Medieval European Medical Manuscripts

 
Gift-giving and Knowledge Exchange in Elite Medical Manuscripts
Prof Faith Willis
The springboard for this discussion is a manuscript recently acquired by the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University. The book was created around 1515, and consists of two parts: a collection of antidota and experimenta in both Latin and French (fols. 1-27), and a regimen of health drawn up by one François Dalais, a physician in the service of the King of France, for the man who commissioned the manuscript. This was François II de Rohan, Archbishop of Lyon (1480-1536). The manuscript was prepared as a gift for the Archbishop's brother, Charles de Rohan-Gié, Vicomte de Fronsac and d'Orbec and governor of Touraine (1478-1528). It is a small but exquisite volume, bound in red velvet, expertly written and richly decorated.
 
The book, therefore, was a gift of knowledge, at once prestigious and personal. A significant number of the recipes it contains were obtained from other individuals, sometimes explicitly as "gifts". These included members of the nobility and higher clergy (directly or through their employees, e.g. apothecaries and physicians, but also from people of less exalted background (a merchant of Rouen named Jehan Cormer, doctors practicing in Paris or Montpellier), and even unnamed individuals ("dun angloye"). One recipe came from the Archbishop's (and the recipient's) own brother, Pierre, Seigneur de Frontenay, de la Marche et de Gié., andVicomte de Carentan, who perished in the battle of Pavia in 1525. In some respects this is typical of experimenta: the efficacy of a recipe is guaranteed by ("proved"/"approved") by someone's experience, and the higher the status of that "someone", the more valuable the recipe. It is noteworthy that a certain Dr Bernard is frequently identified as the source of a recipes, though a phrase is sometimes added to specify that the treatment is actually "esprouvee" by the Archbishop himself.
 
The manuscript is therefore at the centre of a complex web of knowledge exchange: from the Archbishop to (and from) his brother(s); from other grandees to the Archbishop; from the doctors or apothecaries to the Archibishop, perhaps via their noble patrons. Even a regimen designed specifically for the Archbishop could be offered to his brother as part of this donation. To extract all the rich social meanings of this volume requires overlapping frameworks of anaysis: traditions of exchanging medical advice amongst elites; communications networks that work both along and across social networks; how oral knowledge becomes written knowledge; Latin and vernacular code-switching; the role of the manuscript book in the age of print; how to resolve the apparent paradox of a "deluxe" manuscript of "practical" medicine; and the locus of medical authority and experience.
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Prof Faith Willis (McGill University) is a historian of medieval Europe, specializing in the history of science and medicine. She has published translations and studies of medieval time-reckoning (computus) and medicine. Her current research focuses on medical education and the transmission of medical knowledge in the 12th century. She is preparing an edition of the earliest commentaries on the Articella, the first anthology of medical texts designed to support formal teaching to be created in Western Europe, for the "Edizione nazionale Scuola Medica Salernitana" (Florence). The Articella marks the birth of academic medicine, and these commentaries allow us to reconstruct the intellectual dynamics of this crucial event. She is also edited the full five-book version of On the natures of things (De naturis rerum) by the English scholar Alexander Neckam (d. 1217), for the series "British Writers of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period". Prof. Wallis teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of medicine, ancient medicine, medieval medicine, and general medieval history.
(note: session will last an hour)

