Meg Lega writes…
As we leave summer behind us, I hope you took advantage of sage and rue, and wild celery and grape flowers! I am sure you steeped them in boiling water to create an infusion – or muddled them with some alcohol to craft your own version of a medieval cocktail.
You may have guessed correctly that our manuscript of the month deals with regimen. But before we dive into codicological details, one quick note: certain types and/or quantities of rue can be toxic, so please take the above with the humor intended.
To our manuscript: Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (ACA), Ripoll 59, a codex of 306 folios written in Caroline minuscule around the turn of the millennium in Catalonia and held at the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll.[1] The majority of the manuscript contains a collection of Priscian’s works, including his Institutes of Grammar and his treatise On Noun, Pronoun, and Verb. As Paul Dutton and Anneli Luhtala have demonstrated, following these works are approximately 30 folios containing glosses and commentary on Priscian that were composed by John Scottus Eriugena in the mid-ninth century.[2] At the end of the codex are a few works ascribed to Bede: a text on the division of times and extracts from Bede’s On the Reckoning of Time; and on the very last page (fol. 306v) there is a short extract from Quintus Serenus’s poem of medical cures.[3] The regimen part of the codex fits well, thematically, with these scientific works associated with Bede and the medical text yet is found earlier in the manuscript, after the initial work by Priscian.
Folios 195r to 200v contain a calendar, wherein each page is one of the twelve months. Along the left side of the page is listed the dates of the month; beside each day is noted important events in Biblical history, saints’ days, dates from Church politics (related to bishops or popes), and astronomical movements (such as the position of the sun). At the very bottom of each month is a short set of instructions on regimen for that period of time. Importantly, the regimen information is consciously framed within and not outside the red square surrounding each month of the calendar. This indicates that the information was not added later but was rather consciously conceptualized as part of the pertinent information for each month as the calendar was being mapped onto these folios. Why is this significant? Because many other regimen texts that appear in our CEMLM Handlist and in Beccaria’s and Wickersheimer’s catalogues are simply lists of the months with even shorter instructions for that month’s appropriate activities. These lists lack the calendrical format but assume the same overriding importance of the annual cycle of the twelve months.
Barcelona, ACA, Ripoll 59, fol. 195r (month of January)
In the Barcelona case, the regimen is relatively fleshed out, including not only the type of herbal drinks I mentioned above (potiones) but also notes about bloodletting, bathing, purging, diet, unguents, and sexual intercourse. For example, in the month of March, the reader is told to “drink pennyroyal, use sweet things, and especially drink a sweet potio. Take cooked lamb and roots prepared with roasted lamb. Let blood right under the skin. Make habitual use of warm things. Purge the head from the stomach. Use a relaxing unguent. Drink betony and anise.”[4] The advice is framed at the beginning and end by potiones (even though the herbs recommended differ). Otherwise, all of the behaviors or practices exist on a horizontal playing field, with none seemingly more urgent or important than another. Indeed, there might even be the suggestion that there is some flexibility within this list, so that people can still be adhering to health protocols without fulfilling every single stricture.
Many of these recommendations bear strong or even precise similarities to regimen recommendations in other early medieval manuscripts. And here we see the importance placed on potiones in particular. In many other contemporaneous manuscripts, regimen appears primarily as a simple list of drinks beside the twelve months of the year. Sometimes the term potiones is used in a title and sometimes it is only implied. No instructions are ever given for how to prepare these drinks (unlike my initial suggestion, we do not find alcohol mentioned but that does not mean it was never used!). It is likely that oral communication, experience, and observation supplied the necessary information about whether to infuse, mince, or muddle the herb and in what type of liquid. It is also possible that the mode of preparation was not believed to be of particular significance, as long as the herb was ingested (how frequently throughout the month we also do not know – daily, weekly, or simply semi-regularly?).
In terms of direct comparisons, we find that for the month of January, for example, our Barcelona calendar urges the use of ginger and rhubarb, which is exactly what appears in another manuscript in the CEMLM Handlist: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. sang. 124 (ca. 820, Saint-Amand), a liturgical and patristic collection with a monthly potiones list at p. 309.[5] Ginger and rhubarb were also added to the margins of a calendar (similar to the calendar in our Barcelona manuscript) for the month of January in a further CEMLM manuscript: Zurich, Zentralbibliothek, Car. C 176, at fol. 163r (this section dates to ca. 1000, St. Gallen). Finally, the very same substances are the ones listed alongside January in the Lorscher Arzneibuch (ca. 800, Lorsch), where a potiones regimen appears at the bottom of fol. 8r.[6]
St. Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. sang. 124, p. 309
It may seem as though the shorter regimen lists must have evolved out of the longer calendrical versions of the regimens. However, it is equally possible (as far as we know at this point, lacking critical editions of so many early medieval manuscripts) that the evolution went in the opposite direction, or that both forms existed alongside one another. Certainly, we have more extant examples of the list-type than the calendar-type.
At first glance these lists may appear to be emblematic of an early medieval rejection of medical theory. They evoke an empirical focus on herbs and their warming or cooling properties, with the assumption that the herb counters the prevailing environmental conditions at different times of year (best represented by the frequent directive to use a potio with cinnamon in November). However, if one concentrates less on the discrete information at play in each month and more on the overall logic of the monthly regimens, as witnessed in our Barcelona calendar as well as the monthly lists, one notices a strong and consistent theoretical framework. The driving rationale is the discernment of time. As the famous Pseudo-Hippocratic Letter to Antiochus states, in order to achieve good health, it is necessary to learn “about the discernment of time and… what you ought to use or avoid.”
Regimen lists echo this line in the Letter to Antiochus, either in their titles (if they have them) or in their instructions. As opposed to recipe texts, which tend to focus on the observation of the body, these regimens highlight the observation of time. In other words, recipes frame themselves as responses to diseases, pains, or evils that are observable the body through signs; an individual has to pay attention to the physical in order to know which recipe to apply. Even the textual format of the recipe underscores this, with its repetition of the phrase Ad + condition (e.g., Ad dolorem capitis, Ad febrem, etc.). By contrast, the regimens focus not on the body or the material world but on structures that might go unnoticed, like the regular passing of the months. No change is necessarily detected within the body at these moments, and yet an individual carefully discerning times ought to know to adopt a change in habits.
So as with all good natural medicines: drink up while the right ingredients are in season!
[1] See Marina Passalacqua, I codici di Prisciano, Sussidi eruditi 29 (Storia e Letteratura, 1978), 10–11; Zacarías García Villada, Bibliotheca patrum latinorum Hispaniensis II/1, nach den Aufzeichnungen Rudolf Beers bearbeitet und herausgegeben von Zacharias García S. J. (Hölder, 1915), 34–35.
[2] Paul Edward Dutton and Anneli Luhtala, “Eriugena in Priscianum,” Mediaeval Studies no. 56 (1994): 153–163.
[3] On this and other Ripoll manuscripts, see Cullen Chandler, Carolingian Catalonia: Politics, Culture, and Identity in an Imperial Province, 778–987 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 189–228.
[4] Barcelona, ACA Ripoll 59, fol. 196r: In hoc vero mense polledium [pulegium] bibe, dulciamenta usita, et primo dulcem pocionem bibe. Agrum coctum et radices confectos assa agno usita, sanguinem inter cutaneum minuare, callidum usito, caput de stomaco purgare. Unguentum calasticho [calastica, as found in the Gynaecia] utere. Vetonica aut pipinellam bibere.
[5] See the digitized manuscript at https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/csg/0124/309/0/Sequence-316
[6] See the digitized manuscript at https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00140785?page=,1