Medieval Medical Recipes : On Surgery

Medieval Medical Recipes

Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.31 (hereafter MS R.14.31) is a medical manuscript that was made in Canterbury in the 12th century at either Christ Church Cathedral Priory or St Augustine's Abbey; either way, the volume was a part of the St Augustine's library until the dispersal of its manuscripts in the 16th century. Its contents are entirely medical: the manuscript begins with a text on surgery before progressing through a series of medical receptaria organised around the treatment of specific conditions, and closes with treatises on the medicinal properties of wines and of various plants. Among the medical texts in this manuscript, one of the most interesting is that which incorporates passages from the De materia medica of Dioscorides (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(346);return false;'>165r-226v</a>). De materia medica was translated from the original Greek into Latin in Late Antiquity and was popular in north western Europe throughout the middle ages. De materia medica was translated into Latin more than once, and also into vernacular languages in the later medieval period. The popularity of the Latin versions of De materia medica as well as its length meant that it was often copied in abbreviated forms, disseminated with other similar material, and presented with explanatory prefaces and associated texts. As a consequence, the text can appear rather differently in manuscript sources, and it is not always easy to discern what is a copy of De materia medica with some interpolations, and what should be considered to be a new text based on De materia medica.The text on ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(346);return false;'>165r-226v</a> in MS R.14.31 incorporates substantial portions of De materia medica. Of the many surviving Latin recensions of this text, that in MS R.14.31 seems most closely to resemble the version in <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://mdz-nbn-resolving.de/details:bsb00147803'>Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 337</a>, which was edited by Hermann Stadler across several articles around the turn of the 20th century. However, further work is needed to establish the sources of the text(s) in MS R.14.31: the segments of De materia medica do not appear in the same order that they appear in typical copies of the Latin De materia medica, and the text is frequently interpolated with other unidentified medical content. For example, the chapter 'De edera' at the opening of Book 1 in MS R.14.31, beginning 'Cissos id est edere multe sunt species' (MS R.14.31, f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(347);return false;'>165v</a>; <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/view/bsb00147803?page=140,141'>Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 337, f. 69va (ch. PΞE)</a>; and Hermann's edition, p. 244 seq.) diverges from that found in BSB Clm 337 in later chapters (this is just one of several points of similarity then difference between the two manuscripts). Medical books were not typically among the most lavishly decorated products of an English monastic scriptorium, nevertheless MS R.14.31 has delicate touches of decoration throughout, including rubricated capitulae, 'arabesque' initials at the beginning of most major and minor divisions of the text in red, green, or blue, and alternately coloured initials for each lemma in the capitula lists, e.g., f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(330);return false;'>157r</a>. There is one significant decorative initial in the volume, a 'Q' on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(18);return false;'>1r</a> that terminates in the lower margin with a beautiful frond-like flourish emerging from the mouth of a humanoid figure wearing a little 'Phrygian' cap. These caps were sometimes used as a visual shorthand for 'doctor' in medieval art, later superseded by a figure posing with a urine flask. Dr Sarah Gilbert Project Cataloguer for the Curious Cures Project Cambridge University Library