 
Global contexts: Jain medical recipes in early Hindi - SESSION POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
Dr Adrian Plau
This talk will explore global contexts to medieval medical manuscripts by looking to understudied traditions of early modern vernacular medical treatises and recipes from North India currently held by Wellcome Collection. I’ll highlight the historiography of the ‘medieval’ in global contexts and its uses in Western imperialist propaganda and contemporary orientalist discourse, Wellcome Collection’s current work with manuscript cataloguing metadata, and present examples of vernacular North Indian medical manuscripts, including early research on the first-ever medical treatise in Hindi.
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Dr Adrian Plau is Manuscript Collections Information Analyst at Wellcome Collection, working particularly with making the Collection’s global manuscripts more accessible and discoverable to wider audiences. As a 2018-2019 Wellcome Trust Research Bursary-holder, he led a project on the Wellcome Collection’s early Hindi medical manuscripts. His 2018 SOAS PhD presented a critical edition and literary study of the Sitacarit, a vernacular narrative of the seventeenth century that recounts the Ramayana epic from Sita’s perspective. His research has featured in publications such as Religions, Sikh Formations, and the Oxford History of Hinduism. He is a contributor to Digital Orientalist and writes a monthly column on Indian poetry for Asiapunkt.
(note: session will last an hour).
 
 

 
Practical use of medical manuscripts
Dr Kathleen Walker-Meikle
 
What makes a medieval medical manuscript “practical”? Is it a question of genre or a judgement that can only be made on a manuscript by manuscript basis? How do we ascertain contemporary and later readership and use? Is the term ‘practical’ at all useful when examining medieval manuscripts? We started this workshop series with two luxury illuminated recipe collections (Wellcome 626 & Osler’s François II de Rohan ms), how would we classify them? I will be drawing on my work on recipes collections and their later adaptions, poisons literature, and in particular an animal materia medica text, translated from the Arabic, extant in manuscripts ranging from the 13th to the 16th century.
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Dr Kathleen Walker-Meikle's research interests focus on the relationship between animals and humans, particularly in medicine and natural history. She received her PhD from University College London, and published Medieval Pets (Boydell & Brewer, 2012), the first social and cultural study of companion animals in the medieval period. Since then, Kathleen has focused on the history of medicine and its intersections with animals, from snake bites to materia medica. Kathleen has published on medieval toxicology, pharmacology, and disease, and her most recent publication is:  ‘Animals: Their Use and Meaning in Medieval Medicine’, in Iona McCleery, ed., A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middles Ages (Bloomsbury, 2021).
(Note: session will last an hour).
 

ECR session on Medieval European Medical Manuscripts
Dear members, during this session we will hear from 2 PhD Candidates who are currently researching different aspects of Medieval European Medical Manuscripts.
Luthien Cangemi is a first year PhD student in Scandinavian Studies at UCL looking at Old Norse medical manuscripts. Previously Luthien studied 'The Role of Women in Old Norse Medicine' for an MPhil in Anglo-Saxon at the University of Cambridge and a masters in “Medicine in the Medieval Germanic Tradition: Health, Body and Illness in the Old Norse language and Literature” at the University of Padova. 
Læknir ok Lægbók: The Materia Medica in Old Norse Manuscripts
 
Located at the farther north of Medieval Europe, Iceland might have been geographically at the periphery of the Christendom but was certainly not isolated from a cultural viewpoint. Icelandic materia medica is one of the results of this cultural exchange, revealing a syncretism of local and foreign traditions, which includes but not limited to Classical medical treatments, Judeo-Christian formulas, and traditional elements such as runes, otherworldly beings and heathen gods.
 
This multitude of elements denounces a cultural encounter between the Continent and Iceland which affected local conceptions of health and illness. The re-negotiation of health and illness in the materia medica and the employment of certain remedies might help us to map a route of circulation of Mediterranean medical practices and theory in the North. Scholarship has convincingly argued for an Old-Danish-Norwegian route of circulation of medical practices in Medieval Iceland; however certain remedies seem to closely resemble the content of Old and Middle English medical miscellanies. In this paper, Luthien will address this lack in scholarship in an attempt to provide insights into a possible English-Norwegian stream of circulation of medical knowledge in Medieval Iceland.
 
Vanessa Da Silva Baptista is a third year part-time doctoral candidate with the UCL Department of History, London supervised by Professor Sophie Page. Her research focuses on magic tricks and chemical experiments as a form of domestic entertainment and play in the later Middle Ages. She is particularly interested in ideas of play, experimentation, entertainment, knowledge making and knowledge recording. 
 
