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The Medical Culture of Friars 143
been collected to test its usefulness and orthodoxy. Erghome’s collecting of
many volumes of prophecy on the other hand was possibly encouraged by
the Augustinian order’s interest in Joachim of Fiore and the prediction of
the coming of the vires spirituales (spiritual men). But the availability of these
magic texts at the library of the York Austin friars may be an indication that
some friars at least deserved the reputation for dabbling in necromancy and
demonic magic that they acquired in the fourteenth and fteenth centuries
and which got several of them into political and criminal trouble.
John Randolph OFM was confessor to the dowager Queen Joan of
Navarre, and in 1419 was accused with her of attempting to destroy King
Henry V ‘by sorcerye and nygromancye’. He ed but was captured, and when
brought before the king, accused Joan of treason. e whole aair may well
have been the result of a successful attempt to strip the queen of her dower
lands on the part of a king short of money for his wars in France. Although
the friar was never tried for necromancy or treason, he was committed to the
Tower of London. Randolph’s astrological interests probably gave a pretext
for the accusation of sorcery. He was named as the author of a set of tables
with canons of the aspects of planets made for Duke Humfrey of Gloucester.
e duke’s political rival, the Chancellor Henry Beaufort, complained that
Duke Humfrey had unlawfully removed Randolph from the Tower in 1425.
Ultimately Randolph was murdered, still in the Tower of London, in 1429. e
association of astrology with necromancy made the royal court a dangerous
place for friars.
63
Philosophical calendars and astrology
Calculating the date of Easter and other moveable feasts, which required the
co-ordination of the solar and lunar cycles, had long been a preoccupation
of the Church. Astronomical tables for this purpose needed to be updated
regularly. e ‘new’ astronomy and astrology founded on translations from
Arabic, Hebrew and Greek sources in the twelfth century had penetrated
63
H. M. Carey, Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University in
the Later Middle Ages (London, 1992), pp. 120–1; R. C. Ralley, ‘Stars, Demons
and the Body in Fifteenth-Century England’, Studies in History and Philosophy of
Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (2010), 109–16; F. Young, Magic as a Politi-
cal Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England: A History of Sorcery and Treason
(London, 2018), pp. 33–5 (Friar John Randolph), 66–7; R. Archer, ‘Necromancy
and Witchcraft – or eft?’, https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/necromany-and-witch-
craft-or-theft, accessed 17 April 2023. Friar Randolph’s canon and tables for Duke
Humfrey are to be found in BL, MS Sloane 407, fols. 223–6. For William Blakeney
OC, a Cambridge necromancer, see BRUC, p. 65; Leader, History, p. 150.
144 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
England early, notably reaching the episcopal seat of Hereford, where Roger of
Hereford had written a treatise on compotus in 1176, followed by an adaptation
of the Toledan tables to the Hereford meridian (1178), and several astrological
treatises.64 Robert Grosseteste was employed at Hereford in the bishop’s
household (1194/5–8) and in the 1220s carried these studies further in his
Compotus, sometimes known as the Compotus correctorius, quite possibly written
65
during a stay in Paris.
is became one of his most popular and inuential
texts on a scientic topic. It harped on the aws of the Julian calendar and the
nineteen-year (Metonic) lunar cycle attached to it. Grosseteste made use of
sexagesimal fractions and Hindu-Arabic numerals with a pervasiveness and
consistency hitherto unknown in texts on the calendar.66 With these tools,
Grosseteste expressed trenchant criticism of ecclesiastical computus, exposing
its calendrical cycles as abstractions or simplications of astronomical reality.
Afterwards, in c. 1229 Grosseteste was rst lector to the Franciscans in Oxford
and later bishop of Lincoln. His philosophical approach to computus was taken
up by English Franciscans, but also by the Dominican Robert Holcot (c.
1290–1349) in his Questio (Tractatus) de stellis.
