicine. The Regimen sanitatis ad regem Aragonum (1305-1308 according to the Arnau DB; the DBE places it in the summer of 1308) is a regimen of life for James II, adjusted to his complexion: where to set up the court, exercise, bathing, food, drink, sleep and the emotions, with a chapter on the haemorrhoids the king suffered from. Its plain style made it his most widely circulated text: Queen Blanca had it translated into Catalan, and there were medieval Hebrew versions and a Spanish one at the beginning of the seventeenth century (Arnau DB, “Practical medicine”; DBE). The Speculum medicinae (c. 1308), by contrast, closes his career as a medical author: it follows the order of the Isagoge of Johannitius, an introductory manual used in teaching, and offers a systematic synthesis of Galenist theory, from the elements of the body and the external factors that affect it to health and disease, the signs used in diagnosis, an extensive pharmacology and the influence of the emotions (Arnau DB, “Theoretical medicine and natural philosophy”); its critical edition is volume XIII of the AVOMO, by M. R. McVaugh. In the DBE, Paniagua calls him a “scholastic physician”, a man of the university school of medicine, and urges readers to drop the image of the itinerant healer built on apocryphal writings such as the Breviarium practice or the Thesaurus pauperum. It is the same attribution problem that his alchemy raises on a larger scale.

Which alchemical works carry his name?

About twenty alchemical treatises carry Arnau’s name, led by the Rosarius philosophorum, and they form one of the two largest medieval alchemical corpora; the other is the one attributed, also falsely, to Ramon Llull (Arnau DB, “Was Arnau de Vilanova an alchemist?”). Antoine Calvet, who edited the main ones in 2011, counts twenty titles (Arnau DB, “The pseudo-Arnaldian alchemical corpus”). The central one is the Rosarius philosophorum: it teaches that the elixir can only be reached by imitating nature, that is, by going back to the mercury-and-sulphur basis of the metals, and that it serves both to transmute base metals into noble ones and to preserve health, as a universal medicine. Others are the Flos florum, which circulated in several versions (one of them the Semita semitae), an Epistola on alchemy addressed to King Robert of Naples and the De secretis naturae, a dialogue in which the master explains the Work by comparing it to the death and resurrection of Christ. A good part of the corpus deals with medicine (Arnau DB), and that helps explain why it became attached to the name of a physician.

The Arnau DB gives five reasons for denying him authorship: in his medical works alchemy appears only superficially; no text of his time and no inventory of his books made after his death mentions any alchemical work; the style and the method are different; the manuscripts of his medical works and those of the alchemical treatises form separate traditions; and the study of how each treatise was transmitted has gradually shown it to be apocryphal (Arnau DB, “A false alchemist”). Print cemented the attribution: the first edition of his Opera (Lyon, 1504) already includes the Rosarius, the Flos florum and the Epistola to the King of Naples (MedCat, entry for the edition), and between 1504 and 1586 there were eight general editions with more than sixty works (Arnau DB, “Arnau in the early modern press”). For the Rosarius alone, MedCat records 25 complete manuscript copies, 3 fragments and 20 printed editions between 1504 and 1748.

The table lists the witnesses we were able to check in the catalogues. Where we could not verify a digital copy or its licence, we say so.

Is the Rosarius the same book as the Rosarium?

No: they are two different books with almost the same title, and they are easily confused. The Rosarius philosophorum attributed to Arnau begins “Iste namque liber” and was already circulating in the alchemical tradition of the fourteenth century (G. Camilli, 1995). The Rosarium philosophorum is a different work: a florilegium of quotations from alchemical authorities, printed in Frankfurt in 1550 as the second part of the volume described in the table, with the series of woodcuts of the king and queen who unite, die and are reborn; in 1946 Carl Gustav Jung took those woodcuts as the basis of The Psychology of the Transference, a reading that belongs to modern reception (see The Great Work). In that volume, the Arnaldian tradition is in the first part, with the Semita semitae. A Spanish edition circulates under the title El rosario de los filósofos: Rosarium Arnaldi (Índigo, ISBN 84-89768-06-4); if you use it, check which of the two texts it translates, because the details of the record we consulted do not make it clear.

Why were the alchemical treatises attributed to him?

