capsicum

Note: The name capsicum was introduced into Renaissance botany by the French physician and botanist Jean Ruel, who, in De medicamentorum compositione (Paris, 1539; Basel, 1540), translated Books 5 and 6 of De methodo medendi/Theurapeutikḕ méthodos by the Byzantine physician Johannes Actuarius/Ioannes Aktuarios (ca. 1275-ca. 1328). Actuarius included kapsikón in a pharmaceutical recipe among other plants ("… item sitezium indicum, capsicum, piper longum, tenue cinamomum") apparently similar in action to ginger and galanga, but seems to indicate nothing further about it. (The Greek text of these two books has never been published.) Earlier, in his botanical and pharmaceutical encyclopedia De natura stirpium libri tres (Paris: Simon de Collines, 1536), p. 380, Jean Ruel alludes to the capsicon of Actuarius as a synonym for cardamom, so called because "… the seeds are arranged in a row, enclosed in a kind of case, as if they are collected in a capsa" ("… semina in ordinem digesta, quibusdam thecis inuoluentibus, quasi capsis congerantur"). This notion that capsicum has something to do with Latin capsa, "case, receptacle," is repeated by many subsequent authors. The botanist Gaspard Bauhin employs capsicum as a synonym for piper, "pepper" (Phytopinax, seu enumeratio plantarum, Basel, 1596, pp. 155-56), which eventually gives rise to the Linnaean usage; he proffers a completely different etymology, from Greek káptein "to gulp down, swallow up": "Kapsikón [Greek letters] Actuario, fortè quod semen comestum mordeat, à káptō [Greek letters] mordeo" ("Kapsikón in Actuarius, perhaps because the seed once eaten causes a sting, from káptō I bite"). Neither Ruel's nor Bauhin's etymologies make sense derivationally, so the origin—as well as the identity—of Actuarius' kapsikón remain obscure, at least until further examination of the original Greek text.