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This paper presents the newly rediscovered ‘Syriac Galen Palimpsest’. The manuscript has been subjected to the latest imaging techniques, which has allowed scholars to identify its undertext as containing a Syriac translation of Galens Book of Simple Drugs. After discussing the history, imaging and identification of the manuscript, we proceed to consider its significance for our understanding of the transmission of Greek medical lore in Syriac and Arabic, for which the Book of Simple Drugs serves as a convenient model. Several common misconceptions,regarding the Syriac medical traditions are addressed, including the assumed inferiority of the Syriac translations, compared to the Arabic ones, and the role of Syriac as an intermediary between Greek and Arabic.
Hybrid creatures emerging from the pages of Old English medical texts readily capture the modern imagination. A powerful medicinal root in an Old English herbal is rendered with distinctly human arms and legs; a swarm charm inscribed in the margins of Bede’s Old English history addresses bees as Valkyrie-like beings; an entry in the compilation known as the Lacnunga identifies a wayside plant as both herb and mother. Yet the most powerful forms of hybridity in the Old English healing tradition are more subtle and pervasive: linguistic hybrids of Latin and vernacular, cultural hybrids fusing Christian liturgy and Germanic lore, and generic hybrids drawing simultaneously from an ambient oral tradition and an increasingly ubiquitous culture of writing. Hybrid healing seeks to meet such textual hybridity with a methodological hybridity of its own. Drawing from a range of fields including historical linguistics, classical rhetoric, archaeology, plant biology, folkloristics, and disability studies, a series of close readings examines selected Old English medical texts through individually tailored combinations of approaches designed to illustrate how the healing power of these remedies ultimately derives from unique convergences of widely disparate traditions and influences. This case-study model positions readers to appreciate more fully the various forces at work in any given remedy, replacing reductive assumptions that have often led early medieval medicine to be dismissed as mere superstition. By inviting readers to approach each text with appropriately diverse critical frameworks, the book opens a space to engage the medieval healing tradition with empathy, understanding, and imagination.
reflection of an impulse to reproduce medical lore that had been highly valued in England for centuries. ‘three (or four) manuscripts’: beyond periodization For more than a century, the Harley 6258B has almost always been omitted from standard lists of Old English manuscripts. It is, for instance, nowhere to be found in Neil Ker’s Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon , and, at least partially on this basis, the Harley 6258B has been treated tangentially ever since. To the extent that the manuscript is
, another important aspect of early medieval medical lore. Heather Maring’s study of ‘hybrid poetics’ offers the fullest exploration to date of the ways by which traditional language can activate liturgical contexts within ritual performance. As but one example, Maring analyzes images of light in Lyric VIII of Christ , especially the ‘soðfæsta sunna leoma, / torht ofer tunglas’ [‘truth-fast radiance of the sun, bright beyond the stars’]. More than a mere metaphorical representation of the poem’s theological understanding
multiple times into Castilian, and when printing began it circulated even more widely: Rivera and Rogers compare various Spanish versions in their diplomatic edition. 4 Margaret Parker traces its trajectories in Spain, where it was expanded into an adventurous family romance by Lope de Vega. 5 It travelled from Spain and Portugal to the Americas, where abridged versions were translated into Mayan and appear in three Mayan community books, amid calendrical and medical lore
. Building from previous scholarship that has addressed productive connections between healing charms and rhetoric at a general level and numerous studies devoted to identification of rhetorical devices within vernacular verse in particular, 6 the present exploration isolates the particular mode of verbal discourse within the broadly conceived genre of medical lore involving persuasive speech directed toward plants. After a brief examination of such rhetoric within medieval healing practice more widely, this chapter then explores the
pathology steeped in Pliny, Hippocrates, Celsus and Galen. 39 Once again, the sonnet exists by itself as an unsequenced, stand-alone poem reflecting on the art of Englishing and the literary status of the ensuing work. Baldwin’s sonnet is the sole paratext between the title page and the table of contents, and it serves as an encomium to and a defence of Langton’s book of medical lore