Please join us on the 16th December for the next session of the Medieval European Medical Manuscripts working group, with Elma Brenner (Wellcome Collection) and Peter Murray Jones (Cambridge) on the theme of 'People and the medical manuscript: endorsement, authorities, owners, patients'.
The session will feature two papers (details below).
Details:
'People and the medical manuscript: endorsement, authorities, owners, patients'
16th December 2021, 4pm-5.30pm (GMT)
'Practitioners, patients and trust in experience' (Peter Murray Jones)
Late medieval manuscripts owned and used by practitioners to record successful medical treatments were not the sort of book regularly preserved in libraries. A few English examples do survive, nevertheless, and the treatments found in these books were generally expressed as case histories or in recipe form. These records bring us as close as we can get as onlookers to the practice of healing. Personal names crop up in these practitioner books to give authority to remedies, to testify to successful practice on patients, to witness to the circulation of recipes, or to remind the practitioner of the circumstances in which remedies were tried out. On the other hand efficacy phrases (e.g. probatum est, experimentum est) might suffice elsewhere to encourage belief in the merits of particular remedies. This talk will focus on one manuscript owned and annotated by Thomas Fayreford (fl. 1425-50), who practised in locations in the south west of England. British Library, Harley MS 2558, contains two ‘tables’ – or remedy collections organised by ailment – written in Fayreford’s hand, one medical, one surgical. The medical one is headed (in Latin) ‘Table on the ‘practica’ written after the ‘Circa instans’ section of this book, collected by Thomas Fayreford and based both on a great deal of experience, and also on what ought to be tried out God willing’. He recorded his remedies indiscriminately in Latin and in Middle English, with a small admixture of Anglo-Norman. His manuscript contains besides his own work a variety of other texts in earlier hands, many of which also had their share of recipes, to say nothing of those added later by owners in the margins or in blank spaces. Harley MS 2558 is available in digital form at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_2558
Peter Murray Jones is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and an affiliate of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge. His research has focussed on medicine and alchemy in late medieval England, working primarily with the evidence of surviving manuscripts. He is currently writing a book titled 'The Medicine of the Friars', to be published by York Medieval Press.
'Traces of people in manuscript recipe collections: authorities, scribes and family connections' (Elma Brenner)
While manuscript recipe collections from late medieval Europe are often clothed in anonymity, with no extant information about who compiled the collection or wrote it down, people – whether named or not – actively feature in these compendia. This talk considers the place of people in a small number of vernacular French manuscripts held by Wellcome Collection, focusing above all on Western ms. 626, a parchment and paper volume produced c.1470 containing the Livre des simples meìdecines (the French adaptation of the Circa instans), followed by a collection of recipes and a medical glossary in French, with further recipes in Latin and French by contemporary or later hands. A number of the recipes are attributed to named authorities such as Simon of Pavia; other recipes were composed for named individuals, including Jean de Bourbon, abbot of Cluny between 1456 and 1485. The manuscript itself reflects the interventions of multiple individuals, potentially within a monastic community: the finely written and illuminated Livre des simples meìdecines sits alongside recipes and other texts added by a range of less formal hands, from the late fifteenth century into the sixteenth century. A very different manuscript, Western ms. 221, was begun by a named individual, Étienne Cristian, in 1463 and continued by Antoine Cristian, potentially Étienne’s son or grandson, from 1521. The pocket-sized volume includes notes relating to family history alongside medicinal recipes, suggesting that this was a family compendium of practical medical knowledge and other information. Further recipes, many artisanal in nature, are added by seventeenth-century hands, raising the possibility that further generations of the Cristian family continued to use the notebook. The talk explores the collaborative nature of manuscript recipe collections and the traces left by their creators and users.
Dr Elma Brenner is a Research Development Specialist at Wellcome Collection, London and an associate member of the Centre de recherches archéologiques et historiques anciennes et médiévales at the University of Caen. Her research explores health, religious culture and the history of the book in medieval France and England. Among her publications are 'Memory and Commemoration in Medieval Culture' (co-edited with Meredith Cohen and Mary Franklin-Brown, 2013), 'Society and Culture in Medieval Rouen, 911–1300' (co-edited with Leonie V. Hicks, 2013), 'Leprosy and Charity in Medieval Rouen' (2015) and 'Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages: From England to the Mediterranean' (co-edited with François-Olivier Touati, 2021). She is Co-Editor of Social History of Medicine and one of the convenors of the CHSTM working group on Medieval European Medical Manuscripts.
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