Gonville and Caius College : Collection of Greek medical texts

Gonville and Caius College

The manuscript is a volume formed by ten independent parts, collected and united by John Caius (1510-1573), forming a Collection of Greek medical texts. Caius wrote notes in the margins of some of the medical texts, a list of contents of the volume (where, interestingly, he defines the parts of the manuscript as "books"), and titles at the beginning of most of the parts. Part I (ff. i, 1-95) contains two texts by Galen, De symptomatum differentiis and De symptomatum causis libri III. As written in a note on f. 90v, the text was copied by a certain Iohannes Babamos (possibly Vaban? Vauban?), in Paris, possibly in the first half of the 16th century (see also RGK I, 159). John Caius made corrections to the text (hand a, see also Gundert 2009, p. 67, and Nutton 1987, p. 65). Part II (ff. 96-119) includes two texts by Hippocrates, Aphorismi and Prognosticon, probably written in the first half of the 16th century. Part III (ff. 120-134) was probably also produced in the same period. It also contains a portion of the Aphorismi, copied by another hand, with marginal notes by John Caius. Both parts IV (ff. 135-142) and V (ff. 143-150) contain Galen's work De usu pulsuum, copied by two different scribes, both probably in the first half of the 16th century. The text in part V is incomplete. In part VI (ff. 151-158) there are a few texts about the nature of the human being. Part VII (ff. 159-186) contains the 12th book of Flavius Josephus' Jewish Antiquities, copied by Ioannes Serbopoulos, a Greek scribe active in England around 1484-1500 (see RGK I, 180). There are various lacunae in the text, because of the loss of quires and leaves: four quires are missing between ff. 166-167, one between ff. 178-179; two leaves are missing between ff. 169-170, one between ff. 173-174 and another between ff. 177-178. The eighth and ninth part do not include medical texts and were both copied by scribes active in Italy in the first half of the 16th century. Part VIII (ff. 187-194), which was copied by Konstantinos Mesobotes, contains the Liturgy of John Chrysostom, the most used of the eucharistic services of the Byzantine Church. Part IX (ff. 195-226) contains a collection of theological excerpts copied by Bernardinos Sandros, from Cremona. The last part of the manuscript (part X, ff. 227-232) again contains medical texts, all about diet, copied by an anonymous scribe. The manuscript was donated to Gonville and Caius College Library by John Caius (1510-1573), the English physician and second founder of the College. He travelled in Italy from 1539-1544, where he consulted various manuscripts (see S. Berlier, John Caius et le De usu partium. Contribution à l'histoire du texte de Galien, in: Revue d'Histoire des Textes n.s. 6 (2011), pp. 1-14: pp. 5-6) and probably acquired at least some of the Greek manuscripts he later bequeathed to the College. Dr Erika Elia