Next week I am giving a paper on medical letters in Oslo at the workshop Medical Additions & Healing Practices in the Early Middle Ages. In my talk I will be speaking about how the famous Letter of Pseudo-Hippocrates to King Antiochus keeps turning up in different forms in both medical and non-medical contexts. It is a good excuse to revisit one of the two appearances by the letter in our Handlist of ‘new’ manuscripts containing medical texts: Munich BSB clm 29688 (formerly 29134).
The Letter is a simple little thing. The author urges the recipient to pay attention to wisdom about healthcare, and then proceeds to outline common conditions and possible cures, starting with afflictions of the head and heading down the body. Hippocrates himself almost certainly didn’t write any version that has survived in Greek or in Latin translation, not least because he died before Antiochus (or Antigones) was king. The Greek version is attributed to Diocles of Carystus, which is plausible enough. None of the many Latin versions are straight translations of the Greek text, and so they probably represent multiple translations of multiple now-lost Greek versions and/or an exciting interest in elaborating simple Latin medical texts. The fact that it was sometimes anonymous and sometimes recognised as pseudonymous – and either way certainly not Christian – possibly made it an easy target for revision and experimentation. Several of the Latin versions have never been edited and those that have been edited haven’t been done very thoroughly, so good luck disentangling it all.
Anyway, I am going to focus on the oldest surviving Latin manuscript because… well, medievalists often like the oldest manuscripts. But it also highlights some fun things about the Letter.
The manuscript, no. 107 in our handlist, is a single page formerly used as a flyleaf, once at St Emmeram’s in Regensburg and now kept in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. It almost certainly belongs to the same original manuscript as the fragments in Munich BSB clm 15028, which contains bits of Pseudo-Apuleius’s Herbal. It is written in an uncial script (late-antique all-caps…) typical of pre-Carolingian manuscripts so it is commonly dated to the seventh century. Codices Latines Antiquiores, the go-to catalogue for dating old manuscripts, says the script is ‘not very expert but natural’, which is a highly scientific assessment and not judgy at all (cough cough).
The first interesting thing to highlight about the fragment is the association between the letter and the larger single-author medical book. It seems to have been quite common for scribes to add a letter or three to longer books as introductory material, most notably in Marcellus’s Liber de medicamentis. In fact, Marcellus used a version of The Pseudo-Hippocratic Letter in that context, so that illustrates the point nicely. He did not use our version of it, which is quite different in language and content throughout. But the crucial point is that short texts travelled around with larger texts to help readers.
The second interesting thing, hinted at above, is the chaos of text. At some point in the mists of time, our fragment got catalogued as being the Hippocratic letter to Maecenas, not to Antiochus. To be fair, they are both basically the same text, just with different words and addressees making them sufficiently distinct that even Marcellus (or a later scribe) included both in his compilation. It would be easy to think ‘oh this is like the Antiochus letter but not quite the same, so it is probably the Maecenas letter’. The text of the Maecenas letter is actually more stable than the Antiochus letter, but there is no good edition of that text either, so we can all be forgiven for working in the dark a little bit. But it is not the Maecenas letter anyway.
Digging around a little, it is possible to establish that our fragment is a close relative of an identifiable version of the Antiochus tradition, published by Laux in 1930 from an eleventh-century teaching manual with comparisons to a slightly different version in a well-known ninth-century St Gallen medical miscellany.[1] Three witnesses, three different contexts – academic gold dust. As the text is short and useful, scribes adapted it to different projects easily. It shows how late antique and medieval scribes liked to play around with their material.
The fragment was one of the first manuscripts that drew me into the history of early Latin medicine. Its not (just) that there were ‘mistakes to be corrected’. It was intriguing because the state of the field meant there was knowledge in need of systematic sorting, there were texts that required proper critical editions, and beyond that there were worlds of more conceptual issues about how people organised knowledge in the Middle Ages and thought about scientific and folk wisdom about nature. There were and are scholars such as Cloudy Fischer doing interesting work on these areas, but there is still more to be done. Even a little fragment like Clm 29688 invites a lot of questions if you poke about a bit.
[1] R. Laux, ‘Ars medicinae: Ein frühmittelalterliches Kompendium der Medizin’, Kyklos, 3 (1930), 417–34 at 430–2.