Medieval Medical Recipes : Medical and religious compilation

Medieval Medical Recipes

Trinity College MS O.9.10 is a medical and religious compilation of the fifteenth century, produced in England, and apparently owned by one John Gylberd in the fifteenth century and William Feelde (or Feld) in the sixteenth century. Feelde seems to have been a self-conscious and eager Elizabethan courtier, as he added his signature throughout the manuscript, various pen trials and snatches of poetry, along with several drawings of Elizabeth, a palace (perhaps Hampton Court), cannons and warfare, and a well-dressed man (perhaps himself). Most of the texts are written neatly in the same fifteenth-century hand in two columns with red initials, the key exception being a combined herbal and lapidary (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(193);return false;'>89-113</a>) of the fourteenth century with alternating initials in red and blue. It appears that the fifteenth-century scribe built a new collection, dedicated to physical and spiritual healing, around the core of the older herbal. Another addition (on the flyleaves, ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(13);return false;'>iii-iv</a>) by a different fifteenth-century scribe is a Latin poem titled Remedy against the Pestilence, based on the hugely popular plague treatise of John of Burgundy. All the texts in the manuscript are in Latin except for a Sphere of Apuleius diagram with French text (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(166);return false;'>75v</a>) and two recipes in English (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(299);return false;'>142r</a>), for a migraine and for "webbe in oculo" ('web in the eye', i.e. a cataract). English glosses are added to some recipes and titles in the herbal.The owners of this manuscript could find within it all the tools they needed to diagnose, prognosticate, and treat maladies of the body, mind, or soul, along with reference texts for helping them understand the difficult terminology of learned medicine. Trinity College MS O.9.10 contains over twenty different items, primarily medical, in 144 folios. The core texts are an antidotary called Liber Galieni ('The Book of Galen') (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(69);return false;'>27-49</a>), a tabular glossary of medical terms from the Canon of Avicenna (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(119);return false;'>52-66</a>), another medical dictionary (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(1);return false;'>121-136</a>), and a composite verse herbal made of poems by Macer Floridus, Henry of Huntingdon, Marbod of Rennes, and versified passages from other medical texts (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(193);return false;'>89-108r</a>). This manuscript belongs to a distinctly English tradition of large medical collections built around a central verse herbal compilation, containing mostly poems from Macer's De viribus herbarum ('On the Virtues of Herbs') supplemented with poems from its English imitator, Henry of Huntingdon's Anglicanus ortus ('The English Garden'). The Royal manuscript collection in the British Library includes three other medical collections that follow the same pattern as this medical miscellany: Royal MS 12 B.xii, Royal MS 12 B.xxiiii, and Royal MS 12 B.xxiv. Trinity College MS O.9.10 is distinguished from these other collections by the inclusion of two devotional texts, written in the same hand as the surrounding medical treatises: a Passio Christi (the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus, ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(167);return false;'>76-84</a>) and a set of salutations to the Virgin Mary (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(189);return false;'>87-89</a>), curiously interrupted by a short treatise on uroscopy (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(183);return false;'>84-87</a>). The mixture of medical and religious texts shows that readers and scribes in this period viewed health holistically, thinking about the welfare of both body and soul and grouping together physical and spiritual remedies. Dr Winston Black Gatto Chair of Christian Studies St Francis Xavier University Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada