Een nuttelike practijke van cirurgien: Geneeskunde en astrologie in het Middelnederlandse handschrift Wenen, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, 2818 (review)

This book may remind historians of the graduate-school assignment in which the student is given a single document and told to write a paper. Erwin Huizenga has written a massive doctoral dissertation that is an exhaustive examination of a single manuscript, codex 2818 of the Austrian National Library. The work shows a brilliant fascination with every aspect of the medieval manuscript—its production as a material object, its function as a repository of medical and astrological/astronomical knowledge, and its place in a particular sociocultural context.

Codex 2818 is a composite volume of medical and astrological texts, in Middle Dutch rather than Latin, that circulated widely in late medieval Europe. It has received little attention from specialists in either medieval Dutch literature or medicine. There is no published edition, and Huizenga makes clear that he is not providing one because the text is “simply too long” (p. 17). Rather, his five-hundred-page work reflects medievalists’ interest in how texts were produced, circulated, and transmitted, and the milieus in which they were written and read. To explain how MS 2818 came to exist and how it functioned, Huizenga uses three approaches. First, he gives a detailed description of the physical object: the paper, watermarks, ink, handwriting, illustrations, binding, and so on. Second, he inventories the contents. The manuscript presents problems of textual identification because it is a compilation of texts copied from other Middle Dutch manuscripts and/or translated from Latin originals. Every textual fragment may have undergone its own historical development, significant for the compilation as a whole (p. 359). Although many of the texts in MS 2818 are identified in Ria Jansen-Sieben’s Repertorium van Middelnederlandse artes-literatuur (1989), Huizenga goes much further: with great exactitude he describes each folio, title, genre, incipit, explicit, length, and contents; he remarks on linguistic features, and refers to other manuscripts and studies as well as to his own text chapters. The longest of the texts is the well-known Chirurgia magna of Bruno da Longoburgo. Others are more obscure: for some, MS 2818 contains the only known Middle Dutch version. Huizenga’s third approach involves the historical context and comparisons to other medical and astrological tracts. For Dutch readers he discusses late medieval medical practice, the social status of practitioners, and professionalization and institutionalization. On these topics American readers have direct access to the works of Nancy Siraisi, Luke Demaitre, Faye Getz, and Michael McVaugh, among others cited by Huizenga.

To summarize Huizenga’s conclusions: MS 2818 was produced about 1490, though it could have taken years to write. It was probably compiled as a reference book by a Dutch-speaking medical practitioner in Brabant, east of Brussels. The compiler was familiar with astrological and medical texts, but is unlikely to have had a medical degree; rather, the use of vernacular and the presence of surgical as well as medical content point toward a surgeon. This second-rank “learned master” chose to copy only mainstream Latin and Arabic sources used in Europe for centuries, rewritten, reworked, and translated (p. 305). Yet Huizenga intriguingly suggests that the compiler did not actually write the manuscript: careless mistakes in the texts were introduced by the single scribe who wrote almost all of it; errors may also have been present in the sources from which the scribe copied, but he did not correct them as a learned medical practitioner surely would have. It is likely that the practitioner/compiler ordered the manuscript for his personal use.

How certain can we be that Huizenga’s conclusions are correct? He admits that they are based on circumstantial evidence, but proposes them as the most acceptable hypothetical explanation. While other interpretations cannot be ruled out, as long as there is no other information, he sees no reason to prefer them (pp. 291–94). It is humbling for...