The Wittelsbach-Burgundian Transalpine Physician Chain, 1413-1496 (with southern Frederician and northern print-tradition extensions)

This paper traces a transalpine court-physician chain whose Confirmed-tier coverage runs from the start of the Cermisone Padua professorship (1413) through the latest dated Generation-2 vernacular witness (1496), with Candidate-tier extensions to the Constitutions of Melfi (1231) and the Upper-Rhine surgical print-tradition reception (1583). The keystone is Johannes Hartlieb's Padua doctorate of 11 May 1439, anchored at scholarly-consensus level by Fürbeth's 1992 monograph, linking a Bavaria-Munich Wittelsbach court physician directly to the teaching faculty of Antonio Cermisone and Bartolomeo Montagnana.

Around that keystone we read a nine-manuscript witness cluster (1429–1496) carrying iatromathematisches Hausbuch, Regimen sanitatis, and Speculum humanae salvationis calendrical material across a German-vernacular regional book culture spanning Bavaria, Bodensee, Konstanz, Heidelberg, and Bohemian-Silesian production sites. The Burgundian extension is documented through a separately compiled corpus of approximately 1,029 apothecaries operating in 85 cities of the Burgundian state, 1200–1600. The Avicenna Canon (Gerard of Cremona Latin) supplies a 14th–15th-century textual spine, carried in this study by seven Despars-stratum manuscripts.

The paper engages the Brewer-Lewis 2024 paper in Social History of Medicine as a methodologically valued, peer-reviewed precedent that nevertheless landed one Wittelsbach branch over from the substrate-attested dynastic bridge. The thesis is comparator-lens, not identity.