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Writing Medicine Differently 113
it, the compilers left out parts, for instance, lists of names, or anything that
resembles personal reection on the part of the author. By contrast, a ‘Regimen
bonum secundum bernardum de conservatione capitulo 18’ (a good regimen
according to Bernard on keeping healthy, chapter 18) appears intact under
the heading, Regimen. In this case, it seems that the authority of Bernard de
Gordon for these recommendations needed emphasising. is elasticity of the
text was no doubt encouraged by the way that gaps were left after entries in
manuscripts for further material to be added.34 In BL, MS Sloane 403, the
scribe has added an entry between Sternutacio and Sterilitas, though without
giving it a separate heading. It is a text on the twelve medicinal uses of viper’s
skin, entitled De corio serpentis, attributed to Johannes Paulinus. It enjoyed a
wide circulation in England in both Latin and Middle English. If the text
of MS Sloane 403 had itself been copied, this inserted text would no doubt
have been copied too, with or without a new heading, but with no mention
of Johannes Paulinus. is process would have enabled the text of the Tabula
medicine to grow by swallowing up other shorter texts in this fashion. As we
shall see in the next section, the Liber uricrisiarum of the Dominican Henry
Daniel is similar in its textual elasticity to the Tabula medicine.
ese are the ways in which the Tabula medicine was compiled. Like the
‘Table’ of the seven custodies, the work was anonymous. e evidence of added
entries for its expansion – particularly additional remedies credited to famous
contemporary physicians like Gilbert Kymer or omas Duncan – suggests
that the Tabula medicine was valued as a resource by university doctors. For
example, added on to the end of the entry for Appetitus (Appetite) in Jesus
College MS Q.G.6, using the space available between entries, there are two
further recipes. e rst is for a Salsamentum Pictavie (a Scottish sauce, made
with persil, mint and black bread), and the second recommends washing the
patient’s stomach with equal quantities of absinthium (wormwood) and vinegar.
ese will stimulate the appetite it is claimed. After the two recipes the name
‘T. Duncan’ is written, presumably referencing the well-known physician of that
name as giving authority to the recommendations.35 e interest taken in the
Tabula medicine by physicians like Duncan largely accounts for the preservation
of the manuscripts which survive. e evidence for survival is skewed by the
better chances of preservation in the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge colleges
to which many of the physicians belonged. Copies owned by friaries or other
private owners are much more likely to have disappeared without trace.
34
For this ‘open’ compilation of the Tabula medicine, see Jones, ‘e Tabula’, pp. 60–3.
35
Jesus College, MS Q.G.12, fol. 9r. On the citation of university doctors in the add-
ed entries of the Tabula medicine, see Chapter 7, pp. 217–18, where further details
about Gilbert Kymer and omas Duncan are provided.
114 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
Henry Daniel: two unique projects
e two major works associated with the Dominican Henry Daniel (c. 1375–
82) are the Liber uricrisiarum and the Herbal, or Aaron danielis. Neither are
easy to categorise as forms of medical writing. e Liber uricrisiarum (the
book about judgements of urine) developed from an original Latin treatise
on uroscopy, which was then translated into English and much expanded
at the request of Daniel’s socius, Walter Turnour of Ketoun (socius may well
indicate that Turner was himself a friar, perhaps at one time the friar with
whom Henry Daniel travelled).36 At one point in the Latin prologue to
the Liber uricrisiarum, Daniel explains that he has chosen not to describe
medicines for the diseases he discusses because such a task would require a
whole separate text, which he planned to write: ‘wherefore, with the help of
God, and if I live long enough, and my duty to my order permits, I promise
to make a work by itself on that topic’.37 Since the Herbal contains recipes
for remedies at the end of the entries for dierent medicinal simples, the
Herbal may itself be that work.
