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The Legacy of Friars’ Medicine 223
extensive and often dated annotations throughout the volume, revealing
careful comparison of Daniel’s text to other works and records of illnesses
and deaths among named persons known to him. Other owners of Daniel
manuscripts were also doctors: Bodl., MS e Musaeo 116 has the inscription
‘Folvylle & sician’ a page after its copy of the Liber uricrisiarum ends;
Henry Savile of Banke, whose personal binding of Cambridge, St John’s
College, MS B.16 still survives, was a graduate of St Alban Hall, Oxford,
a book collector, and was licensed (1601) to practice medicine. Philemon
Holland (1552–1637), now known best for his translations of Livy, Pliny
the Elder and Plutarch was a Cambridge-educated physician and the
owner of CUL, MS Ff.2.6; among many other translations, he rendered the
medieval Regimen sanitatis Salerni (also called Flos medicine) into English
verse. His annotations (dated Coventry, 1583) show that he collated his
manuscript closely with another Henry Daniel manuscript. But some of
his notes indicate he was thinking of the application of Daniel’s text to
practice. In discussing Daniel’s experiment using standing urine samples to
tell whether the man or woman was barren, Holland interpolated his own
comment: ‘if neither urine best [i.e. less smelly after standing] then neither
of them is baren, he ne she’ (fol. 122).18 e practice of reading Henry
Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum in manuscript and annotating it for practical as
well as recreational use evidently continued into the seventeenth century.
e Herbal too attracted annotations. BL, Additional MS 27329, features
many fteenth-century Latin recipes added in the margins and on blanks,
together with extensive annotations and additions by the seventeenthcentury dramatist and manuscript collector, James Cobbes.
19
Self-help medicine for lay folk
omas Fayreford’s Latin book, BL, MS Harley 2558, discussed above,
was probably intended for the later use of an heir to his medical practice,
rather than for householders, and used vernacular phraseology (English
and French) only occasionally. From Henry Daniel’s time onwards, there
is evidence for a campaign on the part of friars to recommend regimen,
diet and therapy to lay men and women and thus to go beyond writing
18
See Daniel, Liber Uricrisiarum, p. 260, for the experiment in question.
19
See online descriptions of BL, Additional MS 27329 on the BL website; R.
Beadle, ‘e Manuscripts of James Cobbes of Bury St Edmunds (c. 1602–
1685)’, in e Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki
Takamiya, ed. T. Matsuda, R. A. Linenthal and J. Scahill (Cambridge, 2004), pp.
427–42 (p. 435).
224 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
simply for other practitioners of medicine. is campaign is marked by the
deliberate choice of vernacular language, helping non- or partially latinate
readers to acquire the fruits of medical knowledge for the better preservation
of their health (see Chapter 3, pp. 114–20). Henry Daniel signals this at the
beginning of his Liber uricrisiarum, in explaining and defending his use of
English as an act of charity so that his work could be useful to lay readers.
is mission to teach lay people to cultivate their own health was in accord
with friars’ apostolic mission to encourage lay confessants to develop their
own spiritual culture through the writing of appropriate vernacular texts.
John V. Fleming provides a variety of examples of such friars’ literature
aimed at lay readers: vernacular guides to the seven deadly sins (e.g. Richard
of Lavynham OC, A Litil Tretys); more ambitious dialogues like that of the
Franciscan production Dives and Pauper; or translations of the penitential
psalms like those of Richard of Maidstone OC (d.1396).20 As we have seen
in Chapter 3, Faye Getz similarly outlines a programme of charitable medical
writing in the vernacular, which she associates with the Dominican order in
particular, of which Henry Daniel’s work was the outstanding example. As
she observes, Daniel claimed that those who used his book would not just
learn the art of interpreting urines but ‘gain riches and good and health of
the soul’. is makes explicit that those who studied Daniel’s work might
themselves be able to prot from it.
21
Getz suggests that there is evidence of commitment to Henry Daniel’s
charitable programme among later Dominicans of the fteenth century in
England. She identies the signicant trio of medical writings by friars in
London, BL, MS Sloane 3489, written in the third quarter of the fteenth
century.22 ese include a plague treatise compiled by a Dominican named
omas Multon or Moulton, the recipe book of one ‘frere Randolf ’, and a
medical dialogue between two persons who address each other as ‘Brother’,
all within the manuscript. MS Sloane 3489 is best characterised as a
leechbook, or medical handbook. It is written in the vernacular and is in
20
J. V. Fleming, ‘e Friars and Medieval English Literature’, in e Cambridge His-
tory of Medieval English Literature, ed. D. Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 349–75.
