Meg Leja writes…
Our study this month takes up the fundamental codicological question of why. Why do medical texts appear on certain pages in a manuscript? Is there a reason that they were inserted there and not elsewhere? What was the significance to the ordering of texts within the codex? As many of our blog readers will already know, these questions are central avenues by which we as historians hope to gain access to past mentalities, and they are also often impossible to answer with a high degree of certainty.
The manuscript under examination is St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. sang. 124, a codex of 179 folios (with pages numbering 3–360), written by multiple hands.[1] Its dating has been consistently set to the end of the eighth century or beginning of the ninth. A short set of annals at the very end of the codex span the years 691 to 816, with the final commentary on a year occurring in 814 when Charlemagne’s death is noted.[2] Given the dates in the annals, and the fact that the codex is bookended with prayers in what Gustav Scherrer identifies as the “older” hand, it seems likely that the entire manuscript came together before 820, even if there remained blank pages within certain quires that were filled by later hands.
In terms of location, Bernhard Bischoff attributed the codex to Saint-Amand and suggested similarities with Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 44 (48) and links to the scribe Leodhardus of Saint-Bertin who wrote that manuscript.[3] More recently, Lawrence Nees has argued that St. Gallen should be considered a possible site of production, given that the Gospel commentary preserved in our manuscript seems to have been disseminated from that monastery.[4] Many scholars have pointed to the likelihood that the manuscript was composed in a scriptorium with Irish connections, since the Gospel commentary is part of a group of texts with Insular roots and the images found in this version of the commentary may also derive from an Insular “type” that is not well preserved.[5]
And so we come to the crucial subject of our study this month—the contents of the manuscript. There are four central texts that make up the majority of the codex:
- 7–118: a commentary on the four Gospels attributed to Jerome
- 133–306: Liber scintillarum (sometimes, but not here, attributed to Defensor of Ligugé)
- 310–326: Jesse of Amiens’ letter on baptism (written in 802 for the priests of his diocese)
- 326–56: twelve sermons[6]
Surrounding these four works are a number of shorter texts; two take up only one page, and none spans more than four pages:
- 119: on the iniquitous judge as the antichrist
- 119–123: on orthography (from Isidore’s Etymologiae)
- 125: blank
- 126–29: Charlemagne’s letter to Alcuin on fasting (Ep. 144)
- 130–32: on the eight principal vices (from Cassian’s Collationes)
- 306–307: on the exit of the soul (attributed here to Augustine)
- 308: blank
- 309: medical texts!
- 357–59: annals
There is also one page whose bottom half has been mutilated (the bottom of page 123/124), while the beginning and end of the codex (pp. 3–6, and 360) contain a number of prayers.
As one can quickly observe, there is no obvious theme uniting the various textual selections. But simply calling the work a miscellany, in a way that suggests a lack of any organizational strategy, fails to capture the intriguing intertextual play at work among the various excerpts. If we focus on the medical texts copied onto p. 309, it is possible to highlight several resonances between these texts and those found elsewhere in the codex.
St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. sang. 124, p. 309
The texts on p. 309 consist of two lists—the first, a list of Egyptian Days that begins without a title and announces two days for every month, from January through December. Egyptian Days (as the blog post by Bram van der Berg noted, https://cemlm.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2024/05/31/mmotm-8-paris-bn-nal-1616/) were days on which it was considered dangerous to perform bloodletting, take medication, undertake a new venture, and so forth, although this information is not explicitly mentioned in our manuscript. The second text is another list, also from January through December, titled A reckoning of which potions we ought to use in each month. Beside each of the twelve months is one or two ingredients (herbs, roots, seeds, spices, and resins) that should be made into a drink—though, again, no instructions are provided except a note on when to gather the ingredients.
The page that directly precedes our medical lists is blank, but before that is a text titled Item sancti Augustini de exitu anime. This is a short (and terrifying!) explanation of what occurs to the soul after the death of the body, including the battle waged by various “enemies” for the soul’s fate. Though attributed to Augustine, it is not from his works; indeed, the transmission history of this work remains murky, but a similar version can be found in both St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. sang. 146 (s. IX) on pp. 178–82 and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 6330 (s. IX), on fols 50r–51r. In light of this short treatise’s subject matter of—the end of the temporal life and the separation of the fragile soul from the body—we might assume that the compiler was moved to include the medical texts with a thought to the preservation of the physical body. After all, the agenda of both the Egyptian Days and the monthly potiones was to ensure that an individual could avoid life-threatening behaviors and also inculcate healthy habits of a prophylactic nature throughout the course of the year. A similar monthly list, found in Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, pal. lat. 485, highlights the bodily protection provided by these tonics in its title: “Here begin the times that ought to be observed for the health of the body” (Incipiunt tempora pro sanitate corporis quae observare debeant).[7]
Alongside this interest in the life and death of the body, there stands a second thread connecting our page of medical texts to other works within the codex. This is the recurrence of a particular emphasis on liquids.[8] The monthly potiones naturally depend upon the concept of a health-giving drink, even if the ingredients (and thus properties, qualities, or virtutes) of said drink change throughout the year and its seasonal fluctuations. Such medical tonics can be found in a whole range of early medieval manuscripts and are not unusual. What is more unusual is the focus on liquids in the pseudo-Jerome commentary on the four Gospels located at the beginning of the codex. Here, at the start of the exposition, each of the four evangelists is paired not only with one of the four elements, four virtues, four cardinal directions, and—as is most famous—four animal figures from the vision of Ezekiel but also with one of the four rivers flowing from Paradise and one of the four paradisical liquids.[9] This move to connect the rivers and liquids to the four Gospel writers was not typical. Such connections do not appear in Latin patristic authors like Augustine, Jerome, Gregory the Great, or the Greek tradition.[10] They do appear in a select group of Hiberno-Latin Biblical commentaries, which includes this pseudo-Jerome text.[11] And without any link to the evangelists, the rivers and liquids appear in the Latin version of the Vision of Paul, where the river Phison is associated with honey, the Euphrates with milk, the Tigris with wine, and the Gihon with oil.
