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  • Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays
  • Walton O. Schalick III
Margaret R. Schleissner, ed. Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays. Garland Medieval Casebooks. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. xii + 212 pp. $34.00.

“To a medieval reader, books were not just texts; they were texts incarnated in unique, particular sequences and shapes” (p. 128).

In the West, the fourth century of the new era saw the transition to consistent use of the codex, first attested to by Martial in the first century. Since that time, the codex’s portability and ease of citational access have made its adoption one of the most revolutionary steps in modern man’s intellectual evolution. Yet to create a tome was a costly enterprise, requiring much coordinated activity. Consequently, the study of the codex, qua physical entity, remains fundamental to our understanding of medieval and Renaissance history. This is particularly true in the case of medicine, for the source of the medieval, learned physician’s social authority was his manipulation of texts, of manuscripts. The study of the physical objects themselves is crucial to our appreciation of medieval medicine.

This volume addresses that topic by analyzing the modes of production and distribution of medical knowledge in manuscripts, the relationship of that knowledge to practice, the reflection of the actual or intended audience in that knowledge, and the impact of vernacularization on the texts. The book includes nine essays, an index of manuscripts, and a general index. The genesis of all but two of the essays was in three sessions on manuscript sources of medieval medicine at the 1992 Kalamazoo medieval conference. The two additional pieces (by Faith Wallis and Debra Stoudt) were solicited by the editor. The essays are divided between discussions of ongoing projects and more integral studies.

Among the former is Peter Murray Jones’s excellent paper on the implications for our understanding of the fifteenth-century practice of medicine of a rare, commonplace, medical book. Jones’s methods are textual as well as codicological. The analysis provides a window into the practical utility of textual material culled by an individual practitioner, including several case histories. More programmatically, [End Page 144] Bernard Schnell describes an ongoing study of medieval German fachprosa (this material appeared in German in 1994). 1 He emphasizes the need for a categorical analysis by chronology and geography of each vernacular manuscript in order to more appropriately base future literary and sociohistorical studies, now called der überlieferungsgeschechtliche Ansatz . He briefly exemplifies his programmatic with the six extant twelfth-century German manuscripts highlighting the impact of monastic medicine. On a smaller scale, Faith Wallis’s “Medicine in Medieval Calendar Manuscripts” provides a tantalizing and preliminary summary of her study of medieval computus manuscripts, referring to manuscripts made up of very practical treatises that aided the scholar in time calculations and calendar construction. She concentrates on two manuscripts to suggest the variable analysis of these composite manuscripts, showing how the “halo” texts (more peripheral to the computus enterprise—e.g., medical texts) were often quite intentionally ordered about the core texts on a thematic basis. Less codicologically, John Riddle’s “Manuscript Sources of Birth Control” consolidates some of the material in his Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (1992), arguing that medieval scholars knew that emmenagogues could also act as abortifacients, that some of these drugs have biomedical effects commensurate with their intended use, and that medieval women probably took these remedies. Finally, Linda Voigts’s essay updates readers on the eagerly awaited Voigts-Kurtz Catalogue of Incipits of Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English (VK). She provides tabular summaries of the locations, topics, and authors. VK will actually improve upon TK, 2 in adding indices of the 7,700 textual witnesses (200 Old English, 7,500 Middle English), accessing them not only by author, title, and subject, but also by translator, TK number, and manuscript. She concludes with suggested topics for future study.

Of the more integral articles, Gundolf Keil’s “The Textual Transmission of the Codex Berleburg” briefly illumines the heritage of a fifteenth-century manuscript, well known for its illustrations, that is a composite...

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