The historical placement of Vindicianus is uncertain.  We know that he undertook his work in Africa during the second half of the 4^th c., where he was comes archiatrorum and served as proconsul Africae at the start of the reign of Theodosius I (379-95). Augustine of Hippo, who got in touch with Vindicianus at the end of his Manichean period (382?), described him as vir sagax, medicinae artis peritissimus (Confessions 4.3.5). Around 400, Theodorus Priscianus, a student of Vindicianus, explicitly boasts that his teacher enjoyed a great reputation (Phys. 3 = Rose 251: magister meus… qui nunc orbis totius Vindicianus celebratur).  The so-called Antidotarum Bruxellense, which is attached to the manuscript tradition of Theodorus Priscianus, identifies Vindicianus as vir clarissimus (Antidot. Brux. 11 = Rose 367), while in 447 Cassius Felix called him vir illustris (Cass. Fel. 79 = Fraisse 188).

The transmission of Vindicianus’s long work affects two aspects of it: its preservation in various reproductions and the authenticity of part of it.  The first problem concerns the treatise entitled Gynaecia, though the authenticity of this text is certain and we possess more recensions of it through pre-Salernitan manuscripts and a few testimonia of the late medieval period.  The second problem concerns the work that Rose entitled Epitome uberior altera, which is essentially an elaboration of extracts from the Gynaecia and the De natura generis humani.

It is possible that the treatise preserved under the title De natura generis humani does not correspond to its original form.  Beccaria maintains that the present text is nothing but an abridgement of an original by Vindicianus (itself entitled De natura generis humani), from which the various redactions of the Gynaecia and the Epitome uberior altera are derived. According to this theory, the surviving text of the De natura generis humani is an early-medieval compilation that combines Vindicianus’s text with selections from the Latin version of the Hippocratic treatise De mulierum affectibus to create an anonymous Liber ad Mecenatem or De natura generis humani.  Yet this Italian scholar has overlooked an argument that can establish the relationship between these three texts definitively.  Distribution analysis of corresponding passages in the Gynaecia and De natura generis humani reveals not a single point of contact, a fact that can hardly be explained if both derive from the same source.  On the contrary, the so-called Epitome uberior altera incorporates passages of the Gynaecia and the De natura generis humani in a complementary way, and so must surely be considered the secondary production.  Beccaria’s attribution of the De natura generis humani to Vindicianus is based on the presence of partial similarities between this text and the Epitome uberior altera, but this too must remain uncertain.  This line of argument can nevertheless be said to offer general support for a circumstantial attribution of the text to Vindicianus, or in any case to an author of a similar milieu.

The attribution of the treatise entitled De semine or Medicorum placita to Vindicianus is highly suspect.  Wellmann established this authorship on the basis of similarities between §14-16 of this text and §19-20 of the Gynaecia.  Debru, however, maintains that the chapters coinciding with Vindicianus’s Gynaecia are merely an interpolation; their apparently heterogeneous contents are bound together by the thematic thread of nutrition (nutrimentum) and reveal echoes of the Hippocratic treatise De alimento, with which the text also shares certain other similarities. Debru thus denies that Vindicianus is the author of the work and suggests that it arose from the cultivated circles of the early Empire, perhaps the milieu of Macrobius.  A preferable designation for its author is thus “Anonymous of Brussels.”  [M. E. Vázquez Buján; tr. C. L. Caterine].