Her paper will introduce magic tricks as a category of medieval recipe literature in fourteenth and fifteenth century medieval manuscripts. It pays particular attention to the medical manuscripts that collected magic tricks to determine what types of magic tricks medical practitioners collected and why. 
 
 

Please join us on Thursday, June 24, for the next meeting of the working group on Medieval European Medical Manuscripts:

 
Manuscript to print and print to manuscript: medical knowledge in transition
Revised update to this week's meeting: 

In this session we will look at some of the ways in which medical knowledge that circulated in medieval manuscripts transitioned to medical knowledge that circulated in printed books...and then sometimes made its way back into manuscript.  
The session will begin with a very short overview of the transition of medieval medical manuscripts to print. Winston will then talk about the production of Macer Floridus in print, followed by Lori talking about a late 16th-century manuscript that contains a comprehensive rewrite of medieval medical texts that were already circulating in print.  Both will address the ways in which medical knowledge that circulated in medieval manuscripts transitioned to medical knowledge that circulated in printed books...and then sometimes made its way back into manuscript.
Dr Winston Black (Gatto Chair of Christian Studies, St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia) will present on his research into the textual history of the De viribus herbarum of Macer Floridus, a herbal written in the eleventh century that remained one of the most popular medical texts for the following five centuries. His focus today will be on various changes made to the text in its transfer from manuscript to print in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Dr Lori Jones (Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, Carleton University, Ottawa) will present some of the findings from her postdoctoral project that centres on Wellcome Collection MS 674, a late 16th century manuscript that contains rewritten medieval medical treatises. Lori will highlight some of the major changes that were made to the regimen of health and a plague treatise, showing how the manuscript writer bypassed contemporary printed books and instead made the effort to update and modernise medieval texts to suit his (or her) early modern worldview. 
 
 
 

Medieval and early modern recipes: circulation, transmission, organisation. In this session we will compare and contrast the different ways in which manuscripts were used to organise, transmit and circulate knowledge of medical recipes from the medieval to early modern periods. What can be gained from observing manuscript recipes across this broad time period?
Prof Iolanda Ventura, Associate Professor, Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna
"Around the Ricettario Fiorentino: Manuscript Collections of Recipes in the National Library of Florence".
 
Dr Elaine Leong: History department, UCL, London
“In Parcells Transmitted”: Recipes and loose paper slips in Early Modern England. 
This paper introduces a collection of recipes on loose paper slips gathered by two 17th century Cornish gentlewomen - Margaret Boscawen and Bridget Fortescue. It pays particular attention to materiality, archival practices and ideas of ephemerality and permanence. 
 
Helmut Klug has made his paper from the April meeting, "Cooking Recipes as part of the medical tradition," available for working group members. See the file below.