e Liber uricrisiarum is a compilation or treatise devoted to the science
of diagnosing from urine but also a guide instructing practitioners how to
perform such diagnosis from the urine samples given by patients. Although
its structure follows that of the poem on urines by Gilles de Corbeil, written
in the early thirteenth century, along with the prose commentaries that
accompany the poem, Daniel’s text does not take the form of a commentary
itself. Ruth Harvey has described it as a ‘learned treatise, with its divisions,
arguments, cross-references, technical vocabulary, and annotations (inserted
parenthetically in the text)’.38 It is divided into three books: the rst denes
urine and instructs readers how to examine it; the second describes the
twenty colours of urine; and the third outlines the various contents to be
found and examined in urine. It is expository, and it includes a great deal
of information on a wide variety of things only loosely linked to uroscopy
– human anatomy, the physiology of digestion and excretion, how the mind
relates to the structure of the brain, the classication and progress of fevers,
cosmology, medical astrology and nativities, the seasons and appropriate
36
is shorter Latin version is found only in Glasgow University Library, MS Hunt-
er 362. As E. R. Harvey shows, ‘Textual Layers’, the Latin book contains materials
from all versions of the English text, not just the earliest version. is suggests that
Daniel revised his Latin book alongside his English one, although this remains a
question needing further investigation.
37
Daniel, Liber Uricrisiarum, p. 19 (Prol. ll. 83–6): Quapropter iuuante deo et vita com-
ite et ordinis mei obediential promittente vnum opus ad hoc me facturum promitto.
38
Harvey, ‘Textual Layers’, p. 87.
Writing Medicine Differently 115
regimen for them, pregnancy and generation, and diagnosis by other physical
signs. ese are not programmed into the structure of the Liber uricrisiarum
but seem to occur almost haphazardly as suggested by the occasion, under the
headings of various urine colours. In this respect, the treatise becomes a kind
of portmanteau of medical knowledge, not just of uroscopy, but without the
clearly articulated structure of the earlier mendicant encyclopedias like that of
Bartholomaeus Anglicus or omas of Cantimpré.
e Herbal was similarly a ‘baggy’ compilation from a wide variety of
written sources, but with a far greater admixture of Henry Daniel’s own
experiences and those of other people he met. ere are two surviving versions
of the text, one in which herbal and non-herbal simples were arranged
alphabetically by name in two separate sections, and another in which they
were amalgamated (but which in the only surviving copy only went as far
as the letter G). It is not clear which version came rst, but both seem to
have been put together by Henry Daniel himself. e written sources used
by Daniel were mostly products of the ‘Salernitan’ long twelfth century, when
new Arabic texts became available in Latin, and were digested into herbals,
antidotaries, glossaries and commentaries. As with the Liber uricrisiarum,
Daniel also made extensive use of verse texts cited in the midst of his prose:
the De viribus herbarum of Macer Floridus and the Anglicanus Ortus of Henry
of Huntingdon.39 e latest source used by Daniel seems to be the books on
plants and stones from the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus,
compiled in the mid-thirteenth century, and some of the classical sources are
quoted unacknowledged through the medium of Bartholomaeus Anglicus. In
using the alphabetical order of the names of the simples as a principle for
structuring his compilation, Daniel was conforming to the pattern of many of
his Salernitan source texts like the Alphita (a medical botanical glossary), Circa
instans of Matthew Platearius (alphabetically ordered by rst letter only) and
the encyclopedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus within his books on herbs and
stones.40 But as in the case of the Liber uricrisiarum, Henry Daniel is not really
39
ey feature in 85 of approximately 250 entries longer than one line in the Herbal
according to the count of W. Black, ‘Translation, Comparison, and Adaptation: Latin
Verse Herbals in the Aaron Danielis’, in Reading Henry Daniel, pp. 38–62 (p. 41).
40
Henry Daniel’s Herbal will be published in a reading edition by the same team
responsible for the Liber Uricrisiarum. For the moment it is best described on the
website https://henrydaniel.utoronto.ca/herbal/, accessed 17 April 2023. See also
J. H. Harvey, ‘Henry Daniel: A Scientic Gardener of the Fourteenth Century’,
Garden History 15 (1987), 81–93; G. R. Keiser, ‘rough a Fourteenth-Century
Gardener’s Eyes: Henry Daniel’s Herbal’, e Chaucer Review 31(1996), 58–75.
Alphita is available in a critical edition with commentary by A. G. González
(Florence, 2008). e circulation of Circa Instans in England is investigated in E.
