Carine van Rhijn writes…
This month’s manuscript is a full-on medical compendium, a codex filled with medical texts from cover to cover. It is a great example to illustrate one aspect of our project, which is to investigate what exactly people considered to be medicine in the early middle ages. Traditionally, much attention has been paid to texts which are either by the Great Names of Late Antiquity (Galen, Hippocrates), or are medical in ways which people still recognise today (recipes, tracts, descriptions of diseases), and a lot less to texts which do not tick these boxes. This is, I think, a mistake. But first: a brief introduction to this somewhat battered and intensively used book.
Beccaria (no. 50, pp. 199-202) dates the codex to the first half of the ninth century, notes ‘various hands’ and is somewhat confused by its structure because of its interestingly re-shuffled quires. He also tells us that the book has had such an adventurous life that it lost its head and tail, and probably quite a bit more than that: the collector Gerard Meerman in the eighteeth century catalogued it with 169 folia. Today 111 are left. Prime suspect for ‘disappearing’ nearly a third of the book is a certain Mr Thomas Phillipps of Middle Hill, Worcestershire, who bought the book in 1824. It was sold on to the Prussian government some sixty years later, and it has been in Berlin ever since. During its stay at Middle Hill, the book was re-bound and labelled on the back with the title Excerpta ex Hippocrate et Galeno manuscripta.
The manuscript has been digitised here. The description in the side-bar shows how the most recent cataloguer distinguishes eight codicological units, and that recipes and other bits and pieces have been added in the course of the early middle ages. The order of things is, indeed, something of a puzzle, with bits of the same text – not necessarily in the right order – turning up in various parts of the codex. No wonder Beccaria was confused.
Let’s look at the contents. Contrary to what the title on the back promises, only four out of twenty texts (according to Beccaria’s counting) are by, or ascribed to, either Galen or Hyppocrates. There is Galen’s Epistola de febribus (f.29r-32r), a curious letter about virgins wrongly ascribed to Hippocrates[1] (f.32v-33v), another pseudo-Hippocratic letter about the interpretation of urine (f.50r-v)[2], and an excerpt from the first book of Galen’s Ad Glauconem de medendi methodo (f.89r-103v).
The main contents of the book, however, consists of several recipe collections (some of which have been edited by Sigerist[3]), a substantial medical compilation, and a block of so-called lunaria.
Here we come to material usually not considered to be ‘real’ medicine by historians. The idea behind lunaries is that the 30-day cycle of the moon can help predict elements of the future, in this case health-related ones. Such ‘medicine’ is nowadays usually supposed to belong to the realm of superstition, ‘pagan remnants’ or otherwise dubious traditions of knowledge. In our manuscript, we have a block of no less than six different lunaries starting on f.40r, five of which are medical. The beginning of the first one looks like this:
This is a so-called birth lunary, which tells you the future health (and some other characteristics) of a child born on each day of the moon. So: a child born on the first day of the moon will be lively, on the second day a bit less so, on the third day not at all – et cetera. The four lunaries that follow are all concerned with health[4]: number two is a combined illness-dream lunary (for instance: ‘A person fallen ill on this day will recover soon, and what you dream will have no meaning’); number three a more extensive illness-lunary (which is, incidentally, also ascribed to Galen!); number four is a super-brief illness lunary; number five is also an illness prognostic, but organised by the signs of the zodiac (so: Who falls ill in the sign of Pisces will have pain in their feet – could this be an early ancestor of Zodiac Man?).
The people working with this medical compendium, in other words, did not only have recipes and cures on offer, but also ways of predicting the course of an illness with the help of the moon or the signs of the zodiac. Such astronomical prognostications were part of the medical toolkit in the original compilation, and there is no reason to assume that this material was taken any less seriously than the recipes and other instructions. How exactly we should imagine the use of these health lunaries is a different question, however, because no two of them offer the same predictions for any day of the moon. But that is a story for another time.
[1] See Pearl Kibre, ‘Hippocrates Latinus: repertorium of Hippocratic writings in the Latin middle ages’, Traditio 35 (1979), pp, 273-302, for this letter p.288. This is the only manuscript in which this letter has been conserved.
[2] Not listed in Kibre.
[3] Henry Ernest Sigerist, Studien und Texte zur frühmittelalterlichen Rezeptliteratur (Barth, 1923), pp. 65-76.
[4] The sixth one is a dream lunary.