Ricettari medico-farmaceutici medievali nella Francia meridionale

At first glance, medieval medical/pharmaceutical recipes have an overpowering sameness to them: for such-and-such ailment, you take (Recipe) these ingredients, prepare them in this fashion, administer them thus, and, with God’s grace, you will be cured. This edition of three collections of recipes and the treatises bound with them admirably demonstrates how close linguistic study can illuminate these apparently unrewarding texts.

Maria Sofia Corradini Bozzi has edited the overlapping core of three late-medieval medical compilations from southern France: MS Princeton, Garrett 80, fourteenth century; MS Auch, Archiv. Dép. du Gers I 4066, first half of the fifteenth century; MS Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, mid-fifteenth century. Each contains a collection of medical recipes and a prose abridgment of Macer’s De viribus herbarum (as well as a version in verse in the Chantilly MS). An Occitan version of Thesaurus pauperum is found in the Princeton and Chantilly MSS. The letter on regimen ostensibly written by Hippocrates to Caesar is found in both the Princeton and Auch collections. Corradini Bozzi signals but does not edit the religious or other medical items found in the three manuscript volumes: French and Latin recipes and excerpts from Thesaurus pauperum, all attributed to Arnald of Villanova; works on gynecology and surgery in French; and veterinary recipes and treatises on alchemy, anatomy, bloodletting, and alchemical secrets in Occitan.

Through a painstaking linguistic analysis of the manuscripts, Corradini Bozzi is able to locate the original translators and the copyists quite precisely within the Languedoc region. For the Princeton and Chantilly MSS, the original western Occitan texts seem to stem from the court of the counts of Foix, where other medical and natural history works were translated into Occitan. The copyists, however, use the southern dialect characteristic of Montpellier. The watermark of the Chantilly manuscript also suggests a Montpellier provenance. These details support Corradini Bozzi’s suggestion that these manuscripts reflect the Montpellier medical school’s special effort to train barber-surgeons in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although the original Occitan translations used in the Auch collection seem to come from the Languedoc/Gascon border, a connection to the south and Montpellier is suggested by its copyist’s Catalan usages. (It is a pity that the helpful map of the region stops just west of Montpellier.)

The work includes an Occitan glossary (conveniently keyed to the individual texts, so that it is easy to compare the usage of particular medical and pharmaceutical terms across manuscripts), and a reverse Italian-to-Occitan index. Future volumes will contain related recipe collections in manuscripts now in Cambridge, Basel, and Italy and will provide a lexicon. I hope the lexicon will go beyond the glossary and give us a detailed name and subject index to the thoughtful introduction and the texts. It would be good to be able to track down, for example, the medical authorities cited by some texts, the charms and prayers that form part of many remedies, the saints invoked, and the remedies that are claimed to have been proven by experience.