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Writing Medicine Differently 103
of teaching medicine through disputations. Learning must take another path.
Christians must seek urgently to master the techniques that the Antichrist
himself was prophesied to command.17 Book VI of the Opus maius applied the
methodology of scientia experimentalis to the testing of the conclusions of all
the sciences, to the prolongation of human life, and to the making of gold and
elixirs through alchemy, as well as to providing insight into past, present and
future and to illustrating the truths of the Bible against indels and heretics.
None of Roger Bacon’s writings on medicine t within established genres.18
Whether castigating the errors and deciencies of the medici or making the
case for new methodologies of prolonging life and advocating the study of
new sciences, Bacon was staking out dierent territory to that occupied by
those who taught medicine in the universities as members of an academic
guild or corporation. Some aspects of Bacon’s programme, for instance using
mathematical ratios to determine the compounding of qualities in medicine
or investigating the potential of potable gold and other pure remedies which
worked by their specic qualities, were afterwards taken up by university
teachers of medicine at the end of the thirteenth century. But they did so
within the – by then – well-established framework of writing treatise and
commentary that was produced scholastically and then itself became the
subject matter for disputation within medical faculties. Roger Bacon, on the
other hand, was doing something dierent and new in medical writing. It
is not surprising that the kind of writing he addressed to Pope Clement IV
or directed at critique of the medici was not imitated by other authors. e
polemical and expository style, with its prescriptions for extraordinarily pure
and powerful medicines to rejuvenate or delay the ageing process, was quite
distinct from that which belonged to the register of university medicine.19
Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the
Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2007), pp. 16–22.
17
Power, Roger Bacon, pp. 1–2, 11, 27.
18
See particularly e Opus majus’ of Roger Bacon, ed. J. H. Bridges, 3 vols. (Oxford,
1897–1900; repr. 1964); Opus minor, in Bacon, Opera, ed. Steele, I; Opus Tertium:
lateinisch—deutsch, ed. N. Egel (Hamburg, 2020); Secretum secretorum cum glossis
et notulis, in Bacon, Opera, ed. Steele, V; Liber sex scientiarum, in Bacon, Opera, ed.
Steele, IX. ere is a list of all works and modern editions at https://rogerbacon-
researchsociety.com/works/, accessed 17 April 2023. Still useful is J. Hackett, ‘e
Published Works of Roger Bacon’, Vivarium 35 (1997), 315–20.
19
C. Crisciani, ‘Premesse e promesse di lunga vita: tra teologia e pratica terapeutica
(secoli XIII-XIV)’, in Vita longa: vecchiaia e durata della vita nella tradizione medica
e aristotelica antica e medievale: atti del convegno internazionale, Torino, 13–14 giugno
2008, ed. C. Crisciani, L. Repici and P. B. Rossi (Florence, 2009), pp. 61–86 (p. 75):
‘sono, inne, testi scritti e circolanti fuori dal circuito universitario e non ricalcono
104 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
In England, writings of this sort, which were usually attributed to Bacon as
author even when they were not genuinely his, enjoyed exceptional popularity
from the thirteenth to the fteenth centuries. Dorothea Waley Singer invokes
‘the immense number of fourteenth and fteenth century manuscripts on
scientic subjects bearing his name’.
20
Encyclopedic writings of the friars
A second major inuence on forms of medical writing by English friars was
the compilation of moralising encyclopedias by mendicant authors, most
notably De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus OFM. e De
proprietatibus rerum was by far the most popular of these encyclopedic texts in
England, but there were others too: De naturis rerum of omas of Cantimpré
OP, the Speculum naturale of Vincent of Beauvais OP, and Liber de naturis
rerum attributed to John Folsham OP. ese works began to circulate in
England after the middle of the thirteenth century. As their titles suggest,
these encyclopedias were ambitious surveys of the properties of all things
within the cosmos, from spiritual beings down to animals, minerals and plants.
An extraordinarily ambitious and the last project of this kind was the Historia
naturalis of the Paris-trained Franciscan Juan Gil de Zamora, written before
1278. It was arranged alphabetically but left incomplete at the letter ‘A’ and
survives in only two manuscripts. Although the dierent kinds of natural
things surveyed in these encyclopedias were described comprehensively, the
purpose of the compilers was to respond to the educational needs of the friars.
is educational provision was elaborated into an institutional structure, and
this structure was broadly the same, from provincial to conventual level, within
the English mendicant orders.
21
– per stile e per lessico – I generi letterari ormai codicata della medicina scolastica’; (p.
