Macer Floridus, De Viribus Herbarum and a Leechbook containing 162 medical recipes, in Middle English and Latin, including Middle English verse, decorated manuscript on vellum

Provenance

1. Written for an English medical practitioner, c. 1450.

2. R. Wystone, probably of London, whose signature appears on fols. 62v, 64r, 66v & 91v, that on fol. 66v accompanied by a partly erased note in untidy hand with distinctive reversed 'e', recording the gift of the manuscript to him: r.wystone is owner of this booke / in anno 1593. & mr fletwade / & mr recorder of Londone gave / it mee (in 1593 the Recorder of London was Edward Drew, who held the office from 1592-4 and was closely associated in a number of legal cases with one of his immediate predecessors in the role, William Fleetwood). Copious annotations in margins in same hand throughout, mostly of formula: note this next to various medicines, with occasional note this and make it or good & use it.

3. John Lean, with his signature on fol. 95v, and used by him in the late eighteenth century for pen trials whilst writing legal documents: see fols 32v, 34r, 35r, 36v-8r, 42r-3r, 44v-5r, 46v.

Text

Macer Floridus' De Viribus Herbarum ('On the powers of plants') is one of the earliest surviving natural history texts from the Middle Ages. It cannot be known when it was composed, but existed by 1112 as the historian Sigebert of Gemblaux (who died in that year) comments on it. Its author is even more obscure, and it is likely that the name Macer is a pseudonym, aiming to echo the name of the Roman author Aemilius Macer (d. 15 BC.) who was an associate of both Virgil and Ovid. The twelfth-century Dresden manuscript (Sächsische Landesbibliothek, MS. Dc.160) has the name of Odo of Meung added to it, and it has been thought that this eleventh-century physician may have composed the text. That here is the Middle English translation (edited from Stockholm, Kungl. MS. X.91 by G. Frisk, A Middle English Translation of Macer Floridus de Viribus Herbarum, 1949). Beginning with the words here foloweth the wyse and connyng clerke Macer which treteth and openly sheweth the nobill vertues worthy and commendabill p[ur]purces of many and diversis herbis, the text contains descriptions of the medicinal properties and uses of 102 plants, including Garlyk (number 5), Ffenell (number 14), Wylde malowe (number 23), Corianndre (number 32) and hemlok (number 39).

Of particular interest here is a non-medical, bibliographic recipe at the end of list of the potential uses of the poisonous plant wormwood, advising its use to make ynke agenst [ie. which will repell] the gnawing of mouse or ratte (fol. 5r).

Frisk edited the text from eight manuscripts (Stockholm, Kungl. X.91, vellum, mid fourteenth century and from collection of Queen Christina of Sweden; Oxford, Bodleian, Rawlinson C. 81, paper, mid fifteenth century; Bodleian Digby 95, paper, fifteenth century; Bodleian Hatton 29 (previously Hatton 43), vellum and paper, fifteenth century; Cambridge University Library, Ee.1.15, paper, fifteenth century; London, British Library, Sloane 2269, paper, c. 1400; Sloane 2527, paper, late fifteenth century; and Addit. 37,786, vellum, first half of fifteenth century); of which only two are on vellum, and a third a mix of paper and vellum. The present manuscript is apparently unknown to scholarship.

The second text is that of a Leechbook or medical manual. It opens with a complete contents list and a lengthy verse preface, beginning:

A man that woll of Lechecraft leere

And practise medecynes thrghe godds grace

Rede ou[er] this boke and he may leere

To save mannes lyffe in divers place ...

The text contains 162 medical prescriptions, including numerous examples for hedde ache and tothe ake, including a rather gruesome one on fol. 71r: ffor the tothe ake th[a]t cometh by wormes (fol. 71r). Medical recipes for a vast array of ailments follow including a number of eye-complaints, bad-breath, gout, sore backs, the flux, a number of swellings, a cure for a man who speketh in his slepe (fol. 71r), as well as much more serious and gruesome problems such as stab wounds, snakebites and the bite of an eron (ME erayne, poisonous spider; from Ariadne), for the canker of various parts of the body, and rather alarmingly for a man th[a]t pisseth blode (fol. 72v).

It appears to be a complicated patchwork of recipes and prescriptions from England and further afield, some of which can be traced back to a pre-Norman Conquest past. The charm to do away with tooth pain on fol. 78r, containing the line supra petram marmoriam sedebat, is a descendent of those found in British Library, Harley 585 (c. 1000, England) and Bodleian, Junius 85 (mid eleventh-century, England) (see T.O. Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, 1864-6, I: 394 & III: 64). Another clearly English addition can be found in the medicine used by the goode Erle of Hertforde for his owne case (fol. 91r). Yet the presence of a recipe for an antidote to the bite of a poisonous spider suggests that this text may in part descend from one written in the Mediterranean or further to the south, or perhaps from medical texts from the ancient world.

The text is known from only two other manuscripts: London, Wellcome Institute, Misc. Medica MS. 16 (vellum, early fifteenth century), and British Library, Sloane 2584 (c.1450), and the text of the verse introduction is edited from the latter by R.H. Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, 1952, pp. 95-6.