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) at the southern end and the Upper-Rhine surgical print-tradition reception (1583) at the northern end. The keystone is Johannes Hartlieb's Padua doctorate of 11 May 1439 [1], anchored at scholarly-consensus level by Fürbeth's 1992 Untersuchungen zu Leben und Werk monograph (Hermaea NF 64, Niemeyer Tübingen, pp. 30–41), which links 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 [2]. At publisher/imprint level, the separately compiled Bolt corpus describes approximately 1,000 apothecaries in roughly 85 Burgundian-state towns between 1200 and 1600 [3]; the exact internal count of 1,029 remains unreproduced here. The Avicenna Canon (Gerard of Cremona Latin) supplies a 14th–15th-century textual spine, carried in this study by seven Despars-stratum manuscripts in our holdings [4]. The Burgundian–Wittelsbach extension section engages the Brewer–Lewis 2024 Social History of Medicine paper as a methodologically valued, peer-reviewed precedent that correctly identifies Hartlieb's Bavaria-Munich service but does not extend the Wittelsbach reading across the Bavaria-Straubing maternal-line dynastic bridge into the Burgundian court. The paper closes with a programmatic register of the corridor's unexploited cross-connections to the Doutrepont–De Winter–Wijsman–Falmagne–Vaughan Burgundian-library bibliography and to the Bolt apothecary corpus. The thesis is comparator-lens, not identity. We do not claim that the chain produced Beinecke MS 408; we claim that the chain is a substrate-anchored object whose members, dates, teacher–student edges, and manuscript witnesses are attested at primary-source or scholarly-consensus level (the keystone doctorate date at the latter; see the keystone date section) and bracket the relevant fifteenth-century medical-book economy with sufficient density to be read as a stratum in its own right.