78) ‘questi testi – che sono spesso in aperto e vivace polemica con la trattastica medica
accademica – si presentano pero come opere comunque aerenti alla medicina …il
loro stile non e argomentativo ma espositivo-prescrittivo, ricco di exempla e racconti’.
20
D. W. Singer, ‘Alchemical writings attributed to Roger Bacon’, Speculum 7 (1932),
80–6 (p. 80), based on her Catalogue of Latin and Vernacular Alchemical MSS in
Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols. (Brussels, 1928–31); A. G. Little, ‘Roger Bacon’s
Works with References to the Mss. and Printed Editions’, in Roger Bacon Essays,
Contributed by Various Writers on the Occasion of the Commemoration of the Seventh
Centenary of His Birth, ed. A. G. Little (Oxford, 1914), pp. 375–419.
21
ere is a vast literature on encyclopedism and friar-authors in the thirteenth cen-
tury. For an excellent characterisation of these works see Draelants, ‘Le ‘siècle de
l’encyclopédisme’; Iolanda Ventura argues that these encyclopedias moved beyond
describing the natural world to interpreting it, recognising for example the tensions
Writing Medicine Differently 105
e encyclopedias were to provide information which would help friars
understand the scriptures better, by explaining the terms used in the divinely
ordained texts. e encyclopedias did more than explain and illustrate these
terms, however. ey provided a discursive map (and in many ways they are
equivalent in ambition to world maps, mappae mundi) of the natural world
and its place in the cosmos. eir ambition was inclusive and totalising. e
encyclopedias were also, secondarily, designed to provide friars with material for
the writings of sermons, that is, to provide a reservoir of exempla, arranged in a
conveniently retrievable fashion. ese exempla (often exemplifying the ways of
animals or the virtues of plants or stones) were to be used to illustrate the themes
in sermons addressed variously to (1) members of their own orders, nunneries and
other enclosed communities, (2) clergy in general, and (3) most important of all,
the laity. eir use in preaching explains why the mendicant encyclopedias are
best described as moralising; the properties of things are matter for moralisation
or spiritual interpretation, not just itemisation of the world. ese encyclopedias
were intended primarily as resources for biblical interpretation and preaching,
but were, also, as it turned out, highly convenient digests of important practical
information drawn from a large range of textual authorities.
e human body and its illnesses form one subject among many for these
encyclopedias. ings which are helpful or harmful to human health – animals,
stones and herbs – are also found in other parts of the encyclopedias. For those
looking for help with diagnosing or treating illness, such information could
become useful for secular purposes, not as an aid to interpreting scripture
or to preaching or confessing, but as a means of addressing bodily needs.
De proprietatibus rerum has nineteen books in all, covering the hierarchy of
the universe from God down to the humblest matter.22 Liber IV and V deal
between Aristotle and Galen on the role of the organs of the human body (‘Bar-
tolomeo Anglico e la cultura losoca e scientica dei frati nel XIII secolo’, in I
francescani e le scienze : atti del XXXIX Convegno internazionale : Assisi, 6–8 otto-
bre 2011 (Spoleto, 2012), pp. 49–140). For Juan Gil de Zamora and his Historia
naturalis, see I. Draelants, ‘Scala mundi, scala celi de la A a la Z: claves para la
comprensión de la obra universal de Juan Gil de Zamora. Exégesis, libri authen-
tici y mediadores’, Studia Zamorensia 13 (2014), 27–70; A. Hamy-Dupont, ‘La
production encyclopédique de Marc d’Orvieto et Juan Gil de Zamora: ressources
pour la prédication’, Rursus-Spicae 11 (2017), https://journals.openedition.org/rur-
sus/1369, accessed 17 April 2023.
22
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Vol. 1 ‘Introduction générale’, ed.