Not only are the paradisical liquids invoked at the very start of St. Gallen 124,[12] but this is also the only surviving Latin manuscript to contain illustrated figures of the four evangelists with their paired liquid.[13] In these illuminations, Matthew is linked with honey; John with wine; Luke with oil; and Mark with milk.[14] Is it thus possible that the scribe of the regimen list was drawn to include a text about potiones in this manuscript because of the focus on salubrious liquids (water, wine, oil, milk, and honey) at the opening of the codex? To be sure, none of the potiones call for the inclusion of wine or honey—although these were common ingredients in medical preparations—so the hypothesis may be stretch. At the same time, it is difficult to ignore the theme of consumption across the manuscript (the letter on fasting, the medical drinks, Cassian on gluttony) as well as the theme of flowing liquids (the rivers of Paradise, the water of baptism, the body-preserving drinks).
The start of Mark’s Gospel: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. sang. 124, p. 88
Finally, of course, we could consider the ways in which medical metaphors crisscross the codex, with baptism being referred to as a type of “spiritual remedy” for original sin, and Cassian’s text on the vices invoking notions of sin as a type of disease.
In sum, I am far from being able to put forward a decisive rationale as to why one page of medical material was included in a codex that, in general, is focused on moral development and spiritual growth. However, it is equally clear that the medical writings are not completely out of place or stark non-sequiturs. It is itself noteworthy that our anonymous scribes did not judge Egyptian Days and monthly potiones so unusual or strange that they could not be fitted into this compendium of knowledge. And, after all, what fun would it be to study early medieval history if our manuscripts did not leave us with such opaque puzzles to untangle?!
[1] Gustav Scherrer, Verzeichniss der Handschriften der Stiftsbibliothek von St. Gallen (Halle, 1875), 44–45. See the digitized manuscript at: https://www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/csg/0124
[2] St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. sang. 124, p. 259. According to Lawrence Nees, Frankish Manuscripts: The Seventh to the Tenth Century (Brepols, 2022), 2: no. 45, the annals are part of the original codex.
[3] Bernhard Bischoff, Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts (mit Ausnahme der wisigotischen), 3 vols (Harrassowitz, 1998–2014), 3: 5583; Bernhard Bischoff, “Panorama der Handschriftenüberlieferung aus der Zeit Karls des Großen,” in Das geistige Leben (Schwann, 1965), 238.
[4] Nees, Frankish Manuscripts, 2: no. 45.
[5] Robert McNally, “The Evangelists in the Hiberno-Latin Tradition,” in Festschrift Bernhard Bischoff zu seinem 65. Geburtstag (Anton Hiersemann, 1971), 111–22; Jennifer O’Reilly, “The Hiberno-Latin Tradition of the Evangelists and the Gospels of Mael Brigte,” Peritia 9, no. 1 (1995): 290–309; Nees, Frankish Manuscripts, 2: no. 45.
[6] For a discussion and edition of these, see Stephen Pelle, “An Edition of an Unstudied Early Carolingian Sermon Collection,” Journal of Medieval Latin 23 (2013): 87–160.
[7] Vatican City, BAV, pal. lat. 485, fol. 13v.
[8] Thanks to Beatrice Kitzinger for this suggestion.
[9] See Eze. 1:10 and Rev. 4:7 for the creatures that became associated with the four evangelists: man, ox, lion, and eagle.
[10] See the articles by McNally and O’Reilly (above).
[11] In addition to pseudo-Jerome’s Expositio quatuor evangeliorum, these texts include: pseudo-Isidore, Liber de numeris; pseudo-Bede, Collectanea; the Liber questionum in evangelium; and the Irish Reference Bible. See the works in n. 10 (above) for these references.
[12] See St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. sang. 124, p. 12.
[13] Carl Nordenfalk argues that these images share an early Christian ancestor with an illumination in a sixteenth-century Persian text of Tatian’s Diatessaron: “An Illustrated Diatessaron,” The Art Bulletin 50 (1968): 119–140.
[14] The illuminations are found on pp. 7, 66, 88, and 100.