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.