B. Van den Abeele (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 4–6, for the overall contents list; Liber
III and Liber IV, ed. R. J. Long, are also part of Vol. 1; see pp. 196–7 of Long’s ‘In-
troduction’ for the sources of Bartholomaeus’s medical knowledge; I. Ventura, ‘Zur
Rolle der Medizin in der Enzyklopädischen Kultur des Mittelalters’, Graeco-Latina
106 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
with the bodily humours of humans, and the parts of the body respectively;
Liber VI deals with human life stages and matters of regimen; and Liber VII
covers illnesses from head to toe, its remedies based closely on the works of
the Salernitan author, Constantine the African. ings helpful or harmful to
human health – animals, minerals and herbs – are found in books sixteen to
eighteen. James le Palmer, who compiled his own encyclopedia Omne bonum
in London in c. 1360–c. 1375, relied heavily on Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s
De proprietatibus rerum for its entries on natural history and medicine,
despite his clearly stated antipathy to friars.23 Book seven, on illnesses and
poisons aecting parts of the body from head to toe, was a quarry for medical
treatments. omas Fayreford, c. 1425–50, copied the last two chapters from
book seven, on medicines, but without acknowledging his source, into a
manuscript designed to help his medical practice. Friar John Hatfeld recorded
his ownership, c. 1480, of a remedy book including a treatment for bad
breath. is is cross referenced to three dierent passages in book seven of De
proprietatibus rerum. At another place in the same remedy book an electuary
for use in treating the ailment of the stone is taken verbatim from book
seven.24 rough such routes recipes originally taken from De proprietatibus
rerum found their way into remedy books of householders too. Bartholomaeus
Anglicus’s work was also translated into English by John Trevisa in 1398–9,
allowing the encyclopedia to reach non-latinate readerships directly.25 As we
Brunensia 15 (2010), 107–34 (114). An overview of Bartholomaeus’s humoural
theory is to be found in I. Ventura, ‘La structure du corps humain et ses lecteurs:
le discours savant sur les humeurs dans les encyclopédies du XIIIe siècle’, in Com-
par(a)ison. An International Journal of Comparative Literature 1 (2011), 15–35; the
modern edition is proceeding, but is still incomplete. Other volumes are De propri-
etatibus rerum, Vol. 3, Liber VI, ed. J. G. Lidaka, I. Ventura and G. Zarra (Turnhout,
2022); and Vol. 6, Liber XVII, ed. I. Ventura (Turnhout, 2007).
23
L. F. Sandler, Omne Bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowl-
edge, 2 vols. (London, 1996); P. Szittya, ‘Kicking the Habit: e Campaign against
the Friars in a Fourteenth Century Encyclopedia’, in Defenders and Critics of Fran-
ciscan Life: Essays in Honor of John V. Fleming, ed. M. F. Cusato and G. Geltner
(Leiden, 2009), pp. 159–75.
24
BL, MS Harley 2558, fols. 65r–67r (Fayreford); BL, MS Sloane 2322, fols. 59r,
107r (Hatfeld).
25
M. C. Seymour, ‘A Middle English Extract of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De propri-
etatibus rerum’, Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 87 (1969), 1–25. Seymour
says (p. 1) of book 7: ‘Perhaps the most frequently consulted book of that very
popular encyclopaedia, it seems to have been preferred by the medical practitioners of medieval Europe as a general vade mecum’; M. C. Seymour, ‘A Literatim
Trevisa Abstract, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 93 (1992), 185–91, deals with a
copy of passages on arthritica, sciatica and gout only; Getz, Medicine, pp. 16–17,
Writing Medicine Differently 107
will see in Chapter 7, the English form of On the Properties of ings was
destined to survive beyond the dispersion of the friaries in 1537–9 and to
become the most inuential encyclopedia of the sixteenth century in England.
As the preaching usefulness of the work declined, its survival and ourishing
depended crucially on the practical value of sections like those on parts of the
body, the humours, illnesses, regimen and materia medica.
Collaboration and study aids
It is time to turn now from these genres of medical writing pioneered or
imitated by English friars, and to look in more detail at the way in which
medical books were compiled in England by friars. I am going to examine
three features of this enterprise: collaborative compilation, mapping out areas
of study and alphabetical ordering. ese three features, originating in friars’
non-medical compilations, were also expressed in their medical writings; the
best example is the Tabula medicine of 1416–25, which represents a culmination
of these book-making techniques.
e forms adopted by friars to write about medicine were adapted from
the methods of compilation and the construction of study aids, which
mendicants used to forward their core mission of preaching, teaching and
hearing confessions. e Dominicans were clear from the beginning that
these core activities meant that they must become a learned order and, for that
reason, sent their rst missions to the universities. e order soon elaborated
an educational system throughout their administrative structure, from the
provincial level down to the conventual. e Franciscans too found that they
needed to pursue the same strategy, despite St Francis’s initial condemnations
of books as an obstacle to living the apostolic life. ey founded convents
in the university towns and built up an educational system of their own.
For preaching and for catechesis, the friars mastered the scriptures and the
writings of the church fathers for themselves before reaching out to lay people.
