Gripla - 20.12.2018, Qupperneq 58

GRIPLA58
Etymologies, the age of seventy is specifically stated as the end of maturity
and start of old age – though Isidore does not connect the humours to
the different ages of man.94 there are several strong indications that the
Etymologies were well known in medieval Iceland, although only one small
fragment written in Iceland survives: the thirteenth-century aM acc. 7
Hs 140.95 When the old norse treatise is viewed as a whole, one might
speculate that the author of the text represented in Af natturu mannzins ok
bloði amended the year to conform to his other sources, and changed the
span of maturity to seventy, instead of forty-two.
Yet another thing added in Af natturu mannzins ok bloði is an image
of a drivelling decrepit man, juxtaposed with a dribbling infant – since
they are both dominated by phlegm. old age is compared to childhood in
Vindician’s Letter as in the old norse treatise, but without any mention
of saliva.96
Conclusion
The treatise Af natturu mannzins ok bloði represents the development of the
theory of the four humours in late antiquity, and stems in part from a Latin
manuscript of an identified text, Epistula Vindiciani, a text whose oldest
witness is from the Carolingian period, the eighth or ninth century. the
origins of the treatise’s physiological section therefore predate the textual
transmission following the Salernitan medical school and the flow of new
Latin translations of arabic science during the transformative changes in
the long twelfth century in Europe – a movement that is sometimes called
the twelfth-century renaissance.97 However, the theological context that
the treatise presents is the product of the revival of the doctrine of the four
humours within Christian doctrine in the long twelfth century, and has
resonances in many other writings of that time. the old norse treatise,
94 Etym. ix. 2. 6. Isidore defines six stages in a lifetime.
95 Merete Geert Andersen, Katalog over AM Accessoria 7: De latinske fragmenter, Bibliotheca
arnamagnæana 46 (Copenhagen: reitzel, 2008), 132; on Isidore’s works in Iceland,
see Margaret Clunies ross and rudolf Simek, “Encyclopedic Literature,” Medieval
Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Phillip Pulsiano and Kirsten Wolf (London: Garland,
1993), 164.
96 It can be noted however that Galen mentions the abundance of saliva in both old men and
children, see Selected Works, 580–85.
97 On the translation movement, see, e.g., Charles Burnett, “Translation and Transmission
of Greek and Islamic Science to Latin Christendom,” The Cambridge History of Science, ed.