21
Getz, ‘Charity’, 13; Daniel, Liber Uricrisiarum, p. 37.
22
See Voigts Kurtz database (eVK2), for description of the contents of MS Sloane
3489, at https://indexcat.nlm.nih.gov/vivisimo/cgi-bin/query-meta?&v:project=-
indexcat&v:sources=etkevk2&binning-state=source%3d%3deVK2&/, accessed 19
April 2023. K. L. Scott, ‘Newly Discovered Booklets from a Reconstructed Middle
English Manuscript’, in English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, Volume 14 Region-
al Manuscripts 1200–1700, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (London, 2008), pp. 112–29 (p.
121), estimates the date of compilation.
The Legacy of Friars’ Medicine 225
fact only part of a much larger compilation. It was probably assembled for
a gentry family, and included besides English language romances, omas
Hoccleve’s De regimine principum, and Dame Juliana Berner’s Boke of
Huntyng. MS Sloane 3489 enjoyed a signicant afterlife, as it was turned
into the sixteenth-century English medical bestseller, is is the myrrour
or glasse of helth. In the printed work, the entire leechbook was credited
to omas Multon or Moulton (it included a treatise on astrological
medicine and a collection of remedies). It was assumed to be the work
of a contemporary author – an assumption that still holds good today for
the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Because of this adventure into
print, Multon’s supposed work reached a wider audience than any other
medical writing before 1600, despite its origin as part of a corpus of secular
writings, compiled for a single gentry family.
23
e part of the MS Sloane 3489 leechbook compiled by Friar Multon
is itself of great interest. It included a translation and revision of the most
popular plague tract of late medieval England, that written c. 1365 by John of
Burgundy. Multon says that he
sette it in englissh that euery man bothe lerned and lewde may the better
vnderstond hit and do thereafter, and to be his owne phisicien in tyme of
nede ayenst the venym and the malice of the pestilence (fol. 44r).
24
His prologue also gives three reasons for writing: rst, the prayers of his
brethren; second, the prayers of lords; and third, compassion for the aicted.
His translation is very much in the tradition of the charity proclaimed by
his fellow Dominican Henry Daniel. But it is also framed as a response to
the pestilence of the times, the recurrent epidemic crises of the fteenth
century (primarily plague, but also later sweating sickness). Moulton made
his translation from the less widespread longer version of John of Burgundy’s
treatise.25 As Keiser remarks, Multon reorganised the treatise and made its
structure simpler and easier to follow. He divided it into three parts:
23
Keiser, ‘Two Medieval’, pp. 292–324; P. Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health and Treasures of
Poor Men: e Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England’, in
Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. C. Webster (Cambridge,
1979), pp. 237–71. e work credited to Multon was reprinted at least twenty-one
times between 1531 and 1580. For similar leechbooks in manuscript and printed,
see M. B. Reynolds, ‘“Here is a good boke to lerne”: Practical Books, the Coming of
the Press, and the Search for Knowledge, ca. 1400–1560’, Journal of British Studies
58 (2019), 259–88.
24
Keiser, ‘Two Medieval’, p. 299.
25
For multiple places of production and various translations, see Matheson, ‘Médecin
sans Frontières’; Matheson, ‘John of Burgundy’.
226 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
the rst party telleth diuerse causes of Þe pestilens and how hit may be
engendred, the second telles howe man and woman and childe shall preserue
him and to kepe him therefro, the thirde partie telleth remedy and medecyn
ayenst it if man be curable (fol. 44r)
26
Multon begins his version with a statement that the pestilence is divine
retribution for sin, an interpretation absent from the John of Burgundy
original. e astrological causation of the epidemic in the conjunction of the
planets Saturn and Jupiter becomes secondary to this religious explanation.
