Please join us on Thursday 26th May. We are delighted to welcome back Dr Winston Black (St Francis Xavier University), who will speak on “Towards a New Edition of Macer Floridus: Making Sense of Two Hundred Witnesses”. * Please note that this session is one hour long *.
Abstract:
The verse herbal of Macer Floridus, De viribus herbarum, was one of the most popular medical texts of the Latin Middle Ages. It survives in over two hundred manuscript witnesses from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, and was translated into every European vernacular. Despite its ubiquity, the Latin original has been little studied and there has been no edition in nearly two centuries. Ludwig Choulant’s 1832 edition presents an organized herbal of 77 poems, with the implication that this was the work read by medieval students of herbal medicine. This is the work that most scholars of medieval medicine use to understand Macer Floridus, but there are serious flaws with Choulant’s version. For the last decade, Winston Black has been gathering materials toward a new edition of De viribus herbarum, as a successor to his 2012 edition of Henry of Huntingdon’s Latin verse herbal Anglicanus Ortus. In this presentation Dr. Black will share some highlights of his research into the textual traditions and reception of Macer’s herbal, demonstrating that it was not a stable text, differing only in individual readings, but a constantly shifting mosaic of poems, glosses, and commentary designed to fit the needs of the scribe or audience. The kaleidoscopic nature of “Macer” poses significant challenges for the creation of a new edition, and Dr. Black will discuss his goals for an edition worthy of the twenty-first century and explore some questions about the practical and theoretical approaches to publishing such a mercurial text.
Biography:
Winston Black is the Gatto Chair of Christian Studies at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he pursues research and teaches courses on religion, medicine, and intellectual culture in Medieval Europe. He has published extensively on medieval herbalism, medical manuscripts, and the intersections of theology and medicine in the High Middle Ages. This includes his edition of Henry of Huntingdon’s Latin verse herbal Anglicanus Ortus, the document collection Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West, and the popular volume The Middle Ages: Facts and Fictions. He is currently writing Herbalism and Pharmacy in the Middle Ages: A Case Study for the University of Toronto Press, and co-editing with Dr. Lucy Barnhouse a volume of essays for Trivent Press called Beyond Cadfael: Medieval Medicine and Medical Medievalism, both due out in 2023.