Claire Burridge writes…
A ninth-century collection of canon law may not seem like the type of environment in which you would find medical recipes… And yet, like so many of the manuscripts featured in CEMLM’s handlist, we keep finding medicine in these kinds of unexpected contexts. So, this month’s post takes a closer look at Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M. p. th. f. 146, a colourful canon law collection produced in the first third of the ninth century in the Mainfranken region around Würzburg.
Canon law and related texts, such as a canon law glossary, cover fols 3r-112v, making up essentially all of this 113-folia codex (see Fig. 1 for a selection of pages from the main part of the manuscript). The codex has featured in the publications of quite a few eminent historians, manuscript specialists, and philologists, including Bernhard Bischoff, E. A. Lowe, Rosamond McKitterick, and Elias von Steinmeyer, just to name a few.[1] Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the text added to one of its opening flyleaves: a series of medical recipes.
These recipes, seen in Fig. 2, appear to have been added in the late tenth or early eleventh century, at least a century and a half after the manuscript was produced. Interestingly, a series of non-medical additions (mostly liturgical, biblical, and encyclopaedic excerpts) was made at roughly the same time to the final flyleaves, which suggests that, perhaps, by about the 980s, this relatively antiquated codex was seen as more useful for jotting down notes – scratch paper – than its original purpose. Or perhaps it could have served both of these functions as a legal collection-cum-notepad (…would that make it the first legal pad?!).
While questions concerning where, why, and by whom medical texts were added are always of interest to those of us on the CEMLM and/or MINiTEXTS teams, in this blog, I want to highlight two other features on this page of recipes: glosses and ingredients.
First, as you might be able to see in Fig. 2, many interlinear glosses have been inserted into the first recipe: each of these added terms provides the name of an ingredient in the vernacular. We see, for example, that the Latin nepeta (catmint) is glossed with the Old High German vuizminza, that aneti semenis (dill seeds) is glossed with tilli samo, that origano (oregano/marjoram) is glossed with tofto, that cauli semenis (cabbage seeds) is glossed with chol samo, and so on.
While these types of interlinear vernacular glosses were often added to recipes a few generations after they were originally copied (and can thus shed light on the changing linguistic landscape of early medieval Europe), in this case, it looks like they would have been immediately necessary. In the final lines of the very long first recipe (Pulvis contra omnes febres et contra omnia venena et… (‘A powder against all fevers and against all poisons and…’)), as well as in the short recipe that follows (Infusio capitis (‘An infusion for the head’)), a number of ingredients were written in Old High German rather than in Latin. At the end of the first recipe, for example, tilles samo and dofto appear in the main text, sitting alongside Latin terms, such as feniculi semen (fennel seeds), apii semen (celery seeds), and petrosilini (parsley). The handful of ingredients in the infusion present a similarly mixed picture.
This linguistically mixed list of ingredients suggests that the scribe had a handle on both the Latin and vernacular words for many ingredients – did they use them interchangeably? Did they accidentally switch into the vernacular after starting in Latin and then feel the need to gloss the earlier Latin terms? Alternatively, did a later reader add the glosses, realising that the mid-recipe code-switching might cause confusion to someone trying to follow its instructions?
While it may be impossible to provide a definitive answer to these questions, it is interesting to note that the glossed ingredients all represent fairly humble, potentially local herbal products. A quick glance at the recipes might therefore suggest that they reflect what Carine van Rhijn has called ‘kitchen table medicine’ – that is, simple preparations relying on ingredients that could have been sourced locally. A closer look, however, reveals the presence of many exotic ingredients: cinnamon, ginger, cloves, etc.
Among these non-local pigmenta (spices), two stand out: zaduar (zedoary) and galangan (galangal). These two ingredients, both members of the ginger family, do not appear in classical and late antique medical texts and first appear in the West in Carolingian recipes as well as a handful of records relating to elite gift exchange and trade. Additional recipes from this period testify to the introduction of other ingredients, such as camphor and ambergris – ingredients that had long been used in the East and would go on to play significant roles in western pharmacy over the following centuries.
Strikingly, these newly recorded ingredients often appear to travel together, and, based on an extensive survey of Latin recipes written between c. 750-1000, I have identified two primary ‘ingredient clusters’, one of which consists of zedoary and galangal, the pair seen in our first Würzburg recipe. The ways in which these ingredient clusters travel – and the appearance of newly recorded ingredients outside their clusters – have major implications for understanding the dissemination of pharmaceutical knowledge during this period. That these clusters can be found in such unexpected contexts, like the flyleaves of a canon law collection, illustrates the importance of CEMLM’s work: the more traces of medicine we can find, the richer our understanding of early medieval cultures of healing becomes.
For more on newly introduced ingredients and their significance, check out Claire Burridge’s Open Access article in the latest issue of History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals (67.1), a special issue on ‘Pre-Modern Pharmacy between Theory and Practice’ edited by Petros Bouras-Vallianatos.
[1] For a full list of publications that refer to this manuscript, see: http://vb.uni-wuerzburg.de/ub/mpthf146/ueber.html.