116 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
sticking closely to any models found in previous writings, but is developing a
form of compilation that is very much a personal creation.
anks to the work of the scholars currently engaged in the Henry Daniel
project, the pioneering quality and ambitious scope of his writing has begun
to come into focus. Further work by this team on the complexities of the
textual tradition of the Liber uricrisiarum, and on the sources of information
used in Daniel’s Herbal, will signicantly expand our knowledge of the
outstanding individual gure amongst those friars writing on medicine in
England after 1350. We are also coming to see that his inuence spread
widely inside and outside the mendicant orders through borrowings,
adaptation and imitation by other writers. is theme will be considered
further in the next section and in Chapter 6.
e Englishing of medicine by friars
How Latin medical learning was translated into Middle English in late
medieval England has been illuminated by important studies and surveys.41
Texts compiled or translated by friars have not been central to discussions
of the process of translation. Henry Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum, for example,
has only recently received much attention, despite its wide circulation. e
publication of a reading edition of the text and a companion volume of studies
will change this picture. e Liber uricrisiarum, as we have seen, is partially a
translation of Daniel’s own Latin text and partially writing of Daniel’s own
making. Sarah Star has observed that when Henry Daniel decided to turn
his Latin compilation on uroscopy into English, he was conscious that he was
going to have to invent a new terminology – not to write new things, but to
write about them in a new fashion. His innovations were linguistic, stylistic
and lexical, and involved a deliberate distancing from contemporary physicians
Garrido-Anes, ‘Geographical and Dialectal Distribution of Platearius’ Liber de sim-
plici medicina in England’, International Journal of English Studies 5 (2005), 93–114.
41
Amidst a considerable literature of specialised studies, see L. E. Voigts, ‘Multitudes
of Middle English Manuscripts, or the Englishing of Science and Medicine’, in
Manuscript Sources of Medieval England: A Book of Essays, ed. M. R. Schleissner
(New York, 1995), pp. 183–96; Medical and Scientic Writing in Late Medieval
English, ed. I. Taavitsainen and P. Pahta (Cambridge, 2004). Important surveys of
Middle English medical translations are to be found in G. R. Keiser, A Manual
of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500: Works of Science and Education (New
Haven, 1998); the Index of Middle English Prose: an electronic index to all volumes
is at https://imep.lib.cam.ac.uk/, accessed 17 April 2023; L. E. Voigts and P. D.
Kurtz, Scientic and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: an Electronic
Reference (eVK2) at http://cctr1.umkc.edu/cgi-bin/medievalacademy, accessed
17 April 2023.
Writing Medicine Differently 117
and their use of ornate language.42 ere were over 1,000 new words in the
Liber uricrisiarum which predate or are contemporary with the earliest records
in the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. Daniel
argues that his project is justied because it will make knowledge of urines
available to ‘more men’ (Prol. l.48). He anticipates that his readers will carry
his terminology forward into the future, expand and correct it. It will become
a language for communication of medical and natural philosophic learning.
Daniel’s English combines what he calls ‘almost-Latin’ words, derived directly
from Latin terminology (like ‘cerebre’ for brain), with much homelier English
phrases using the vocabulary of agriculture and the trades, or parts of everyday
speech. He also recorded English terms that were already circulating in dialect
forms but had not yet entered written discourse.43 e newly enabled readers
of this work would be able to use the knowledge of urines thus acquired to
practise uroscopy for themselves.
Faye Getz has examined in detail the preface originally written in Latin
to Daniel’s work and demonstrated that it aligns with Dominican ideals of
preaching to the laity. Daniel argues that in making knowledge of uroscopy
available to those without Latin, he is acting with the purest motives and not
for the sake of lucre or favour as other men do. Daniel, as a Dominican vowed
to poverty, could not be accused of the sordid motives underlying translation
or dissemination of medical texts by those who did so for prot. He aligns
himself with ‘simple men’, by which he probably means to suggest friars
who adhere strictly to those vows, possibly belonging to a reformist strand
of mendicancy.44 Getz concludes that Dominicans like Daniel ‘seem to have
42
Daniel rejected the lifestyle and language of the modern (latinate) physician, what
he called the vita pomposa verbosa ac mendosa (pompous, chatty, mistaken life). See
Stadolnik, ‘Guitar Lessons’, p. 133. is is reminiscent of Roger Bacon’s contemp-
tuous attitude to the language and outlook of his scholastic medical contemporar-
ies (see pp. 99–102 above).