67
Roger Bacon had calculated astronomical tables to cover the years 1254
to 1329, using the data from the newly translated sources. But Bacon also
understood that the new information had radical implications for the papacy
and the Church, when other faiths mocked the Christian inability to determine
the correct date of its major festival, and disputes broke out with the Greek
churches over the date of Christ’s passion.68 Bacon’s ideas were expressed
64
R. K. French, ‘Foretelling the Future: Arabic Astrology and English Medicine in
the Late Twelfth Century’, Isis 87 (1996), 453–80.
65
Robert Grosseteste’s Compotus, ed. and transl. A. Lohr and C. P. E. Nothaft (Ox-
ford, 2019); R. C. Dales, ‘e Computistical Works Ascribed to Robert Grosse-
teste’, Isis 80 (1989), 74–9; J. Moreton, ‘Robert Grosseteste and the Calendar’, in
Robert Grosseteste: New Perspectives on His ought and Scholarship, ed. J. McEvoy
(Turnhout, 1995), pp. 77–88; J. Moreton, ‘On Not Editing Grosseteste’, in Editing
Robert Grosseteste, ed. E. A. Mackie and J. Goering (Toronto, 2003), pp. 167–84; M.
F. Dowd, ‘Astronomy and Computus at Oxford University in the Early irteenth
Century: e Works of Robert Grosseteste’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Universi-
ty of Notre Dame, 2003), pp. 200–304.
66
Grosseteste, Compotus, p. 9; C. P. E. Nothaft, Scandalous Error: Calendar Reform and
Calendrical Astronomy in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2018), pp. 127–35.
67
Grosseteste, Compotus, p. 22; Sharpe, Handlist, pp. 556–7; Nothaft, Scandalous Er-
ror, pp. 134–5; Kaeppeli, Scriptores, III, p. 318.
68
C. P. E. Nothaft, Dating the Passion: e Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientic
Chronology (200–1600) (Leiden, 2011), pp. 156–74; Nothaft, Scandalous Error,
pp. 145–50. What follows is indebted to Nothaft’s account of Bacon on astrology.
The Medical Culture of Friars 145
directly to Pope Clement IV in the Opus maius in 1267. Since the ecclesiastical
calendar failed at correctly predicting the lunar phases in the present, there was
no reason to suppose that it could make any more reliable predictions for the
rst century AD. is had already been addressed in a Summa de temporibus
(Summary on periods of time) in three books written 1260–4, the work of the
Parisian Dominican Gilles de Lessines. Bacon refers to and criticises this work
69
without mentioning the author’s name or the title in the Opus maius.
Eclipses
of the sun and moon were the keys to determining a correct chronology, for,
Bacon claimed, Ptolemy’s Almagest, his major source for calculating the passage
of years in the ancient world, had been established on this basis. However, for
pre-Ptolemaic chronology Bacon leant on Abū Maʿshar, particularly his use of
the great planetary conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, which determined the
beginnings and end of epochs of human history.70 is then gave a justication
for the use of astrological predictions at the scale of epochs of human aairs.
Bacon quoted from the pseudo-Ovidian poem De vetula, in which the birth of
Christ is predicted by a great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter.71 Astronomical
data would also allow for predicting future transformations in world history.
us, for Bacon, the end of the ‘Saracen’ threat to Christianity might be predicted
based on calculation of future planetary events.
72
See Roger Bacon, Opus maius, ed. J. H. Bridges, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1897–1900), I,
pp. 269–85.
69
Opus maius, I, pp. 191–3; see C. P. E. Nothaft, ‘Climate, Astrology and the Age of
the World in irteenth-Century ought: Giles of Lessines and Roger Bacon on
the Precession of the Solar Apogee’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
77 (2014), 35–60; C. P. E. Nothaft, ‘“With utmost certainty”: Two Late Medieval
Pioneers of Technical Chronology’, Journal of Medieval History 46 (2020), 335–49.
e Compotus attributed to Bacon (Opus hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, vol. 6, Com-
potus Fratris Rogeri, ed. R. Steele (Oxford, 1926), pp. 1–198) is really book 3 of the
Summa de Temporibus of Gilles de Lessines.
70
See Abū Maʿshar, On Historical Astrology: e Book of Religion and Dynasties (On
the Great Conjunctions), ed. K. Yamamoto and C. Burnett, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2000);
Bacon, Opus maius, I, p. 389.