Historians do not agree on why the treatises were attributed to him; the explanations on offer range from his pharmacology and his prophecies to confusion with a namesake. That the corpus is not his is hardly disputed any more; the question is why it ended up under his name. Calvet and the historian Michela Pereira pointed to several clues: his pharmacological research, his prophecies about the end of time, the central place of Christ in his spiritual writings, his reputation as a necromancer and the possible alchemical activity of people around him. José Rodríguez Guerrero proposes another explanation: confusion with an Occitan of almost identical name, Perarnau or Pedro Arnaldo de Vilanova, a physician, surgeon and alchemist of the first half of the fourteenth century, who would have written the first core of the corpus (Arnau DB, “A false alchemist”; Azogue 9). There is no consensus on this hypothesis.

The underlying issue is more general. Alchemy took cover again and again behind great names: the mythical Hermes Trismegistus, Aristotle, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Ramon Llull and Arnau too (Arnau DB, “A false alchemist”). The Rosarius abbreviatus in the table shows it in miniature: the same short text appears in the manuscripts under three different authors. It is a device similar, though not identical, to the one that gave ancient authority to the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, written in Greek in Roman Egypt and placed under the name of Hermes, and it can already be seen in Greek alchemy: Zosimos of Panopolis, the first alchemist we know as a real, datable author, preserves quotations from authors writing under borrowed names, such as Pseudo-Democritus. The difference is that Hermes was a legendary figure and Arnau a real physician, almost a contemporary of the treatises attributed to him, and that, if the namesake hypothesis is right, in his case there was also a confusion of names. The case of Nicolas Flamel, a Paris scrivener who died in 1418, is even more extreme: no work of his survives, and the alchemist of legend comes from an anonymous manuscript of the late fifteenth century and a book printed in 1612.

Where does Arnau de Vilanova meet Hermes?

Arnau meets Hermes only in later reception: the link runs not through the historical physician but through the texts attributed to him and the people who read them. One of the clearest witnesses is English. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written at the end of the fourteenth century, the Canon’s Yeoman cites Arnau and, a few lines later, Hermes:

Lo, thus seith Arnold of the Newe Toun,
As his Rosarie maketh mencioun; [...]
How that he, which that first seyde this thing,
Of philosophres fader was, Hermes;

“Lo, thus says Arnold of the New Town, / as his Rosary makes mention; [...] / how he who first said this thing / was father of philosophers, Hermes;”

(Chaucer, G 1428-1429 and 1433-1434, ed. Skeat, 1900, checked against the Project Gutenberg text; the modern English rendering is ours.) Edgar H. Duncan argued in 1977 that the source of line 1431 is not the Rosarius that Chaucer names but the De secretis naturae, also from the pseudo-Arnaldian corpus, which quotes Hermes Trismegistus; Lindy Brady and Andrew Rabin returned to the question in 2018. On that reading, a text falsely attributed to Arnau quotes Hermes, and Chaucer puts the whole of it in Arnau’s mouth.

The association can also be seen in a miniature in Thomas Norton’s Ordinall of Alchemy (the poem dates from 1477; the British Library dates the manuscript, Add. MS 10302, to about 1480-1490), which shows the four great alchemists, Geber, Arnau, Rhazes and Hermes; in 1652 Elias Ashmole reproduced it in an engraving. In the Renaissance, readers such as Marsilio Ficino and Cornelius Agrippa were drawn to the esoteric and empirical side of part of the Arnaldian corpus, and in the second half of the sixteenth century the presses of Basel relaunched the alchemical corpus together with Paracelsianism; Paracelsus himself had been influenced by the Arnaldian writings (Arnau DB, “Arnau in the early modern press”). What cannot be claimed is that Arnau read Hermetic texts: we know of no source that shows it. In his time the Asclepius circulated in Latin, but we have found no passage in which he cites it, and the Corpus Hermeticum had no Latin translation until Ficino’s, in 1463, a century and a half after his death. The Emerald Tablet was also already circulating in Latin, having arrived from Arabic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it would become the founding text of Western alchemy; we know of no source that connects it with Arnau either.

What are the myths about Arnau de Vilanova, and where do they come from?

