Claire Burridge writes…
After our first ‘Manuscript of the Month’ posts featured codices today held in Bern and Berlin, we’ll stick with the letter ‘B’ and head to Oxford’s Bodleian Library to consider MS Bodl. 232. I recently had the pleasure of consulting this fairly small, but utterly fascinating, manuscript in-person. On that note, I should warn readers that MS Bodl. 232 is not currently available as a digital facsimile, so I’m afraid that the following post, unlike the first two project posts, won’t have as many great manuscript images from the codex itself, but I’ve added some images for context and links to Oxford’s online resources.
Let’s begin with the basics. According to the Bodleian’s online catalogue summary, MS Bodl. 232, a composite manuscript of just twenty-eight folia, was ‘written in the 10th and 11th centuries, probably in France’. The summary also notes that hymns were added in the twelfth century to two pages (ff. 3r and 9v) and, intriguingly, f. 18 has ‘traces of a Merovingian (?) hand’. Overall, the manuscript is divided into four textual groupings: 1) calendrical writings and diagrams, 2) the aforementioned hymns, 3) medicinal recipes, and 4) a lectionary with Acts 20.7.
The record for MS Bodl. 232 in Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries provides mostly the same information, though it subdivides the third textual unit. This section is described as containing medical recipes – here, listed as occurring on ‘f. 1*’, which I eventually realised meant ‘f. 18r’ – and forms of manumission and betrothal on ff. 21v-22r.
Given that a single page in MS Bodl. 232 was recorded as including recipes, I wanted to investigate this further – what type(s) of recipes? How many? Is this section an excerpt from a known recipe collection or an otherwise unidentified composition? Are the recipes a discrete textual unit or related to neighbouring writings in the manuscript? What material is on the following folia that are not specifically mentioned by the summarising catalogue entries? When consulting MS Bodl. 232 in-person, it rapidly became apparent that the manuscript held some surprises…
For example, the catalogues do not mention that:
- The medical material beginning on f. 18r (which, it’s worth noting, does not consist exclusively of recipes) continues to the top of f. 21r (at which point the formulae begin)
- On f. 24v, a distinct hand has added a full page of recipes – and, in this case, the focus is entirely on recipes
- Two medico-magical ‘Sator Squares’ (see Figure 2 for an example in stone) have been added in the margin of f. 5r, a page with calendrical diagrams
- In several places throughout the manuscript, it appears that trimming has cut off marginal material, but I have no sense of how much has been lost and whether any of this was medical…
Needless to say, it was very exciting to find not only much more content relating to medicine than I expected, but also potentially medical elements, such as the Sator Squares (on which, see Heather Taylor’s recent piece at ‘Migrating Materia Medica’), added alongside calendrical material – a field of learning that scholars such as Faith Wallis have convincingly demonstrated is inherently interrelated to and often found in concert with texts relating to health, medicine, and prognostication [1].
Furthermore, both of the longer medical sections (i.e., ff. 18r-21r and f. 24v) are dense – my typed transcription covers ten pages, single spaced. The recipes on f. 18r begin with a treatment titled Ad farcimo, which is then followed by a potion for the same issue (Pocio ad farcim). While the first recipe uses some mineral products, including orpiment and sulphur, as well as exotic materia medica, such as myrrh, the potion presents a combination of herbal ingredients with a much more local feel: betony, agrimony, milfoil, plantain, and so on.
It appears that the term farcim(o) is from farciminum, which is commonly translated as farcy or glanders, a disease in horses that can also affect humans [2]. Fitting this potentially dual human-veterinary context, the next three recipes offer cures for worms in humans or horses (Ad uerme qui in homine uel in caballo etusant). While the modern medical understanding of farcy (a bacterial disease) clearly differs from the medieval aetiology (an affliction caused by worms), it is interesting to see a longstanding linkage with respect to horse-human health – and that, at least in some cases, the approach to healing this condition could be shared by horses and humans alike.
These human-veterinary recipes are just the tip of the iceberg, representing the first five entries out of nearly fifty on ff. 18r-21r, the vast majority of which are intended to combat various types of fevers. The eleven recipes on f. 24v then cover a wide range of conditions, from coughs to toothache to dropsy.
While there is a lot more to say about this material and the rest of the manuscript, I’ll save that for a future post. In short, I hope this brief overview demonstrates why it is so important to return to the manuscripts themselves: no matter how detailed a catalogue may be, every codex still holds some (or, as with MS Bodl. 232, many!) surprises.
Notes:
[1] See, for example, Faith Wallis, ‘Medicine in Medieval Calendar Manuscripts’, in Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays, ed. M. R. Schleissner (New York, 1995), 105-43.
[2] As an etymological aside, farciminum comes from the Latin farcio, ‘to cram, to stuff’ (due to the way the disease presents – inflammation, ‘stuffed’ nodules), and is therefore related to the English ‘farce’, a term which originally meant a ‘comic interlude in a mystery play’, i.e., stuffing!
But back to more serious matters: for anyone interested in veterinary medicine in Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, see, for example, Pelagonii Ars Veterinaria, ed. Klaus-Dietrich Fischer (Leipzig, 1980) and J. N. Adams, Pelagonius and Latin Veterinary Terminology in the Roman Empire (Leiden, 1995). On worms in human and veterinary medicine, see especially María Teresa Santamaría Hernández, ‘Una acepción medieval de uermis en Medicina humana y veterinaria a partir del morbus farciminosus tardoantiguo’, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 75 (2017), 149-86.