Western Medieval Manuscripts : Medical treatises and recipes

Western Medieval Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This fifteenth-century medical manuscript appears to have been made in two stages, with a clear distinction between the scripts used on ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(9);return false;'>1r-103v</a> (Part 1) and ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(215);return false;'>104r-148v</a> (Part 2). In the first part of the manuscript, the handwriting seems to be from a slightly earlier period in the fifteenth century compared to that of the second part. It is written almost entirely in Middle English, suggesting that the scribe or compiler participated in what Linda E. Voigts has called a 'groundswell of Englishing' in the fifteenth century: a sudden rush to translate medical texts from Latin into English (Voights 1995: 184).</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The first part of this manuscript contains the only known complete copy of a Middle English translation of the <i>Practica brevis</i>, a Latin collection of advice for a wide range of medical ailments and recipes for medicines, compiled by Johannes Platearius II in the first half of the twelfth century at the medical school of Salerno (the only other known Middle English version of the <i>Practica brevis</i> is incomplete, surviving in a sixteenth-century manuscript - now London, British Library, Sloane MS 14 - of only 24 folios). The English version contains sixty-eight chapters, comprising remedies for different types of fever, headaches, aches of the eyes, ears, nose and teeth, mouth ulcers, digestive issues, dropsy, diabetes, unexpected bleeding from various orifices, leprosy, 'wormys in þe wombe', and many more. As Tony Hunt has argued, the English version shows the difficulty of translating medical vocabulary into the vernacular, as many specialised terms are left in the original Latin, then sometimes followed by English clarifications (Hunt 1994: 158). In addition to this translation into English, the <i>Practica brevis</i> was also translated into Anglo-Norman, as discussed by Hunt and Monica Green (Hunt 1994; Green 2009).</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The <i>Practica brevis</i> may have been studied and translated at late medieval Oxford, which was a developing centre for the study of medicine; students and scholars often studied medical texts from the established school in Salerno, and the Practica brevis was among them (Getz 1992: 377; Hunt 1994: 149). Faye Getz has noted that, while in Oxford a statute from 1350 prohibiting the practice of medicine by those who had not studied at the university was renewed in 1400, university physicians themselves were concerned that medical information might be used fraudulently but were not against its transmission in general terms. Getz also suggests that the translators of medieval English medical texts may have imagined an audience beyond their own scholarly community (Getz 1992: 396-400; Getz 1990: 2, 9-10). Although there is no concrete evidence linking MS Dd.10.44 to Oxford, it is possible that the manuscript was made with similar motivations to bring the text to a wider and perhaps non-academic audience.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The second part of MS Dd.10.44 contains a variety of recipes for medicines (for example, for making pills and 'electuaries' - medicines made with honey) and herbal texts, listing a range of herbs and their medicinal properties. It also contains several texts concerned with uroscopy - the study of urine for the purpose of medical diagnosis. In the fifteenth-century movement of the 'Englishing' of medical literature, there was a particular interest in making uroscopic medicine more accessible in the vernacular (Jasin 1993). The manuscript not only contains the only complete English version of the <i>Practica brevis</i>, but, as Teresa Tavormina has pointed out, also the only Middle English version of the <i>Letter of Ypocras</i> - an adaptation of a French original with an expanded version of the section on women's urines (2007: 639). The English version of the <i>Practica brevis</i> must have been joined together with this uroscopic material since a very early stage: both parts contain marginal annotations by the same sixteenth-century hand, and William Thorowgood, who recorded the birth of his daughter in 1561 in the first part (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(212);return false;'>102v</a>), also added his ownership inscription in the second part (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(305);return false;'>149r</a>). There seems to have been a tradition of compiling herbal and uroscopy texts together: such combinations also occur in in Cambridge University Library, MSS <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DD-00006-00029/1'>Dd.6.29</a> and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-EE-00001-00013/1'>Ee.1.13</a>. The latter manuscript includes another Middle English version of a text from Salerno: the <i>Circa instans</i>, a compilation of medical recipes that was written by Matthaeus Platearius, a relative of Johannes Platearius. Thus, these manuscripts suggest a strong interest in the knowledge of the Salernitan school among audiences who were reading medical texts in the vernacular.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>While the <i>Practica brevis</i> in MS Dd.10.44 is combined with many shorter texts on uroscopy, other manuscripts too suggest that the work was often read within the context of uroscopic medical literature. Uroscopy texts also appear alongside the Latin text of the <i>Practica brevis</i> in other Cambridge manuscripts, including Gonville and Caius MSS <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-GONVILLE-AND-CAIUS-00159-00209/1'>159/209</a> and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-GONVILLE-AND-CAIUS-00401-00623/1'>401/623</a>, and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/jm097by4127'>Corpus Christi MS 511</a>. But there is also evidence that suggests that the <i>Practica brevis</i> was considered an important source for uroscopic information in its own right: in the incomplete translation in Sloane MS 14, 'vryne' and 'vryna' appear written in the margins 27 times, highlighting the text in the manner of manicules - a medieval annotation technique of drawing pointing hands in the margins to emphasise important sections. The compiler of MS Dd.10.44 therefore is likely to have been aware of the uroscopic context in which the <i>Practica brevis</i> was disseminated, and sought to recreate this context for the English translation as well.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Margaret Connolly has argued that the survival of non-decorated volumes of medical texts suggests that the information they contained was highly valued well beyond the centuries of their production (2016). The numerous annotations in early-modern scripts and appearance of manicules (drawings of pointing fingers, functioning like the modern bookmark) throughout MS Dd.10.44 indicate that this manuscript was used well into the sixteenth century and perhaps beyond. The combination of a Middle English text from Salerno and additional vernacular adaptations of uroscopic texts may have made this manuscript a desirable source of medical learning that contributed to its longevity and survival.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison<br /> Teaching Fellow in Medieval Art History<br /> University of Edinburgh</p><p style='text-align: justify;'><i><b>Further reading:</b></i></p><p><div style='list-style-type: disc;'><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Margaret Connolly, 'Evidence for the Continued Use of Medieval Medical Prescriptions in the Sixteenth Century: A Fifteenth-Century Remedy Book and Its Later Owner', <i>Medical History</i>, 60 (2016), 133–54.</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Linda Voigts, 'Multitudes of Middle English Medical Manuscripts, or the Englishing of Science and Medicine', in <i>Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays</i>, ed. by Margaret Schleissner, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, v. 1576 (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 183-197 (p. 184).</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Faye Getz, 'Charity, Translation, and the Language of Medical Learning in Medieval England', <i>Bulletin of the History of Medicine</i>, 64 (1990), 1–17 (pp. 2, 9-10, and notes 4, 8).</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Vern Bullough, 'Medical Study at Mediaeval Oxford', <i>Speculum</i>, 36 (1961), 600–612.</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Ralph Hanna, 'Henry Daniel’s Liber Uricrisiarum', in <i>Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England</i>, ed. by Lister Matheson (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), pp. 185-219 (p. 188); see also Getz, 'The Faculty of Medicine before 1500', p. 392.</div></div><br /></p>