In this month's meeting we will be exploring the theme of recipes, food and cookery:
The earliest English culinary recipes, and other dietary advice in the Old English medical collections
Debby Banham: Affiliated lecturer, Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic University of Cambridge, Director of Studies, Murray Edwards College
Banham will discuss a paper she is currently writing on the diet and medicine in the early middle ages. Culinary recipes are almost non-existent for the period, but she is currently working on a paper on those that do appear in medical collections:
When Faith Wallis and Giles Gasper published the *salsamenta pictaviensia* (‘sauces from Poitou’) from Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College manuscript Δ. 3.6 (Durham, twelfth century), there was much excitement about these being the ‘earliest English culinary recipes’.
They are indeed the earliest discrete block of culinary recipes yet found in a manuscript from England, but they are by no means the earliest culinary recipes *per se*, as a number are found in the vernacular medical collections compiled in England before the Norman Conquest. Like the Durham *salsamenta*, these are prescriptive rather than descriptive, that is, they do not tell us what people were eating at the time, but what the medical authorities of the time thought people ought to eat.
This paper will present these earlier recipes in the context of other contemporary dietary advice from medical collections, and investigate how food and drink were believed to contribute to health in early medieval England. It is clear that there was no general concept of ‘healthy eating’ in the modern sense, rather each recipe was intended to contribute to the treatment or management of a particular condition.
But it is possible to detect general principles behind them, and it will be of particular interest, from the point of view of intellectual history, to consider to what extent these are influenced by what is broadly understood as ‘humoral theory’.
Cooking recipes as part of the medieval medical tradition of the Middle Ages
Helmut W. Klug, Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung - Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities:
Klug co-manages a similar group with a focus on medieval German knowledge and practical texts in relation to medieval culinary history. He has been researching medieval cooking recipes since 2006, focussing particularly on Early New High German cooking recipes. 
Medieval cooking recipes are strongly related to medieval medical theory. Medieval chefs can easily be regarded as members of the medical profession - and at the beginning of Modern Times they start living this role. The presentation will provide a short introduction to the medical background of cooking recipes and outline the role model of a medieval chef. The portraits are based on Early New High German cooking recipe collections. These will be presented in an overview on the tradition context of handwritten recipe collections before 1500. These findings will be aligned with other vernacular medieval cooking recipe collections.
 
 

Our next meeting on 25.2.21 will be hosted by Laure Miolo. a Cambridge
University Fellow who completed her Phd in Medieval History in 2017 based on
scientific medieval manuscripts of the Collège de Sorbonne, their owners and
users from the 13th century to the early 16th century.

Autograph and authorial astronomical/astrological manuscripts

This paper will focus on a specific aspect of manuscript studies, which is
the autograph, whether it is autograph notes or a whole manuscript. Although
a large number of medieval manuscripts contains marginal annotations, short
texts, or other additions due to external readers, the identity of these
hands remains often unknown. However, in some cases, the historian and
paleographer is lucky enough to distinguish a specific hand and put a name on
it. In fewer cases, the signature of the medieval scholar appears, and the
identification is easier. As others, medieval astronomers and/or astrologers
have left records in codices, and for some of them their handwritings are
clearly recognisable. Although marginal autograph annotations and texts are
less studied, they deserve more attention as they reveal scientific
practices, working methods, habits, and readings. The study of
practitioners’ autographs allows a better understanding, not only of their
practices, but of the elaboration of their texts and private libraries. I
shall focus here on three case studies of astronomers/astrologers at work and
their manuscripts, ranging from the late 13th century to the late 15th
century. Their autograph productions include a wealth of information for the
history of science but also for the history of the book.

We look forward to seeing you soon.  A reminder with the link to join will be
sent before the meeting.

For our March meeting we are considering running a session oriented around
teaching using medieval manuscripts. If you have any perspectives you would
like to share with the group on how you have used manuscripts as objects in
classes, please get in touch with me (j.nurse@wellcome.org) or any of the
group owners. We are looking for a mix of practitioners/scholars who could
share 10 minutes on top tips.

28th January:     Setting the scene: the Osler’s François II de Rohan manuscript and Wellcome Western MS. 626 (Mary Yearl, Anna Dysert, Faith Wallis, Elma Brenner, Julia Nurse). To view the digitized manuscripts, see:
Osler: https://archive.org/details/McGillLibrary-osl_medical-recipes-health-regimens_WZ240F825m1515-18875
Wellcome: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/eu3ym7su/items?canvas=5&langCode=fre&sierraId=b1879175x&source=viewer%2Fpaginator
Agenda:
Overview (Elma): Presentation of the working group and its aims (5 minutes)
Introductions (all members): (10 minutes)
Osler MS (Faith): Preliminary presentation on the Osler MS and Francois de Rohan (10 minutes)
Wellcome MS (Julia and Elma): Preliminary presentation on the Wellcome MS, its herbal content and images (Julia) and recipes (Elma) (10 minutes)
Discussion