To act as confessors, they had also to master the body of canon law which
governed the church. ese kinds of learning required easy access to books,
48–9; H. Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie des Bartholomäus Anglicus: Untersuchungen zur
Überlieferungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte von “De proprietatibus rerum”, Münster-
sche Mittelalter-Schriften 77 (Munich, 2000), with a list of manuscripts in Eng-
land and elsewhere, and owners; E. Keen, e Journey of a Book: Bartholomew the
Englishman and the Properties of ings (Canberra, 2007), pp. 106–7; E. Stein-
er, John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400
(Oxford, 2021), pp. 143–76; On the Properties of ings: John Trevisa’s Translation of
De Proprietatibus Rerum, A Critical Text, ed. M. C. Seymour et al., 3 vols. (Oxford,
1975–88).
108 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
and eective means of retrieving the information needed from these books, to
develop their mission. us, the new orders of friars in the thirteenth century
had to recast knowledge of the Bible, patristics, theology and canon law to suit
their purposes as preachers, teachers and confessors.
26
By comparison with university masters who were not regular (monastics
or friars) but secular clergy, and whose eorts were channelled usually
through individual initiatives, friars were able to harness collective eort and
collaborative methods to construct study aids which would be of benet to
their orders. ese were rst studied properly by Richard and Mary Rouse,
on whose work I draw here. e rst verbal concordance to the Bible seems
to have been put together in the Dominican convent of St Jacques in Paris by
1239. Evidence survives that this was made by assigning individual friars to
assembling biblical lemmata for dierent parts of the alphabet, so that they
wrote up their parts in separate parchment quires, leaving gaps at the end
for possible additions or amendments. e second and much larger biblical
concordance was also the work of Dominicans at St Jacques, but this time
they were English friars led by Richard Stainsby or Stavensby, and their work
was known as the Concordanciae anglicanae (c. 1252). is was a much more
ambitious project than the rst, as it put each lemma within its surrounding
context of a passage from the Bible. is made it easier to appreciate the dierent
senses in which the word might be used, but also made the concordance far
bulkier as a book and somewhat unwieldy. We know that, nevertheless, the
Cambridge Franciscans had a copy of this massive Concordanciae anglicanae in
their conventual library.
To appreciate the collaborative methods of compilation employed by friars
in medicine, we should also notice the Tabula septem custodiarum – completed
in 1309 by the Franciscans of Oxford, but certainly its compilation took the
friars several years before that date. e ‘Table of the Seven Custodies’ (that
is, of the dierent regions of the Franciscan province of England) is an index
to passages in the works of the church fathers (fourteen authors, 220 works),
arranged in the order of the books of the Bible, so that one could look up any
passage of scripture and be referred to authoritative explanations by the fathers
26
M. M. Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow is Bent in Study—’: Dominican Education before 1350
(Toronto, 1998); B. Roest, A History of Franciscan Education (c. 1210–1517) (Leiden,
2000); B. Roest, Franciscan Learning, Preaching and Mission c. 1220–1650: Cum scientia
sit donum dei, armatura ad defendendam sanctam dem catholicam…(Leiden, 2015); A.
Reeves, ‘“e Cure of Souls is the Art of Arts”: Preaching, Confession and Catechesis
in the Middle Ages’, Religion Compass 7 (2013), 372–84. e system of Franciscan
schools in England is described by M. J. P. Robson, ‘e Network of Franciscan Schools
in England: From the Local scholae to the studia generalia’, in Early irteenth-Century
English Franciscan ought, ed. L. Schumacher (Berlin, 2021), pp. 23–55.
Writing Medicine Differently 109
of the church. e Tabula septem custodiarum relied on each participating friar
from the Oxford convent reading through the text of a single work by one of
the church fathers, and then noting the passages of the Bible commented on in
this work. is friar’s report was then assembled with that of others responsible
for dierent works of the church fathers. All the reports were eventually
amalgamated into a sequence in biblical order, which could be copied out into
the consolidated Tabula. e passages from the Fathers were cited by author,
work, chapter and rst words of the specic passage.27 e Tabula septem
custodiarum was designed for the use of the Franciscans of the seven custodies
(regional groupings of convents) and was in that sense an in-house project,
designed to help all their friars in their biblical studies. Only one of the ten
surviving complete copies was owned by a Franciscan, however, and the others
were written for or found their way into collegiate and cathedral libraries. is
suggests its usefulness was widely recognised, and that this justied the massive
collaborative eort involved in copying such a very large work.
