The Despars Avicenna Canon Corpus: A Seven-Witness Substrate-Anchored Inventory (1431–1498)

This paper presents a substrate-anchored seven-witness inventory of Jacques Despars's commentary on Avicenna's Canon medicinae (Latin translation of Gerard of Cremona, c. 1170s), assembled inside a research substrate that tracks several hundred late medieval medical manuscripts, figures, and findings (substrate snapshot, June 2026) [Honeycutt 2025, Paduan Medical Reference dataset, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18687530]. Despars (c. 1380–1458), regent master of medicine at the University of Paris and physician to the houses of Burgundy and France, compiled his Commentarii in Canonem between 1432 and 1453 [1][2]. The substrate identifies seven witnesses spanning 1431 (the earliest dated commentary stratum) through 1498 (the Lyon editio princeps): British Library Harley 3799 (vol. 1 of an eleven-volume Despars-tradition set), Bibliothèque nationale de France Latin 6915 (a Despars-tradition copy carrying preparatory annotations attributed to Despars), BnF Lat. 6926, 6927, 6928, and 6937 (four further Despars commentary volumes from the Jean Budé presentation set), and the Lyon 1498 printed edition (Trechsel / Clein) [3][4][5]. Six of the seven manuscript witnesses are currently anchored at catalogue level (Biblissima authority records or Wayback-recovered British Library catalogue records); one witness (the Lyon 1498 print, BSB Munich bsb00071249 volume three) is anchored at folio imagery level and has been HTR-walked at corpus scale. A thirty-two-folio handwritten-text-recognition (HTR) walk of that single read-folio witness, processed under Kraken with the CATMuS Medieval 1.6.0 model, returned hits on the order of tens per term across seven substrate-tracked Latin pharmacological class-words (paleographer verification pending; per-term counts and confidence posture in §2.3) and is reported here as an Observed pattern across two witnesses of distinct register (Latin pharmacological print plus Middle High German gynecological manuscript Cgm 261), pending the negative-control walk flagged at §6.2 F5; not as a closure on the seven-witness inventory as a whole [6]. The seven witnesses are situated against the Padua scholastic medical tradition (Antonio Cermisone, Bartolomeo Montagnana, Hugo Senensis, Gentile da Foligno); Despars is read as the parallel French branch of a single Latin commentary culture, not as an independent intellectual stream. We catalogue the seven witnesses with shelfmark, date, language, and acquisition status; situate the 1498 Lyon print as the print-consolidation moment that carries the Despars commentary into European medical-print circulation; engage the verified secondary literature on Padua-Alfonsine astronomy (Chabás 2007; Chabás & Goldstein 2003, 2012) and the medical-tradition scholarship of Crisciani, Agrimi, Pesenti, Nicoud, and Park; supply a tier and falsification matrix; and close with a programmatic statement on the Despars-Canon corridor as a substrate-anchored entry into the Latin medical commentary tradition (Avicenna Canon commentaries specifically), a comparator surface that remains comparatively under-developed inside the Voynich-studies field. --- Substrate origination documented August 2025 (Paduan Medical Reference dataset; DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18687530, copyright origination 2025-08-27).