71
Nothaft, Passion, p. 176.
72
Nothaft, Passion, p. 175, n. 47: Bacon, Opus maius, I, p. 266; Abū Maʿshar, On His-
torical Astrology, II, 2.8.5. On the background, see J. D. North, ‘Roger Bacon and
the Saracens’, in Filosoa e scienza classica, arabo-latina medievale e l’età moderna, ed.
G. Federici Vescovini (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1999), pp. 129–60; A. Power, ‘“In the
Last Days at the End of the World”: Roger Bacon and the Reform of Christendom’, in Acts of the Franciscan History Conference held at the Franciscan International
Study Centre on 9th September 2006, ed. J. Röhrkasten and M. J. P. Robson (Canterbury, 2008), pp. 135–51.
146 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
For Roger Bacon, both the correction of the calendar using astronomical
means and knowledge of the eects of the heavenly bodies on terrestrial
events (astrology) were part of the use of mathematics in religion. In part four
of the Opus maius, Bacon mounts his defence of judicial astronomy, that is,
astrology. He was careful not to get caught in the trap of determinism, the false
argument that what is foretold in the stars must come to pass, whatever the
will of individual humans and irrespective of God’s omnipotence. He argues
instead that the heavens act on human dispositions or complexions, so that
one can make general or universal predictions about human behaviour. As well
as mounting a defence of astrology, Bacon also provides guidance as to how
it should be done. At the end of part four of the Opus maius Bacon provides
a sketch for a treatise on practical astrology that he hopes to write if he gets
enough time and support. is sketch describes the xed stars, constellations
and signs of the zodiac, before going on to the planets, which have elemental
qualities – so that, for example, Saturn is cold and dry and causes all indolence,
death and destruction of things through the excess of dryness and cold. He
discusses the powers or dignities that planets have because of their position
within the signs of the zodiac, and the signicant angular relationships they
have to each other through their aspects. Most importantly, the planets also have
an angular relationship to each point on the sphere of the earth. e planetary
conguration focussed on a particular place at a particular time aects the
complexion of every natural thing generated there. is is information that a
healer can use to understand the life course of a patient, including the patient’s
health or sickness and death (via calculating a nativity for the patient), but also
perhaps to choose a propitious time for treatment (this is called calculating an
election). Bacon discusses how to construct a horoscope for such purposes and
how to nd the patient’s ruling planet in his horoscope.
73
Despite the probability that Pope Clement IV never had the chance to
read the Opus maius or any of its supplements, the work did circulate outside
the papal milieu to which it was addressed.74 ere are references to the Opus
maius in the Summa astrologiae iudicialis de accidentibus mundi (Summary of
judicial astrology on worldly events), written by the English astrologer John
Ashenden in Oxford in 1347/48. Furthermore, some undisclosed lines of
inuence may have existed between the Opus maius and the work of another
English Franciscan, named Robert Leicester, who served as regent master
at Oxford in 1321/22. His treatise De ratione temporum, sive de compoto
Hebraeorum, aptato ad kalendarium Latinorum (On the reckoning of times, or
73
Allen, Roger Bacon, pp. 50–2, for the eects of the constellations on human bodies.
74
Nothaft, Passion, p. 197, n. 207.
The Medical Culture of Friars 147
the computus of the Jews, adapted to the Latin calendar), written in c. 1294
and dedicated to Richard Swineld, the bishop of Hereford (died 1317),
contained an astonishingly comprehensive and accurate depiction of the
Jewish conjunction-based calendar, whose intricacies were demonstrated in
no fewer than ten lavish tables.