e Registrum Anglie was a Franciscan union catalogue of the books found
in ninety monastic and cathedral libraries, datable to c. 1320. is must
have been compiled over years by a body of friars who were able to allocate
individual visits to the libraries concerned and assess their holdings. ere is
no known equivalent project of this size amongst friars in other countries of
Europe. e Registrum Anglie includes ancient, patristic and early medieval
authors – it was intended as a nding device, not as a record of property. Friars
consulting it as a nding device would be able to identify where the written
source they needed to consult was located within the nearest library collection.
ese great collective projects help to provide a context for the Tabula
medicine, a work which one manuscript tells us ‘was begun in the year 1416
and concluded in 1425’.28 It was put together over these years by a team of
Franciscans. We do not know if they came from one convent, or from several.
Some of the names of contributing friars may be found within the text, as
they are credited with specic remedies for treating ailments. Citations of
medical authorities in the Tabula medicine were harvested from medical texts
after nearly ten years’ exploration of medical books, probably not gathered in
any one mendicant library but scattered across collections in monastic and
cathedral libraries. We do not have a surviving catalogue of medical books
equivalent to the Registrum anglie, but such an instrument may well have been
27
Registrum Anglie de libris doctorum et auctorum veterum, ed. R. H. Rouse and M. A.
Rouse with R. A. B. Mynors, CMBLC 2 (London, 1991), p. cvi.
28
University College, MS Lat. 11, fol. 323v: Explicit Tabula medicine incepta anno
1416 et terminate 1425.
110 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
used to identify the location of crucial medical authorities that were harvested
for the Tabula medicine.
e ambition behind this encyclopedic medical handbook, the Tabula
medicine, and the other works by Henry Daniel OP discussed below in
this chapter, was of the same kind as major projects like the Concordanciae
Anglicanae, the Tabula septem custodiarum and the Registrum anglie. e aim
was to bring together in encyclopedic works maps of medical knowledge in
the areas of therapy, diagnosis and materia medica. ese medical writings all
related not to theoretical knowledge of the logical basis of medicine but to
practical healing. Putting together such medical handbooks required a wideranging knowledge of classical, Islamicate and Salernitan works on practical
medicine, which in turn was based on enquiries after authored and anonymous
texts in libraries. e mapping process was only ever partial and provisional.
It was open to further amplication and comment by other friars who might
be able to bring additional reading or personal experience of healing to bear.
Alphabetical ordering and the Tabula medicine
We can connect a preference for the alphabetical principle of ordering in
the Tabula medicine to the many preaching aids constructed by the friars
which made use of the same principle.29 e Franciscan who wrote the Liber
exemplorum (Book of examples) now in Durham Cathedral Library was a
student at Paris by 1265 and may have known Roger Bacon. Later he became
lector of the Franciscans at Cork. is Liber exemplorum is the earliest of such
English collections of illustrative stories to bear out the themes of sermons, or
exempla. e second part of the work is an alphabetical collection of exempla,
beginning with the rubric Acidia, that is, spiritual restlessness. Under each
such sin or virtue, listed alphabetically, come the stories which exemplify
them. Frequently, these collections of exempla were prefaced by a table of
the alphabetical headings in the collection, and there were cross-references
inserted in the main text from one entry on a particular subject to others
related to it. Friars seem similarly to have preferred to order practical medical
knowledge on an alphabetical principle, rather than in the head-to-toe method
of localising illness favoured by university medici.
is use of alphabetical order is the most striking feature of the Tabula
medicine. e names of both members of the body and of illnesses were led
in one alphabetical series of 234 headings to give order to this encyclopedic
handbook. e two rst entries for medical complaints are Abhominatio and
Abstinentia, both as it happens referring to issues with eating. Abhominatio,
29
See also Juan Gil de Zamora, Historia naturalis, note 21 above.
Writing Medicine Differently 111
which is disgust at eating, does not dwell on denition or signs of the illness but
leaps straight into a series of remedies, beginning with an electuary drawn from
the medical author pseudo-Mesue, whose recipe is given at length. Abstinentia,
by contrast, is dened as a perfect middle way which allows bodily heat to
be maintained but not to excess, as recommended by Galen – moderation in
bodily regimen, that is, not a kind of spiritual discipline as might be expected
of friars. ere is a space between the successive entries designed for use by
later contributors with further remedies to add. All but one of the surviving
manuscripts show that this intervening space between entries was indeed used
to advantage by later contributors of remedies (see below). e margins too had
their uses. In one manuscript from the second quarter of the fteenth century
now at Jesus College, Cambridge, an annotator has used the bottom margin
of the leaf to introduce some medical concepts, including the denition of the
contra-naturals: i.e. the causes of illness, illness itself and signs of illness. At the
top of the page are inscribed Maria, the Jesus monogram and John, as often
found in friars’ books.
