Carine van Rhijn writes…
The manuscript of this month, Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek 751, is a big, well-known medical compendium dating from the ninth century. It is full of famous texts by famous people, and since it has been described by Beccaria, it is not in our handlist.[1] While many of the texts that fill its 500 pages have received substantial scholarly attention, I would like to focus on something a bit different today. Even in this famous medical collection there is anonymous, unknown and sometimes overlooked material that is, all the same, part of early medieval medicine and cultural history. This includes a text that travels under a series of different titles (or, more often, under no title at all) and discusses the many useful things one can do with the various body parts of a vulture.[2]
In our manuscript, the text appears as just one chapter of a collection of hundreds of recipes, among remedies for fractured skulls, painful testicles, snake bites, teary eyes and the like. Chapter 330 on p.408: Incipit de vulturio quod medicina in se habent. An early reader clearly found it worth marking the text in the margin: [M]ultas in se habet [v]irtutes vulturis corpus – The vulture’s body contains lots of good things.
Lots of good things, indeed. The ca. 250-word text explains how its skull, wrapped in a wolf pelt, helps against migraines, while its eyes, wrapped in a fox pelt, relieve pain of the eyes. So far, so good: it is not hard to see why the compiler of this receptary considered this to be a good fit among the other material. In the last section of the text, however, the themes start to move away from physical ailments. If you have a fox pelt already, why not wrap the vulture’s heart in it, too? It will chase away demons. Its feathers can also do marvellous things: tie them to the left leg of a woman in labour, and she will deliver her baby quickly and easily. The vulture’s feet and claws, thrown into a house, will make sure that no maleficia can ever do any damage there. What we have here, then, is a powerful, multi-purpose bird with not only medical, but also anti-demonic powers that can offer protection against dark arts. This is just a small selection of the possibilities mentioned in this text – everything one single vulture can do is surely worth the effort needed to catch one.
Our vulture and its wonderful properties has not been received very widely in the scholarly literature, and does not feature much in studies of early medieval medicine. Loren Mackinney, who published an early article about this treatise, and included a transcription and translation of the text on the basis of the copy in Paris, Bn,F Latin 9332, thought it was more magical than medical. He suggested that these vulture remedies reflected early medieval ‘unwritten folk medicine and magic’, apart from material by Pliny the Elder and Sextus Placitus.[3] However, A. A. Barb, reacting to Mackinney’s publication in 1950, pointed out that there were also very similar texts about the vulture in Greek, which, in his opinion, definitely had older sources. This led him to believe that the Latin and Greek texts both went back to ‘some ancient Egyptian treatise’.[4] So instead of the vulture lore of illiterate Franks, we might be looking at much earlier, Egyptian knowledge that ended up in early medieval Latin manuscripts via Greek intermediaries. And voilà: an enormous rabbit hole opens up – does our vulture tract have Egyptian ancestors and Greek relatives? And how did it manage to turn up in Sankt Gallen?[5]
The picture is even more complex than this because there is a growing corpus of manuscript witnesses to this text that show varying degrees of relatedness. As it turns out, there are eleven manuscripts with some version of the vulture treatise that were written before ca. 1250, and no two versions are the same.[6] They vary in length from eight body parts/recipes to some twenty; what each body part can do also differs. That the feathers lead to easy childbirth is just one option; in another manuscript, the feathers chase serpents; in yet another one, they get rid of omnia mala (‘all bad things’); and in another, they cure morbus regius (jaundice). In at least one relatively late case, moreover, a version of the text has been inserted into a copy of Pliny’s Natural History, replacing Pliny’s original (rather short) chapter on vultures.[7] And this does not even take into consideration the dozens of individual recipes that include some vulture body part in other early medieval medical compendia. Once you start to look for vultures, they are all of a sudden everywhere.
The compiler who slotted the vulture text into his recipe collection, then, was not doing anything out of the ordinary, for clearly vulture-based remedies were pretty mainstream. I do not think it makes sense to think about this material in categories such as magical, superstitious, ‘folklore’ and the like, for these are modern categories (and mostly value judgements, too) very far removed from the way in which early medieval compilers dealt with them. This material should, therefore, get its place within the history of (medical) knowledge, feathers, claws and all.
[1] See Augusto Beccaria, I codici di medicina del periodo presalernitano (secoli IX, X e XI) (Rome, 1956), pp. 372-381, and further notes via https://e-codices.ch/en/list/one/csg/0751#details
[2] The oldest known witness of the text, in Paris, BnF, Lat. 9332 (s.VIIIex) transmits it in the form of a letter to the king of Rome; here it is titled ‘Incipit epistula vulter’. A much later witness, Paris, BnF, Lat. nouv. acq. 229 (s.XII) presents the text as a no-nonsense tract, titled ‘Si vis scire quantam habeat vultur de medicamine’.
[3] Loren C. Mackinney, ‘An unpublished treatise on medicine and magic from the age of Charlemagne’, Speculum 18 (1943), pp. 494-96.
[4] A.A. Barb, ‘Miscellaneious notes. 2. The vulture epistle’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950), pp. 318-22.
[5] These questions cannot be answered at the moment, but I plan to investigate the text further and publish on my findings in future.
[6] A thorough overview of most (but not all!) of the manuscripts can be found in Rainer Möhler, Epistula de vulture. Untersuchungen zu einer organotherapeutischen Drogenmonographie des Frühmittelalters, Würzburger medizinhistorische Forschungen 45, Mittelalterliche Wunderdrogentraktate IV (Horst Wellm Verlag Pattensen, Hanover, 1990).
[7] For instance in the 13th-century manuscript Paris BnF Latin 6799, spotted by Tim Hertogh.