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Introduction The Middle English Gilbertus Anglicus consists for the most part of medicinal recipes, grouped according to the diseases for which they were useful. These recipes in turn were arranged roughly from the head downward, with the text divided into chapters that are introduced by simple guides for diagnosis. The text also defined for its readers many Latin medical terms. The Gilbertus translation shares material with other Middle English recipe collections, although it is not clear whether the Middle English or Latin version of the Compendium was the source of this shared material. The recipes found in the Middle English Gilbertus derive almost exclusively from the Latin exemplar, and thus cannot be said to be characteristic of "folk" medicine. Nor can those Middle English recipe collections that share material with the Middle English Gilbertus (as many seem to) be labeled as such. Instead, the Middle English Gilbertus and those collections that share material with it would seem to represent a popularization and simplification of Latin medical learning.1 Not every recipe from every collection had a learned origin: these collections are 1 Major sources for information about the scope and development of the Middle English medical text are as follows: Linda Ehrsam Voigts, "Medical Prose," in Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), pp. 315-35; H. S. Bennett, "Medicine," in English Books and Readers, 1475-1557, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 97-109; Rossell Hope Robbins, "Medical Manuscripts in Middle English," Speculum 45 (1970): 393-415; Voigts, "Scientific and Medical Books," in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375-1475," ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 345-402. xv xvi MIDDLE ENGLISH GILBERTUS ANGLICUS themselves compendia from a variety of sources, especially from other recipe collections. But the Middle English Gilbertus must be regarded as representative of a larger trend in late medieval English vernacular literature as a whole: the production in manuscript form of a body of useful knowledge for popular consumption. It is, in short, a very early example of the "self-help" manual, derived from learned Latin sources.2 The Wellcome version of the Gilbertus translation is of special interest for several reasons. It provides excellent evidence of how a medieval manuscript was rearranged, divided, and corrected. It is unique among manuscripts of the Gilbertus text in that it contains numerous illuminated initials, and, more important, it demonstrates how the scribe edited his more complete exemplar to remove most references to the diseases of women and children, to travel, and to the use of animals and animal parts in medicinal preparations. The type of binding, the illumination, and the scribal editing indicate that the Wellcome Gilbertus, unlike other witnesses, was probably produced in a monastic house.3 This edition places one witness to the Middle English Gilbertus in its historical and textual context. It demonstrates that the Middle English Gilbertus is a translation of a Latin exemplar. It also shows how one manuscript was prepared, how this manuscript relates to others containing the same text, and how the translation was incorporated into various compendia. It also shows how Middle English recipe collections share material with the Gilbertus translation, and how that shared material can be traced to earlier Latin sources. Finally, it places the 2 The increase in availability of information in the vernacular that took place in England from the beginning of the fifteenth century suggests that the printing press, rather than marking the onset of demand for such material, instead accelerated an already existing demand: Faye Marie Getz, "Gilbertus Anglicus Anglicized," Medical History 26 (1982): 436-42. On the nature of this demand, see Getz, "Charity, Translation, and the Language of Medical Learning in Medieval England," Bull. Hist. Medicine 64 (1990): 1-17. German scholarship into the production of useful knowledge in the vernacular is quite developed. See Volker Zimmermann, Rezeption und Rolle der Heilkunde in landessprachigen handschriftlichen Kompendien des Spiitmittelaiters (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1986). See also Jerry Stannard, "Rezeptliteratur as Fachliteratur," in Studies on Medieval Fachliteratur, ed. William Eamon, Scripta 6 (Brussels, 1982): 59-63. More general are Bennett, "Translations and Translators," and "Trial List of Translations into English Printed between 1475-1569," in English Books and Readers, 14741557 , pp. 152-77,277-319. For the early modern period, see Paul Slack, "Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature of...

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