75
In her Courting Disaster, Hilary Carey drew attention to the Franciscans
as collectors of astrological books: ‘Of all the religious orders, the Franciscans
seem to have taken the greatest interest in astrology, both inside and outside the
universities’.76 Several astronomical manuscripts with Franciscan connections
have survived, despite the widespread losses of books of the mendicants in the
Reformation. One of these was identied by Linda Voigts in her study of the
fteenth-century Franciscan astrologer, Ralph Hoby. is is Bodl., MS Digby 2,
an astronomical miscellany with calendar tables dated 1282.77 Another is Bodl.,
MS Digby 68, a fourteenth-century manuscript owned by the Salisbury convent
of the Franciscans, which contains astronomical tables and texts, including
the Ysagoga minor of Albumasar, translated by Adelard of Bath.78 e most
interesting example is Bodl., MS Ashmole 360, part 4.79 is was written at the
end of the fourteenth century by Richard Pole OFM, as his inscription at the
top of the rst leaf tells us. He is not otherwise identiable. ere is a text of the
75
Nothaft, Passion, p. 198, n. 110; Nothaft, Scandalous Error, pp. 161–3. On Robert
Leicester, see Sharpe, Handlist, p. 565, A. Jotischky, ‘Leicester, Robert (c. 1266–
1327x34), Franciscan chronologist and theologian’, ODNB, 23 September 2004,
accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16370; C. Walmsley,
‘Two Long Lost Works of William Woodford and Robert of Leicester’, Archivum
Franciscanum Historicum 46 (1953), 458–70; J. D. North, ‘Astronomy and Math-
ematics’, in e History of the University of Oxford: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J. I.
Catto and R. Evans (Oxford, 1992), pp. 103–74 (pp. 132–3).
76
Carey, Courting, pp. 49–50 (‘Franciscan friars’) (p. 49).
77
L. E. Voigts, ‘e Medical Astrology of Ralph Hoby, a Fifteenth-Century Fran-
ciscan’, in e Friars in Medieval Britain, ed. N. J. Rogers (Donington, 2010), pp.
152–68 (pp. 153–4). See manuscript description at https://medieval.bodleian.
ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_4319, accessed 17 April 2023. For Ralph Hoby see
further below.
78
MLGB3: http://mlgb3.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/mlgb/book/5143/, accessed 17 April
2023. Manuscript description at https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/man-
uscript_4406, accessed 17 April 2023. e binding of another fourteenth-century
manuscript owned by the Franciscans of Babwell is now found on New Haven,
Beinecke Library, MS Mellon 37. It once contained a text of the Tabulae almanac of
the Montpellier physician Jacob ben Machir ibn Tibbon, better known as Profatius
Judaeus.
79
Bodl., MS Ashmole 360, pt 4: https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manu-
script_333, accessed 17 April 2023.
148 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
Novus quadrans correctus (New and corrected quadrant) translated by Peter of St
Omer from the Hebrew treatise on the astrolabe quadrant by Profatius Judaeus
(Jacob ben Makhir ibn Tibbon), the Flores astrorum (Flowers of the stars) of
Albumazar, a eorica planetarum (eory of the planets), and the Tabulae
almanac [Almanach perpetuum] (Almanac tables) of Profatius Judaeus. ere is
also a horoscope gure on fol. 57 illustrating Profatius. After the authored texts
come some anonymous astrological fragments. e whole section ends with an
incomplete Prognostica de naturis hominum sub quoque signo natorum (Prognostics
of the nature of man from the sign under which he is born).80 Evidently, Richard
Pole had a serious interest in astrological judgements. John Bruyl copied out
astrological tables in MS Digby 153.81 It is not only Franciscan manuscripts
which survive. Catherine Eagleton has linked some astronomical instruments
to Augustinian friaries as well as to Austin canons.82 Dominicans are not quite
so well represented in manuscript survivals, though this may be accidental rather
than a feature of Dominican culture. Certainly, the manuscript lled with tables
and information on the eects of the zodiac and planets on human fortunes,
written by the Dominican friar Giles of Orvieto, while he was a student at the
University of Naples in 1327, suggests a great deal of enthusiasm for astrology.
83
Two scholars have thrown more light on Franciscan practitioners of
astronomy and astrology. In providing background to her study of Ralph Hoby,
Linda Voigts deals with Grosseteste (as the teacher of Franciscans), Roger
Bacon and two less well-known gures. e rst was Simon Tunsted OFM
(d.1369), who was minister provincial in England in the 1360s, and had earlier
worked to revise and improve calculations by Richard of Wallingford in his
Albion, a description of how to make an equatorium. is was a device allowing
80
is text appears to be that recorded in Voigts-Kurtz, eTK, A Catalogue of Incipits of
Mediaeval Scientic Writings in Latin, accessed 17 April 2023. It is 1209E, under the
title De nativitatibus, though MS Ashmole 360 is not listed among manuscripts there.
