Anglo-Norman Medicine, Vol. 1, Roger Frugard's "Chirurgia" and the "Practica Brevis" of Platearius (review)

Medieval medical texts in European vernaculars, long eclipsed by the Latin literature, are drawing increasing attention. They shed light on bookish learning as well as on folk traditions. The latter were sampled by Tony Hunt in Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England: Introduction and Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), with a host of receipts largely drawn from a manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge. Now the transmission of learned medicine is illuminated by Hunt’s edition, from the same mid-thirteenth-century manuscript, of Anglo-Norman translations of two Latin “textbooks.” The Trinity College codex further contains Anglo-Norman versions of shorter scholastic treatises, which will appear in a second volume together with a general introduction and index. The present volume consists of separate editions, with little thematic or linguistic correlation, of the two texts.

The Practica brevis was probably compiled between 1120 and 1150 by Johannes Platearius II from the experiences of his father and other masters in Salerno. The Chirurgia was a redaction, by Guido of Arezzo in the 1170s, of lectures that Roger Frugard had given at Parma. These treatises document not only the common characteristics but also the distinct branches of medical teaching as it developed independently in southern and northern Italy. They share a direct concern with practice and a clear appreciation of theoretical underpinnings. Both compilations preserve authoritative knowledge, yet neither leans heavily on Greek authorities or reflects Arabic influences beyond those disseminated by Constantine the African. On the other hand, the topical comprehensiveness, rational structure, and therapeutic range of the practical compendium stand in typical contrast to the surgical textbook’s focus on injuries, preference for physical descriptiveness over logical neatness, and omission of dietary and internal remedies.

The Anglo-Norman version of the Practica brevis, which may come from France rather than England, adheres closely to the Latin. The more distinctly insular translator of the Chirurgia was hampered by a defective exemplar and personal limitations such as the inability to recognize the surgical scraper, chisel, and other tools. Precision may not have mattered much if the version was intended less for instruction than for edification, as would appear from the drawings that illustrate the text in the Trinity College manuscript. It is worth noting that these have been published in The Medieval Surgery (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992) by Tony Hunt, who is dispensing the riches of a Cambridge cornucopia with a dispatch uncommon in scholarly circles.