James Palmer writes…
For this month’s ‘Manuscript of the Month’, I’m revisiting an old friend: St Gallen SB 225, a fascinating and odd late-eighth-century Carolingian miscellany.
I first encountered it during my postdoctoral fellowship, half a lifetime ago, because I was interested in early medieval ideas of time. The manuscript contains an unusual Easter table (possibly datable to 773), computistical notes, and a version of Pseudo-Methodius’s Revelations.[1] It was a nice surprise to see it crop up in our project Handlist for containing medical material the principal medicine catalogues hadn’t documented. (It’s just about too early for Beccaria and, being in Switzerland, out of scope for Wickersheimer). I hadn’t really noticed any medical material before, probably because it wasn’t really what I was looking for. It’s a perfect example of the value of the project’s work, uncovering the specialist material that sometimes lurks in plain sight.
Indeed, in this particular case the medical material was so ‘in plain sight’ that it was actually at the end of the computistical section I had studied earlier. It just hadn’t registered as ‘medical’ because I had been excited by an un(der)documented partial computistical text dated to 743. In a later copy of the same material at St Gallen, in fact, it was omitted, so it wasn’t perceived as integral to the assemblage.[2]
The text itself is one of those short pieces that gets everywhere: a punchy little bit of dietary and phlebotomy advice for each month of the year starting in March, sometimes (as here) attributed to Hippocrates. Pearl Kibre listed 38 medieval witnesses, not including this one.[3] Klaus-Dietrich Fischer has since added more, and there are of course even more in our Handlist (e.g. St Petersburg MS lat. Q. v. I. 56).[4]
That the text is commonplace doesn’t mean it’s not special in its own way. For March, for instance, it recommends sweet food and drink, with use of agrimony and roots. Most versions say that. Ours, however, also suggests use of a pennyroyal potion. Some go on to recommend the use of hot baths (which I can understand, writing in my chilly Scottish house). Ours puts that advice in February instead, along with the extra suggestion of drinking some wine. Good plan. More controversially, it suggests swapping sex for drinking wine November, which isn’t in most versions. (Don’t worry – it’s not monkish bad behaviour – this is something that comes up in this family of dietary advice’s big brother, the Pseudo-Hippocratic Letter to Antiochus).
The variation in the text highlights an intriguing theme in the field at present: the extent to which medical texts are unstable in their transmission. Once, we would have definitely said that this is because scribes were careless. In our St Gallen text, there is the odd phrase ‘contra offogationes’ which is probably more properly ‘contra suffocatione’ (against suffocation). Hmm. Latin ‘balneum’ for ‘bath’ has become ‘bagneum’. There, perhaps, the game is given away: the spelling has mutated to reflect changing pronunciation. The Italian ‘bagno’ isn’t just coming, it’s basically here.
This is, then, probably part of a living tradition, where texts are discussed and adapted in different schools over time. Whether changes are rooted in intellectual activity or medical activity is probably a moving target. Here, in a Carolingian miscellany, one struggles to imagine much of a medical context. The previous two items in the manuscript are a table outlining the age of the moon through a lunar cycle and a list of how to describe the different kinds of sounds that animals make. But that context is still telling. It illustrates, as many items in our Handlist do, how little bits of medical wisdom swirled around in Carolingian general knowledge.
[1] J. T. Palmer, ‘Computus after the paschal controversy of 740’, in D. Ó Cróinín & I. Warntjes (eds.), The Paschal Controversy of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Its Manuscripts, Texts and Tables (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 213–41.
[2] St Gallen, SB 110, pp. 511–24.
[3] P. Kibre, ‘Hippocratus Latinus IV’, Traditio, 34 (1978), 193-226 at 209–12.
[4] K.-D. Fischer, ‘Gesund durchs Jahr mit Dr. Hippokrates – Monat für Monat!’, in B. Holmes & K.-D. Fischer (eds.), The Frontiers of Ancient Science (Berlin, 2015), 111-37.