Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 222

220 GRIPLA
The obscurity concerning the textual relationships among the six man-
uscripts is quite commonplace in the study of medieval medicine in the
vernacular, as Faith Wallis points out, because it often results from the
specific production culture of medical texts in the Middle Ages.50 As
opposed to medical texts within scholastic education, which were more
uniform, medical texts in the vernacular and those from earlier times when
medicine was not taught through institutions were “subjected to radical
and unabashed reworking, dismemberment and de-authorization.”51 The
rewritings were tailored to their individual specific purposes and contexts,
and because pharmacology was the most popular subject within medieval
medicine, that is where “the most disturbed textual traditions are found.”52
This poses a problem for the modern scholar striving to deduce from the
extant material what people in the Middle Ages knew and believed. But,
as Wallis points out, the selection and reorganisation in each medical
manuscript are “not mechanical or random; choice and arrangement al-
most invariably mean something,” and this rearrangement communicates
information about their users and purpose.53 Despite sharing the same
topic and having many similarities, the six manuscripts exhibit notable dif-
ferences in terms of their size, style, and content, which speaks to the dif-
ferent interests and aims of each maker or owner. Within the group, one
(696) appears to have formed a part of a substantial, handsome codex with
more or less unabridged clauses from the original material, Harpestræng’s
pharmacology; judging from the length of the clauses and the fragment’s
quarto size, it was possibly intended as a manual. Another (673) consists
of only twenty-seven lines of selected short cures, scribbled unevenly like
notes within an older manuscript. The third (194) can be characterised as a
type of florilegium, where medical content is presented alongside other en-
cyclopaedic knowledge encompassing diverse subjects. The youngest two
manuscripts (434 and D), although small in size, are lengthy, and seem to
50 Faith Wallis, “The Experience of the Book: Manuscripts, Texts, and the Role of
Epistemology in Early Medieval Medicine,” in Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical
Traditions, ed. Don Bates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 102–107.
51 Ibid., 125. On this topic, see also Peter Murray Jones, “Medical Books Before the Invention
of Printing,” in Thornton’s Medical Books, Libraries and Collectors: A Study of Bibliography and
the Book Trade in Relation to the Medical Sciences, ed. Alain Besson (London: Gower, 1990).
52 Wallis, “The Experience of the Book,” 109.
53 Ibid., 105.