The stories about Arnau, from gold-making to the homunculus, come from later writers and from texts that are not his; the one charge he heard in his lifetime, necromancy, he denied himself. The gold. In the mid-fourteenth century the canonist Giovanni d’Andrea claimed that Arnau had made rods of gold. Llull’s master. According to the legend, Llull turned to alchemy after meeting Arnau; a miniature of the second half of the fifteenth century, in a pseudo-Lullian manuscript in Florence (BNC, ms. B.R. 52, f. 237v), shows them as disciple and master. The homunculus. The theologian Alonso de Madrigal, known as el Tostado (d. 1455), tells how Arnau created an artificial human being in a vessel and did not dare to complete it for fear of being taken for a usurper of God’s power. The history of that figure, from the recipe attributed to Paracelsus to Goethe’s Faust, is told in The alchemical homunculus. The necromancer. His reputation as a necromancer and sorcerer dogged him in his lifetime: he denied it himself in the Raonament d’Avinyó (1310), and the records of the 1319 trial of Bernat Deliciós contain the suspicion that Arnau had been an accomplice in the alleged poisoning of Benedict XI by Deliciós himself, although the pope had died of natural causes in 1304 (all according to Arnau DB, “The myth of Arnau de Vilanova”). His treatise against necromancy, mentioned above, points the other way. Brandy. The texts on alcohol and wine that circulate under his name are not securely his either: the De aqua vitae simplici et composita, on the medical uses of alcohol, belongs to the pseudo-Arnaldian corpus, and the De vinis is among his probably apocryphal writings (Arnau DB, “The pseudo-Arnaldian alchemical corpus” and “Dubious writings”).

How should you read Arnau de Vilanova?

Read him in three layers, in order, and keep them apart. The fact: a well-documented physician and theologian who wrote against necromancy and whose work has critical editions. The debate: why someone else’s alchemical corpus ended up under his name, and whether a namesake lay behind it. The reception: Arnau the alchemist, Llull’s master and Hermes’s companion, born of manuscripts, printers and readers from the fourteenth century onwards. All three are history; only the first is biography. Before you quote a treatise “by Arnald of Villanova”, look it up in the MedCat entries and in Calvet’s edition, and give it the same test as any ancient attribution.

Key facts

Name	Arnau de Vilanova (Catalan); Arnaldus de Villanova (Latin); Arnaldo de Vilanova (Spanish); Arnald of Villanova (English)
Born	c. 1240, probably in Valencia (Arnau DB); a later source has him born in Villanueva de Jiloca (Aragon)
Died	1311, during a sea voyage, off the coast of Genoa
Occupation	Physician and professor at Montpellier; physician to Peter III and James II of Aragon and to Popes Boniface VIII and Clement V
Authentic work	Medicine (Opera Medica Omnia, since 1975) and theology (Opera Theologica Omnia)
Alchemical corpus	About twenty attributed treatises; according to current research, none is his
Edition of the alchemical corpus	Antoine Calvet, 2011: only the main treatises (Textes et travaux de Chrysopœia, 11)

Fair questions

Who was Arnau de Vilanova and what did he do?

A physician born around 1240 who died in 1311. He studied and taught at Montpellier, translated medical works from Arabic, attended Peter III and James II of Aragon and Popes Boniface VIII and Clement V, and also wrote theology and prophecy, which brought him into conflict with the theologians of Paris. His authentic work has been published in critical editions since 1975.

Was Arnald of Villanova an alchemist?

No, according to current research. Some twenty alchemical treatises were attributed to him, but no text of his time and no inventory of his books mentions any alchemical work, and the style and the manuscripts of those treatises differ from those of his authentic works. What is still debated is why they were attributed to him.

Was Arnau de Vilanova a necromancer?

He had that reputation in his lifetime and denied it in 1310, in the Raonament d’Avinyó. He also wrote a treatise against necromancy, the Epistola de reprobacione nigromantice ficcionis, published in 2005 in the critical edition of his medical works.

Did Arnau de Vilanova write the Rosarium philosophorum?

No. The Rosarium philosophorum is a florilegium printed in Frankfurt in 1550, the one with the woodcuts that Jung used. A different text circulated under Arnau’s name, the Rosarius philosophorum (the one that begins with the words “Iste namque liber”), and according to current research it is not his either.

What is his connection with Hermes Trismegistus?

No direct one: we know of no evidence that he read Hermetic texts. The connection comes from reception. A treatise falsely attributed to him quotes Hermes, Chaucer names the two together at the end of the fourteenth century, and an English miniature of about 1480-1490 depicts them among the four great alchemists.