81
ese are identied in the Bodleian Quarto Catalogue, items 13–16. See https://
medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_4270, accessed 17 April 2023. See
above pp. 138–42 for John Bruyl.
82
C. Eagleton, Monks, Manuscripts and Sundials: e navicula in Medieval England
(Leiden, 2010), pp. 78–9.
83
Now University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center for Special Collections - Man-
uscript LJS 361: see https://schoenberginstitute.org/2022/05/25/ljs-361-astrono-
my-astrology-religion/, accessed 17 April 2023. Part of Giles’s name is visible in
the rubric on fol. 46r. Mulchahey, ‘First the Bow’, does not mention astronomy or
astrology, although the Order provided for the teaching of Natural Philosophy at
its schools. At least one astrological manuscript was owned by the etford Do-
minicans, see the discussion on pp. 153–4 below. See also a Franciscan scribe’s copy
of a work on astrological fortune-telling, on p. 88, n. 33.
The Medical Culture of Friars 149
for the rapid calculation of planetary positions.84 e second was Reginald
Lambourne OFM (. 1351–77) – though Lambourne may still have been a
Benedictine at the time he produced his astrological predictions of weather
and eclipses.85 Laure Miolo has drawn attention to a rare example of a friar
who made astronomical observations at convents at Worcester, Weymouth
and Shrewsbury. In the 1320s, Frater Stephanus heavily annotated a composite
astronomical manuscript containing the Toledan tables, now CUL, MS
Hh.6.8. Stephen’s interventions are an eloquent witness to the actual practice
of astronomical observations by a Franciscan. is friar used a large and a small
quadrant to observe the meridian altitude of the sun at dierent times and this
during several years.86 Friar Stephen’s annotations reveal his ‘daily’ practice of
astronomy and his expertise in this eld outside the University context.
In the custody of Cambridge, Friar Nicholas of Hepworth (OFM)
gave the friary of Babwell (Bury St Edmunds) two volumes related to the
science of the stars and a medical manuscript. One of these manuscripts
(CUL, MS Ii.1.1) is mainly dedicated to astrology, and includes Arabic
authorities such as Zael, Messahallah and Gergis, as well as Latin works by
Roger of Hereford on judicial astrology and by Richard of Wallingford.87
ese last two authors are signicant contributors to the corpus of English
astronomy and astrology. A third equally important text is by Robert of York
OP, who wrote a treatise known as De impressione aeris or De mutabilibus
elementorum (On the pressure of the atmosphere or On changes of the
elements) in 1325. is was closely studied by John Ashenden, the Merton
College, Oxford, author of Summa de accidentibus mundi (1348, see above p.
146). Ashenden was one of a group of Mertonian astrologers, along with
Simon Bredon and William Odington, who ourished alongside the famous
Merton calculators (omas Bradwardine and his pupils). e Summa is
84
A. Jotischky, ‘Tunsted, Simon (d. 1369), Franciscan schoolman’, ODNB, 23 Sep-
tember 2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/27821; J.
D. North, ed., Richard of Wallingford: An Edition of His Writings, 3 vols. (Oxford,
1976), II, pp. 130, 137–248, 270–1; S. Falk, e Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of
Discovery (London, 2020), pp. 157–60.
85
Carey, Courting Disaster, pp. 69–72; Sharpe, Handlist, p. 457. Tunsted and Lam-
bourne are described in Voigts, ‘Medical Astrology’, pp. 152–4.
86
See S. Falk, ‘“El Capri Kylex”: A Franciscan Astronomical Mnemonic’, Journal of
the History of Astronomy 52 (2021), 267–88.
87
Unpublished description of CUL, MS Ii.1.1 by M. R. James, https://www.reposi-
tory.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/320779/, accessed 17 April 2023; for background, see
H. M. Carey, ‘Judicial astrology in eory and Practice in Later Medieval Europe’,
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (2010), 90–
8. e medical manuscript given by Hepworth to Babwell is TCC, MS R.14.49.