43
For example, Daniel denes longaon or rectum as ‘þe laste gutt in þe body & it
is tyede vnto þe tayle ende. Som folke calle it þe “erse-þerme” & “tail end,” or
“þe erse-bubbe”’ (I.3.76–8). For linguistic study of Liber Uricrisiarum see S. Star,
‘Henry Daniel, Medieval English Medicine and Linguistic Innovation: A Lexi-
cographic Study of Huntington MS HM 505’, Huntington Library Quarterly 81
(2018), 63–106; S. Star, ‘e “almost-Latin” Medical Language of Late Medie-
val England’, in Henry Daniel and the Rise of English Medical Writing, ed. S. Star
(Toronto, 2022), pp. 158–74. See also Black, ‘Translation’, for Daniel’s translation
work in his Herbal.
44
By ‘simple men’ Daniel did not mean unlearned. Daniel criticised some members
of his own order as being amongst the ‘dog leches’ who pretend to medical learning
where they should not. See Daniel, Liber Uricrisiarum, p. 359. My interpretation
here is guided by the suggestion of an anonymous reader.
118 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
seen the vernacular medical translation as a kind of medical sermon, with a
pastoral, indeed charitable, function in mind’.45 is charitable alignment is,
undoubtedly, part of the Dominican mission to the laity, and the comparison
with sermons is illuminating. But the direct textual address to lay readers
employed by Daniel here might also make us think of one of those works
written by friars in English which assisted the lay reader to examine their own
soul, and to encourage in them emotional states which will lead to contrition
and full confession of sins.
46
Henry Daniel was undoubtedly the rst compiler to write a medical
treatise in Middle English.47 His Liber uricrisiarum was often copied, bearing
out his intention to reach new readerships. More than twenty manuscripts
of this substantial work have survived.48 ere were also various adaptations
and abridgements. e most widely circulated was the seventeen-chapter
abridgement of Liber uricrisiarum as found, for example, in the compendium
assembled for the London barber surgeon omas Plawdon. Medical
practitioners like Plawdon with limited or little knowledge of Latin were
most likely the reader group reached by Daniel’s work. e most ambitious
reworking of the Liber uricrisiarum was that done by the Franciscan known as
Narborough in 1442, who added a Passionary or book of remedies, apparently
of his own devising, as a fourth book of the Liber uricrisiarum. It may be
that Narborough was trying in this way to make it still more useful to his
Franciscan brethren, but also to lay readers.
49
Charles Talbot and Faye Getz have argued that the Dominicans were at the
forefront of those motivated by charity to translate medical texts into English
for the use of lay people. One example at least suggests that the Dominicans
45
F. M. Getz, ‘Charity, Translation, and the Language of Medical Learning in Medi-
eval England’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (1990), 1–17.
46
Stadolnik, ‘Guitar Lessons’, p. 129, illuminates the signicance of styles of preach-
ing for Daniel’s exposition of medicine to lay people: ‘Daniel writes his vernacular
medical text in the voice of the friar preacher, with habitual recourse to sermon
style in translating the proper terms of uroscopy into current ones, and weighty
words into plainer ones’. See also on this subject D. McCann, Soul-Health: era-
peutic Reading in Later Medieval England (Cardi, 2018), chap. 1.
47
Daniel’s contemporary the surgeon John Arderne wrote in Latin, as did John Mir-
eld the clerk at St Bartholomew’s priory and hospital, author of the Breviarium
Bartholomei, and John Bradmore, surgeon and author of the Philomena.
48
Daniel, Liber Uricrisiarum, pp. 20–30, for analysis of these manuscripts.
49
M. T. Tavormina, ‘e Heirs of Henry Daniel: e Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Cen-
tury Legacy of the Liber Uricrisiarum’, in Henry Daniel and the Rise of English Med-
ical Writing, ed. S. Star (Toronto, 2022), pp. 108–32.