Sources & further reading

• Arnau DB, digital corpus of Arnau de Vilanova (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), pages “His origins”, “Timeline”, “Translations and rewrites”, “Galenism”, “Aphorisms”, “Theoretical medicine and natural philosophy”, “Practical medicine”, “Was Arnau de Vilanova an alchemist?”, “A false alchemist”, “The pseudo-Arnaldian alchemical corpus”, “The myth of Arnau de Vilanova”, “Natural magic and astrology”, “Dubious writings”, “Arnau in the early modern press” and “Basic bibliography”: webs.uab.cat/arnau/en/ (Spanish version consulted on 29 October 2026, English version on 12 November 2026; CC BY-NC-ND licence).
• Juan Antonio Paniagua Arellano, “Arnau de Vilanova”, in Diccionario Biográfico Español (Real Academia de la Historia), online version in Historia Hispánica (in Spanish): historia-hispanica.rah.es/biografias/44963-arnau-de-vilanova (consulted on 29 October 2026).
• Arnaldi de Villanova Opera Medica Omnia (Barcelona, 1975-), in particular vol. II, Aphorismi de gradibus, ed. M. R. McVaugh (1975), vol. X.1, Regimen sanitatis ad regem Aragonum, ed. L. García-Ballester, M. R. McVaugh and P. Gil-Sotres (1996); vol. XIII, Speculum medicine, ed. M. R. McVaugh; vol. XVII, Translatio libri Albuzale de medicinis simplicibus, ed. A. Labarta, J. Martínez Gázquez, M. R. McVaugh, D. Jacquart and L. Cifuentes; and vol. VII.1, Epistola de reprobacione nigromantice ficcionis (De improbatione maleficiorum), ed. Sebastià Giralt (2005); catalogue of Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona.
• Arnaldi de Villanova Opera Theologica Omnia, vols. III (2004), IV (2007) and V (2014), ed. J. Perarnau; vol. XIV (2019), ed. J. Mensa.
• Antoine Calvet, Les œuvres alchimiques attribuées à Arnaud de Villeneuve: grand œuvre, médecine et prophétie au Moyen-Âge, preface by Sebastià Giralt (Paris and Milan: S.É.H.A. and Archè, 2011; Textes et travaux de Chrysopœia, 11).
• MedCat (Sciencia.cat), entries by Sebastià Giralt (works 4563, 4556, 4564 and 4554; Lyon edition, imp. 245) and by Lluís Cifuentes (work 3158): Rosarius philosophorum (4563), Flos florum (4556), Semita semitae (4564), Epistola super alchimia ad regem Neapolitanum (4554), Rosarius abbreviatus (3158); entry for the Lyon edition, 1504: imp. 245 (consulted on 29 October 2026).
• Giuliana Camilli, “Il Rosarius philosophorum attribuito ad Arnaldo da Villanova nella tradizione alchemica del Trecento”, Arxiu de Textos Catalans Antics 14 (1995), pp. 175-208, revistes.iec.cat.
• José Rodríguez Guerrero, “Pedro Arnaldo de Vilanova (s. XIV¹), médico, cirujano, alquimista y socius del magister Testamenti”, Azogue 9 (2019-2023), pp. 5-38, revistaazogue.com.
• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, in Walter W. Skeat (ed.), The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. IV, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), lines G 1428-1434; Project Gutenberg, no. 22120 (public domain).
• Edgar H. Duncan, “Chaucer and ‘Arnald of the Newe Town’: A Reprise”, Interpretations 9 (1977), pp. 7-11.
• Lindy Brady and Andrew Rabin, “‘Arnold of the Newe Toun’ Revisited: A Note on the Sources of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale”, Notes and Queries 65 (2018), pp. 174-177, doi:10.1093/notesj/gjy009.
• Hec sunt opera Arnaldi de Villanova (Lyon: François Fradin, 1504), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek copy, 2 Med.g. 5, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10147895-9 (NoC-NC 1.0).
• De alchimia opuscula complura veterum philosophorum (Frankfurt: Cyriacus Jacobus, 1550), copy of part I in the SLUB Dresden, Chem.362,misc.1, digital.slub-dresden.de/id280366256 (Public Domain Mark 1.0).
• C. G. Jung, Die Psychologie der Übertragung (Zurich: Rascher, 1946), on the woodcuts of the Rosarium philosophorum.