150 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
an exhaustive sourcebook of classical and Arabic authorities on astrology,
together with ‘modern’ writers on the subject. Ashenden’s long description
and evaluation of Robert of York’s work shows that he classed it amongst
the most important contributions of the ‘moderns’. roughout Ashenden
calls Robert ‘frater’, though he does not specify that he was a Dominican.88
is attribution came from later authors, although there is no independent
documentary record for his membership of the order. Robert also became
known as ‘Perscrutator’ (Investigator), probably because on successive lines
of the treatise he uses the Latin words perscrutatum and perscrutor.
89
De impressione aeris belongs to a genre of astrological weather prediction,
although it is also much more interested in the theory of the mixture of
elements than is usual for treatises belonging to that genre. At the beginning,
‘Perscrutator’ announces that his work will contain eight conclusions,
dealing with: (1) the humour of the air; (2) the congealing of the humour
into what falls from the sky; (3) thunder; (4) earthquakes; (5) ‘stars which
are produced in the air’ (the term comet is never used); (6) winds; (7) tides;
and (8) pestilence. But there is a long discussion of the forces required for
the mixture of elements, amounting to a third of the treatise, before we get
to the conclusions. Rather in the spirit of Roger Bacon’s speculative alchemy,
the mixing of elements requires the introduction of another more basic set
of forces, involving the exibility or rigidity of elements. ere turn out to
be seven forces in all, which produce mixture of the four inferior elements
(earth, air, water, re), and ‘Perscrutator’ identies these with the inuence
of the seven planets. At one point, he refers to another treatise of his, De
elementorum mixtione musica (On the musical mixture of elements), not so
far known to survive. is work presumably linked his theory of mixture of
elements with musical proportions in a scale. When ‘Perscrutator’ comes to
the derivation of rules for predicting weather phenomena from planetary
motions, he is less original. He lays great stress on the signicance of great
conjunctions (i.e. Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars) as they eect human aairs. But
his observations on natural phenomena, such as tides, seem to be his own.
88
K. Snedegar, ‘Ashenden, John (d. in or before 1368?), astrologer’, ODNB, 23 Sep-
tember 2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/39190.
89
CUL, MS Ii.1.1, fol. 13r. For Robert of York OP, see J. D. North, ‘York, Robert
[called Perscrutator] (. 1313–1325), natural philosopher’, ODNB, 23 September
2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23737; Sharpe,
Handlist, pp. 535–6; and L. orndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Sci-
ence, 8 vols. (New York, 1935–58), III, pp. 103–18. His work is rated as ‘high-
ly original’ by S. Jenks, ‘Astrometeorology in the Middle Ages’, Isis 74 (1983),
185–210 (p. 192).
The Medical Culture of Friars 151
roughout the treatise he lays great stress on the importance of his own
personal experiences: ‘I beg, therefore, that nobody readily reject what is said
here, but instead believe in what has been tested by experience and thus hold
to the truth’.
90
Another Franciscan in the Cambridge custody copied CUL, MS Ii.1.27
in 1424. omas of Wyndele’s manuscript contains Alfonsine canons and
tables produced in Paris in the 1320s and 1330s, supplemented by tables
adapted to the Oxford meridian by William Reed and William Batecombe.
Alongside the astronomical material, Wyndele copied the Summa of John
Ashenden (1348), which may indicate his own practice of astrology. But most
impressively he composed himself the tables of radices (roots) for several cities
(London, Oxford, Cambridge, York and Montpellier), based on the Alfonsine
tables, and expressed in sexagesimal form until the fth (quinta). is involved
a table and extensive computations of his own.