Writing Medicine Differently 119
did not have the eld to themselves.50 In Cambridge University Library, MS
Ii.6.17, we nd a Middle English translation of a Latin uroscopy attributed to
a Franciscan. It is preceded by a Latin rubric:
Tractatus Magistri Bartholomei ordinis Sancti Francisci & composuit
breviter in lingua materna magis plane ad intelligenciam laicorum ad eos
gubernandum prout placet altissimo ad Requisicionem Regis Ricardi
Secundi & Anne Regine (Treatise of Master Bartholomew OFM and
rendered into the vernacular to make it clearer, so that laypeople can
understand how to govern themselves, in accordance with God’s will, and it
was composed at the request of King Richard II and Queen Anne).
is would put the translation in question between 1382 and 1394, that is
between the date of Anne’s marriage to Richard and her death. It is one of
several Middle English versions of a thirteenth-century treatise by Walter
Agilon, beginning ‘Cum secundum auctores …’, and for convenience called by
M. Teresa Tavormina e Craft of Urines. It deals with the colours and contents
of urines but begins with a long prologue that discusses: the operations of
nature; its own translating and commenting procedure; the battle between
disease and nature; and the humours. ere are substantial digressions on such
topics as complexions, qualities, spirits, quarters of the year, crisis and several
others. ere are six manuscript witnesses to this text identied by Tavormina,
but the ‘Master Bartholomew OFM’ is not otherwise known to us. e Craft
of Urines is certainly not on the scale of the work of Henry Daniel, even if it
shares his subject matter and digressive approach. e Latin rubric shows that
Master Bartholomew shared Daniel’s rhetoric of charitable translation.
e most compelling evidence for the continuing inuence of this
campaign of charitable translation after the works of Henry Daniel and
Master Bartholomew is found in British Library, MS Sloane 3489, written
c. 1475. e manuscript contains Middle English medical texts, one of them
attributed directly to a Dominican, and others associated with brethren of
the mendicant orders. One text in the manuscript, a collection of medical
recipes (fols. 1r–5v), is attributed to ‘Frere Randolf’, and there is also a medical
dialogue (fols. 29r–42r) which begins ‘Brother, I praye the for charite that
thou write to me a fewe medecynes that I myght helpe pore folk that falleth
into sekenes and beth unkonnyng to helpe hem sylfen and of unpower to hyre
hem leches’ […not skilled to help themselves or too poor to hire healers].51
50
My description here is taken from M. T. Tavormina, ‘Uroscopy in Middle English:
A Guide to the Texts and Manuscripts’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History
3rd s. 11 (2014), 1–154 (pp. 92–5).
51
Talbot, Medicine, pp. 188–9.
120 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
e reply prays that the brother will be able to make medicines to do people
good, so that they can serve God better. is seems to be a radical adaptation
into English dialogue form of the Practica chirurgiae (Surgery) of Roger of
Parma, but with some religious (providential) and medical (complexional)
questions inserted at the beginning.
52
ere are other texts in the same manuscript which use English to set forth
medicine out of charity for poor people. One of them is a plague tract (fols.
44r–52r) written by omas Multon:
a master of diuinite of the ordre of the frere prechours [OP], that is needful
and necessary against the pestilence that now is reigning. He has set it down
in English to that both learned and unlearned will better understand and
act on it in time of need against the venom of the pestilence.
53
Multon connects his status as a Dominican friar with a mission to use the
English language to help both learned and unlearned. is text is in fact a
reworking of the most widely used plague tract in England, often attributed
to John of Burgundy, in its longer Latin form. Multon begins his adaptation
with a moral statement about pestilence as divine retribution for sin, a
perspective entirely lacking in the John of Burgundy original. He invokes the
four great doctors of the church, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory and Ambrose in
support of this interpretation. e Speculum historiale of his fellow Dominican
Vincent of Beauvais is also cited. He suggests that his is the correct way of
understanding ‘this soden pestilence that nowe is regnand, also j sey generalli
in this realme.’ Multon’s moralising approach to pestilence does not prevent
him giving appropriate medical advice to his readers, but his version of John
of Burgundy’s plague tract indicates the need for moral reformation as much
as following a good bodily regimen in time of pestilence.
54
Henry Daniel, Master Bartholomew, Narborough, ‘Frere Randolf’, and
omas Multon were all friars whose Englishing of Latin medical texts was
intended to bring their diagnostic and healing prescriptions to a readership
of practitioners and householders who could not easily access the Latin
of the original source texts. ey proclaimed that they were acting out of
charitable motives, and this would have tted well with their evangelical
mission to lay people.
