St John's College : Antidotarium magnum

St John's College

The main text of the manuscript is a 12th-century copy of the Antidotarium magnum, a text produced at the Abbey of Montecassino in the 11th century by or through the direction of a monk of Tunisian heritage known to modern scholarship as Constantinus Africanus. The Antidotarium magnum was the first substantial medical work produced in western medieval Europe that presented medical recipes and ideas from Arabic sources alongside recipes deriving from Greek, Roman, and subsequent western European medical sources. The work has often been confused with a similar text, the Antidotarium Nicholai or Antidotarium paruum, which probably originates from the medical school at Salerno, and which was based, in part, on the Antidotarium magnum. Indeed, M.R. James mistook the main text in this manuscript for the 'Antidotarium (Nicholai)' in his 1913 Descriptive catalogue of the manuscripts of St John's College. The probable cause of the confusion of these two antidotaria is the fact that the first recipe in both antidotaria pertains to Aurea alexandrina. However, as Monica H. Green has observed, the Antidotarium Nicholai typically opens with a prefatory address by a 'Nicholaus', and the content of the Aurea alexandrina recipes differs between the two. For further information see: Monica H. Green, 'The Antidotarium magnum: A Short Description' (2019), especially n. 19. Readers may also be interested in <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-GONVILLE-AND-CAIUS-00366-00588/1'>Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 366/588</a>, another 12th century copy of the Antidotarium magnum in Cambridge, and also digitised and catalogued as part of the Curious Cures in Cambridge Library Project. Dr Sarah Gilbert Project Cataloguer for Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries Cambridge University Library