IN MEMORIAM

Don Juan Antonio

Michael R. McVaugh

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Department of History. mcvaugh@email.unc.edu

In 1959, when I was twenty, still an undergraduate and dreaming of preparing a student paper thesis on Arnau de Vilanova, I could find no serious modern scholarship on Arnau until I saw a reference to Don Juan Antonio's publications in Asclepio, which my university library did not subscribe to. I wrote to him -he had just moved to the "Estudio General de Navarra", as it then was- and asked him for his "Vida de Arnaldo", and I still have his kind reply in which he told me he would send me his publications and encouraged me in my work, asking me for my future papers on the subject. I hope I never disappointed him! Those first papers (the "Vida", and his "Patología General"), were an inspiration, because they showed me how much information was available to a careful investigator and how much could be done with them. D. Juan Antonio's mastery of Arnau's works, and his clear-headed analyses of the written and biographical material were models on which I tried, and still try, to shape my own work. Not a week goes by, even now, that I do not turn to his writings in his collected Studia Arnaldiana¹ to supplement or confirm or test some idea of my own.

From that first encounter by correspondence he was always kindness itself. He recounts in his introduction to the Studia Arnaldiana ² that he was not originally convinced in 1975 that the time was right for a collected modern edition of Arnau's writings, the project that became AVOMO, but he never expressed those doubts to me; he enthusiastically contributed his support to the project, shared his mountains of manuscript data with Luis [García Ballester] and me as we tried to establish a catalogue of Arnaldian writings, and eventually contributed two of its finest studies (VI.1-2) ³ to AVOMO. But I really began to know him personally in the fall of 1986, when I was carrying out researches in Zaragoza; my wife and I spent parts of two days in his company while he introduced us to Navarra -we went to all sorts of places with him, from the cathedral in Pamplona to the palace at Olite, and, towards the end of the visit, to his own village of Artajona. The photograph I took of him there, leaning, smiling, on the half-opened door of his grandmother's house, will always remind me vividly of him, of his wisdom and his generosity.

Bibliografía

1. Paniagua, Juan A. Studia arnaldiana: trabajos en torno a la obra médica de Arnau de Vilanova, c. 1240-1311. Barcelona: Fundación Uriach 1838; 1994.         [ Links ]

2. Paniagua, n. 1, 11-39 (p. 33).

3. Arnau de Vilanova. Medicationis parabole. Edición y estudio de Juan A. Paniagua; Pirqé Arnau de Vilanova. Edición y estudio de Lola Ferre y Eduard Feliu. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona; 1990 (AVOMO VI. 1);         [ Links ] Arnau de Vilanova. Commentum in quasdam parabolas et alias aphorismorum series: aphorismi particulares, aphorismi de memoria, aphorismi extravagantes. Edición y estudio de Juan A. Paniagua y Pedro Gil-Sotres con la colaboración de Luis García-Ballester y Eduard Feliu. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona-Fundació Noguera; 1993 (AVOMO VI. 2).         [ Links ]