Keiser argues that this moral interpretation helped to account for the
popularity of Multon’s version (the original John of Burgundy treatise was
never printed). In the print editions of is is the myrour …(rst printed in
1531), Multon’s plague treatise is promoted to rst place in the volume and
most probably was responsible for the continuing popularity of the book
through the sixteenth century. It is worth noting, however, that Multon
did not claim that physic was to take a back seat to religion, nor did he
denigrate the practice of medicine. He boosted his own medical credentials
by advertising in MS Sloane 3489 that he had practised as a physician
himself for no fewer than eighteen years at the time of writing (fol. 49r).27 His
essential point as a Dominican writer was that the lay reader of the treatise on
plague should look to moral reformation above all to protect the individual
and the community from visitations of pestilence. is was a point that would
survive Reformation and the disappearance of the friars.
28
Roger Bacon: Inuence and Reputation
At rst sight, it might appear that the fteenth century was the high-water
mark of English Baconianism. New texts on sericonian alchemy, based
principally on the writings of George Ripley, an Augustinian canon, came
into fashion in the late fteenth and early sixteenth century in England, and
were soon diused into European collections. ese new texts nevertheless
owed much to the earlier writings on the elixir and the quintessence.29 At
26
Keiser, ‘Two Medieval’, p. 300.
27
Keiser, ‘Two Medieval’, p. 311.
28
Jones, ‘Itineraries’, discusses the range of manuscripts in which John’s treatise
appear, and the fate of the omas Multon version. A Protestant rewriting of
his version (dropping reference to the Dominican and to astrology) is found in
London, Wellcome Library, MS 674, of the late sixteenth century. See also Jones,
‘Unrecorded’, pp. 14–17.
29
Ripley was an Augustinian canon, not a friar: see pp. 17–18 above for the order
of canons. Sericonian alchemy was an oshoot of the pseudo-Lullian tradition,
The Legacy of Friars’ Medicine 227
the same time as sericonian alchemy was becoming fashionable, there was
a corresponding interest in recovering Roger Bacon’s works on alchemy on
the part of the English royal librarian, Giles du Wes (d. 1525), and his friend
and fellow alchemist, Robert Greene of Welby (c. 1467– d. after 1544). ey
conceived of English alchemy as a distinct historical tradition and admired
Friar Bacon as the earliest stage of the incipient pseudo-Lullian tradition,
while Ripley and sericonian alchemy took centre stage as a culmination of
that tradition. Jennifer Rampling has brought the collecting and transcribing
activities of du Wes and Greene in early sixteenth-century England into
focus. She emphasises that their text-focussed activities went hand in hand
with what she calls practical exegesis, that is reading while trying to recreate
the elixirs of the tradition by following the obscure directions of the texts
experimentally in their home laboratory.
30
e name of Roger Bacon was attached to a wide variety of alchemical
and medical texts in the sixteenth century, and this is well illustrated by
the pair of codices assembled and written by Robert Greene of Welby in
1528–9, now in CUL (MSS Ff.4.12 and Ff.4.13). Both these contain many
short texts, the majority of them pseudonymous or anonymous. e rst,
MS Ff.4.12, has ten texts on alchemy ascribed to Roger Bacon, out of a total
of thirty-eight items, described by Anke Timmermann (some of the entries
might be broken down into further smaller units). e second manuscript is
similarly compendious and pseudonymous; it does not feature Bacon’s name.
Of the ten texts ascribed to Bacon in the rst manuscript, only one of them
can be ascribed securely to the thirteenth-century friar, the Epistola de secretis
operibus artis et naturae et de nullitate magiae (Letter on the secret works of art
and nature, and on the emptiness of magic).31 Robert Greene would not have
had the resources available to enable him to discriminate between Bacon
and pseudo-Bacon, and probably assumed that the ten texts he transcribed
were all the work of the friar Roger Bacon. It was characteristic of sixteenthcentury English authors and collectors of manuscripts to make this same
centred on a vegetable stone. It is expertly characterised and put into historical
context by Rampling, Experimental Fire, pp. 73–99, and passim.
30
J. M. Rampling, ‘Transmuting Sericon: Alchemy as “Practical Exegesis” in Early
Modern England’, Osiris 29 (2014), 19–34; J. M. Rampling, ‘Reading Alchemical-
ly: Guides to ‘Philosophical’ Practice in Early Modern England’, BJHS emes 5
(2020), 57–74; Rampling, Experimental Fire, pp. 137–57.
31
Compare A. Timmermann, ‘Alchemy in Cambridge: An Annotated Catalogue of
Alchemical Texts and Illustrations in Cambridge Repositories’, Nuncius 30 (2015),
345–511 (p. 484) with Allen, Roger Bacon, Appendix B, ‘Bacon’s Authentic Al-
chemical/Medical Works and eir Witnesses’, p. 225.
