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 seven-witness list is anchored by Jacquart's manuscript census, the Biblissima records for the BnF witnesses, and the BSB image record for the Lyon print [1][4][5][27]. Six manuscript witnesses are catalogue-anchored; 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 print, processed under Kraken with the CATMuS Medieval 1.6.0 model, returned raw hits across seven tracked Latin pharmacological class-words (paleographer verification pending) and is reported as an Observed pattern, not as closure on the seven-witness inventory [6]. The paper situates the witnesses against Padua scholastic medicine, catalogues them with source-bounded metadata, and supplies a tier and falsification matrix.