91
But arguably the most inuential mendicant work on astrology was
in connexion with new calendars, equipped with series of tables and
medical supplements. Ecclesiastical calendars had from the early Middle
Ages onwards been accompanied by a penumbra of medical items. ese
typically include a text on the Egyptian or unlucky days (two or three days
each month are nominated in the Julian calendar); many of these days are
occasions of illness. Another text frequently met with is the lunare, a list
of prognostications for each day of the lunar month. Sometimes, these are
decumbitures, prognoses of the outcome of an illness, based on the age of the
moon on the day the patient fell ill. ere are also dietary or hygiene calendars
listing the months of the year and giving advice on the health regimen to
be followed in each. Recipes and charms and other simple prognostics were
often added to these calendars, as were calendrical rules for bloodletting
or giving medicines.92 A signicant change came with the advent of the
‘new’ calendars of the fourteenth century. Medical matters moved from the
margins of the calendar to the centre: it seemed that the new calendars
were designed to facilitate medical prognosis, the timely administration of
90
CUL, MS Ii.1.1, fol. 13r: Obsecro igitur ne quis faciliter dicta reiciat hec sed ex-
perimento credat magis et teneat veritatem. orndike prints the section on tides,
History, III, pp. 679–81.
91
L. Miolo, ‘Practising the Science of the Stars in the Franciscan Custody of Cam-
bridge: omas of Wyndele (. 1390–1424) and His Astronomical Book’, Transac-
tions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society (forthcoming).
92
For these medical features of early calendars, see F. Wallis, ‘Medicine in Medieval
Calendar Manuscripts’, in Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Es-
says, ed. M. R. Schleissner (New York, 1995), pp. 105–43.
152 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
treatment and medical astrology in general. e most successful of these
new calendars were the work of two friars, John Somer OFM and Nicholas
of Lynn OC. Signicantly, both calendars were commissioned by important
royal patrons, as we learn from prologues. John Somer, initially from
Bridgewater in Somerset, was attached to the Oxford Franciscan convent
between 1380 and 1395; there he wrote his Kalendarium (1380) for Joan of
Kent, mother of Richard II, at the request of omas Kingsbury, provincial
of the English Franciscans.93 e Carmelite friar Nicholas of Lynn wrote a
similar calendar in Oxford for John of Gaunt in 1386.94 ese were updated
versions of Kalendaria, that is to say, almanacs, compiled by the Benedictine
Walter of Oddington or Evesham, and Walter of Elveden.
95
e two new calendars have canons or rules explaining how the calendars
are to be used. Besides the explanatory canons, they both include a table giving
precise times for lunar and solar eclipses, together with the length of each
eclipse. ere is also a table for calculating the moon’s position in the zodiac.
e moon was thought to magnify the astrological inuence of the zodiacal
signs through which it passed. It gathered up the astrological inuence of
the other planets with which it was congured. e moon also had a special
power over the uids of the human body, especially the blood, like that it
held over the tides. ere is also a table showing which of the seven planets
reign at each hour of the day or night. e hourly movements of the planets
exert inuence over the human body. Many of the Somer and Lynn calendars
also included a zodiac man gure showing which zodiacal sign had critical
inuence over a part of the body with which it was symbolically associated
(melothesia). Insofar as these calendars assisted in medical prognosis and
helped to time bloodletting and surgical interventions, they were fullling the
Baconian astrological programme. ey even gave assistance with determining
when to give medicines, since the various signs were also associated with
93
L. R. Mooney, ‘Somer, John (d. in or after 1409), Franciscan Friar and Astronomer’,
ODNB, 23 September 2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/
ref:odnb/25997; e Kalendarium of John Somer, ed. L. R. Mooney (Athens GA,
1998); Nothaft, Scandalous Error, pp. 176–7.
94
S. Eisner, ‘Lynn, Nicholas (. 1386–1411), Carmelite Friar and Astronomer’,
ODNB, 23 September 2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/
ref:odnb/20091; e Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn, ed. S. Eisner (London,
1980).
95
Walter of Oddington: Sharpe, Handlist, pp. 738–9; Walter of Elveden: Emden,
BRUC, pp. 210–11, Sharpe, Handlist, p. 734; K. Snedegar, ‘Elveden, Walter (d. in
or before 1360), Ecclesiastic and Astrologer’, ODNB, 23 September 2004, accessed
14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/39192; see Nothaft, Scandalous
Error, pp. 176, 185–6.