An Anglo-Norman Medical Compendium (Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.2.5 (1109)) ed. by Tony Hunt (review)

This brief work provides an edition of the medico-botanical receipts found in the manuscript of Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.2.5. While the manuscript has been mainly ignored since its identification by Paul Meyer (‘Les Manuscrits français de Cambridge’, Romania, 32 (1903), 18–118 (pp. 98–99)), the contents have now been edited in a succession of works by Tony Hunt: the medical receipts in ‘Anglo-Norman Medical Receipts’ (Anglo-Norman Anniversary Essays, ed. by Ian Short (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1993), pp. 185–96), while the prognosticatory texts found in this manuscript collection were previously published in Writing the Future: Prognostic Texts of Medieval England, ed. by Hunt (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013). The compendium published here is a corrupted translation of the pseudo-Hippocratic Capsula eburnea (ll. 1–537) and bears a resemblance to the text of the Practica (see Hunt, Anglo-Norman Medicine, II: Shorter Treatises (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), pp. 190–275); some of the receipts are equally found in other manuscripts (Hunt, ‘Early Anglo-Norman Recipes in MS London, B.L. Royal 12 C XIX’, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 97 (1987), 246–54). Following the compendium is a gynaecological treatise (ll. 538–697), De sinthomatibus mulierum, which contains similarities to a verse translation also published by Hunt (Anglo-Norman Medicine, II, 68–128). The edition contains additional receipts (ll. 698–1055) including a herbal, a dietary section broken down by month, as well as diagnostic advice on fevers and urine. While the texts are unique to this manuscript, Hunt controls the edition by making a comparison with the text of the Practica as well as with the Latin edition of this same text (K. Sudhoff, ‘Die pseudohippokratiche Krankheitsprognostik nach dem Auftreten von Hautausschlägen “Secreta Hippocratis” oder “Capsula eburnean” benannt’, Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, 9 (1916), 79–116), and provides comparative section numbers for those who wish to carry out a thorough comparison. Rejected readings are provided at the bottom of the page, although they are at times opaque: for example, the rejected readings for l. 153 and for l. 314 are identical to the reading of the text, so it is unclear what has been changed. The scribe seems to have been prone to careless repetition of phrases. As is the policy with the editions in the Plain Text Series, only very brief explanatory notes accompany the edition, which can make it difficult to understand the rationale behind some of the emendations. While the Introduction to the text is limited, readers can find a lengthier discussion of these types of texts in Anglo-Norman in a number of Hunt’s texts mentioned above, to which this work is certainly complementary.