52
Voigts-Kurtz (eVK2) no. 1325; partly transcribed in I. Taavitsainen, P. Pahta and
M. Mäkinen, Middle English Medical Texts CD-ROM (Amsterdam, 2005).
53
Getz, ‘Charity’, p. 12.
54
Keiser, ‘Two Medieval’, pp. 300–6; A. Honkapohja and L. Jones, ‘From Practi-
ca Phisicalia to Mandeville’s Travels: Untangling the Misattributed Identities and
Writings of John of Burgundy’, Notes and Queries 67 (2020), 18–27.
Writing Medicine Differently 121
Conclusion: refashioning the medical book
is chapter has tracked various ways in which English friars developed new
ways of writing and compiling medical information in textual form. Part
of the reason for this innovation was a response to the under-development
of university medicine in Oxford and Cambridge, compared to continental
universities. ere was a signicant gap in the market. But Roger Bacon had
sought to expose the inadequacies of scholastic medicine as expressed in
its characteristic forms of expository treatise, commentary and disputation
literature. Bacon devised new forms of writing about medicine of his
own, striking polemical or evangelical notes as he sought to criticise the
scholastics, and persuade or endorse particular methodologies and medical
products. In England imitation took the form of many pseudo-Baconian
writings, while in the fourteenth and fteenth centuries, the texts compiled
by John of Rupescissa and pseudo-Raymund Lull (both supposed popularly
to be Franciscan friars) on medicinal alchemy were imported to England in
signicant numbers, and so continued the evangelical strain characteristic
of Bacon. Alongside this evangelical strain, the encyclopedic works of
thirteenth-century friars packaged medical information in a guise that was
both moralised and readily accessible to religious and (increasingly) lay
readerships. e De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus was the
most inuential of these encyclopedias in England and much quarried by
friars and other readers for medical diagnosis and remedies.
Turning from consideration of genres of medical writing pioneered and
imitated by English friars, this chapter has looked at the ways in which
medical books were compiled in England by friars. e focus has been on three
of these: encyclopedic mapping of the natural world for preaching purposes,
collaborative compilation in large projects and alphabetical ordering as a
means of providing ready access to compendious works. ese features, all
originating in friars’ non-medical compilations made for preaching, teaching
and confessional purposes, found their way into medical works – the nest
expression of this is the Tabula medicine of 1416–25. is was a text in which
space was left in manuscripts for its own collaborative development, so that it
was open to future additions. Its material was selected from other authoritative
medical books or from medical cases treated by the friars themselves. It was
organised alphabetically by names of illnesses, body parts or kinds of medical
preparation, thus ‘attening out’ the scholastic hierarchy of subalternated
illness categories.
e nal part of the chapter has considered the unique contributions to
medical compilation and the language of medicine in English made by the
Dominican Henry Daniel. His Liber uricrisiarum (c. 1375–82) is in form a
122 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
translation and exposition of the poem on urine diagnosis by Gilles de Corbeil,
with its Latin commentaries. But it also tends towards encyclopedism with
signicant digressions on a variety of medical topics. e Liber uricrisiarum
made much of the value of knowing the lessons of experience, employing case
histories and recommending experimenta. Daniel’s Herbal is just as ambitious.
It is sourced and translated largely from earlier Latin verse treatises on herbs,
supplemented with material from prose pharmacological works. Like the Liber
uricrisiarum, it is of an encyclopedic character, both in its ambitious scope and
the extensive use it makes of the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus
Anglicus. e Herbal includes personal observations by Daniel himself,
developing further that appeal to experience which was already a feature of
the Liber uricrisiarum. Daniel made one version of the work in which herbal
and non-herbal simples are in independent sequences, and another in which
they are amalgamated (but incomplete). Both employed alphabetical order.
ese formal departures from Latin scholastic norms of medical writing were
complemented with a commitment to the use of English as a vehicle for
medical teaching. After a rst short version of the Liber uricrisiarum in Latin,
Daniel opted for English to reach the widest possible lay readership for both
his compilations. is commitment originated in charitable motives, and other
friars, Dominican and Franciscan, followed in Daniel’s footsteps, whether
in subsequent versions of the Liber uricrisiarum or in independent writings
on plague and in remedy books. e medical book compiled in English was
Daniel’s legacy and an inspiration to others, whether friars or laymen.