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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)