30
e alphabetical order of headings in these works inevitably involved a
‘attening out’ of scholastic principles of hierarchical organisation. e
arbitrariness of alphabetical order did not appeal so much to those teaching
medicine in the university faculties, whether at Oxford or Cambridge or at
Bologna, Padua, Paris and Montpellier. e scholastic approach favoured the
organisation of practical medical knowledge in head-to-toe order of the body
(a capite ad calcem). Even the Franciscan Bartholomaeus Anglicus in book 7
of De proprietatibus rerum had used the head-to-toe order to structure his
handling of dierent illnesses. In the Tabula medicine, there are headings for
the illnesses Abhominatio and Fastidium, and cross-references between them,
but no sign of the scholastic distinction between Fastidium, and one of its
subaltern species, Abhominatio. Fastidium was a comprehensive category for
scholastics that included up to four conditions, namely Abhominatio (disgust),
nausea, stomach upset and vomiting. is principle of subalternation of
illnesses is asserted for example by the Lilium medicine of the university
teacher, Bernard de Gordon, one of the principal sources for remedies in the
Tabula medicine. But the Tabula medicine abandons the scholastic principle of
subalternation in favour of alphabetic order.
In surviving manuscripts of the Tabula medicine the text was kept ‘open’ for
additions from the team of Franciscans involved, so that additions could be
made. Most of the manuscripts of the work show that these openings were
indeed used to add new remedies, although the rst leaf of the Jesus College
30
Cambridge, Jesus College, MS Q.G.12, fol. 1r.
112 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
manuscript shows an unused gap between Abhominatio and Abstinentia.
e Tabula medicine combined numerous textual authorities for remedies
for dierent ailments with remedies presented anecdotally, as proved by
the experience of individual friars. Both kinds of information were brought
together under alphabetically arranged disease headings. e text as a whole
was meant to provide its readers and users with brief descriptions and coverage
of appropriate regimen and therapies for the various members of the human
body, and those illnesses aicting humankind that were known by name.
As well as illnesses and members of the body like the liver and the back,
there are entries for Regimen and Balneum (bath), for Puer (child) and Senectus
(old age), and some classes of remedy like Laxativum and Dragetum (draget
or dragée in French). e presence of this variety of headings suggests the
compilers aimed to build a medical encyclopedia which would guide the reader
through all the issues relevant to practical medicine, not just the contents of a
remedy book. Each heading, even those for illnesses, begins with a section that
is identied as doctrina, medical teaching. e scope for discursive explanation
or description is very limited. e doctrina part of an entry usually consists of a
bare outline: remarks on the denition of a disease, an etymological explanation
for its name, sometimes a few diagnostic signs and a statement about causation.
ey give the briefest possible introduction to the nature of the ailment, for the
priority is clearly the best means of treating it by regimen or remedy. In most
cases, there is no named source for the doctrina, though often it turns out to be
the Practica maior or Summa of Roger de Barone, a late thirteenth-century work.
For example, the entire entry for Lupus is copied from the Summa.31 Avicenna
is the most often named source of authority. But frater Robert Wainete is
also credited with doctrina, for instance, in the entry for Medicina. Wainete
is otherwise unknown as an author but must have been a friar who, to judge
from the number of citations to him on doctrina, was regarded as an important
authority by the compilers of the Tabula medicine.
32
Another facet of the Tabula medicine text is its elasticity. Whole sections of
other texts are sometimes included, with or without explicit acknowledgement.
us under Pestilentia we can nd in one manuscript most of John of
Burgundy’s plague treatise, unacknowledged.33 In the process of incorporating
31
Roger de Barone, Practica maior, tractatus II, cap. 6 De herpete estiomeno (alio
nomine Lupus), in Chirurgia, vel inventarium seu collectorium in parte chirurgicali
medicinae (Venice, 1498), p. 224.
32
Jones, ‘Mediating’, p. 292. Simon Forman referred to the Tabula Medicine as the
work of ‘Waineete’ in his evidence to the College of Physicians on 8 March
1593/4: see M. Edmond, ‘Simon Forman’s Vade-Mecum’, e Book Collector 26
(1977), 44–60 (p. 46).
33
Cambridge, King’s College, MS 16, fols. 96r–7r.