228 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
assumption. ey credited Bacon as the one English medieval author who
ranged over all the sciences, from mathematics and perspective to medicine,
alchemy and magic.
John Dee (1527–1609) modelled his own intellectual programme on that
of Roger Bacon, moving away from his University of Cambridge roots to
establish himself as an adviser to princes, who prized his independence from
academic authority (remembering Bacon’s own rejection of scholasticism).
In the mid-1550s, Dee began to assemble his famous library, displaying
an interest in the works of al-Kindi, Robert Grosseteste, and above all,
Roger Bacon’s writings on perspective and the physics of light. Dee’s rst
work, the Propaedumata Aphoristica of 1558, develops Bacon’s theory of the
celestial inuences on human aairs to devise a mathematical foundation
for astrology. In the prefatory letter to his work, Dee lists among his own
previous writings a Speculum unitatis: sive apologia pro fratre Rogerio Bachone
anglo (e Mirror of Unity: or Apology for the English Friar Roger Bacon,
1557), written to defend Bacon’s reputation against the charge of practising
magic and other demonic arts. is text does not survive, but would have
distinguished between magic per se, which involved the aid of demons
and was condemned forcefully by Bacon, and the legitimate performance
of marvellous feats by human artice using the secrets of nature as
instruments. A manuscript of Bacon’s Epistola de secretis operibus artis et
naturae, et de nullitate magiae transcribed by Robert Greene of Welby, which
distinguished Bacon’s practice from magic, was annotated by Dee, who
intended to publish the work himself. Dee suered from accusations of
necromancy, and this no doubt promoted his self-identication with Bacon.
Dee also imitated Bacon in drafting a work on burning mirrors, starting
with the assumption that a parabolic mirror could focus the parallel rays
coming from the sun to a single point.
Dee’s famous ‘Mathematical Praeface’ to Euclid of 1570 articulates a
concept of ‘Archemastrie’ that closely paraphrases Roger Bacon’s account
of scientia experimentalis in the sixth book of the Opus maius. e three
prerogatives of experimental science asserted by Bacon, that it investigates
by experience the conclusions that other sciences reach by reasoning; that it
provides a method of teaching truths in other sciences that they cannot arrive
at by their own methods; and that it can enable knowledge of the future, the
past and the present, the formation of judgements better than ordinary judicial
astrology, and the production of wonderful works. ese are all present in Dee’s
‘Mathematical Praeface’, as in Bacon. Dee’s library, which, once he established
himself in his large house in Mortlake in 1565, was open to visitors for use,
included a remarkable collection of Roger Bacon manuscripts. In Dee’s library
The Legacy of Friars’ Medicine 229
catalogue of 1583 one manuscript (M23) is described as a collection of Bacon’s
works written in Dee’s own hand. ere were more Bacon manuscripts in his
library than those of any other author besides Aristotle, and they include all
Bacon’s genuine writings plus a good number of pseudo-Baconian works. Dee
started collecting alchemical manuscripts rather later than Bacon’s astrological
and mathematical works, and it was not until the Mortlake period that there
is evidence both for signicant accumulation of alchemical texts and Dee’s
own ‘practical exegesis’ of these writings by way of laboratory experiment.
Nevertheless, Dee acquired roughly sixty alchemical manuscripts between 1551
and 1597, as well as buying all the printed collections of alchemy published
from the 1560s onwards. He annotated many of his alchemy manuscripts, as
found for example in what is now TCC, MS O.7.35. is manuscript included
writings attributed to Albertus Magnus, Morienus, Avicenna and Rasis, as
well as pseudo-Baconian works, and an alchemical recipe cuiusdam fratris (of
a certain friar, f. 42r).
32
e fate of Roger Bacon’s manuscripts, and the development of his
extraordinary reputation in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England,
have been re-examined by Amanda Power.33 She argues that the idea that
Roger Bacon became a byword for failed magic, exploited for comic eect
by the playwright Robert Greene (1558–92, not to be confused with Robert
Greene of Welby) in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1592), was only a
partial truth. e former Carmelite, and bibliographer, John Bale wrote in
1548 that Bacon was ‘an illusionist and magus necromancer, not by the
power of God, but by the operation of evil spirits’.34 is picture of Bacon
as a necromancer was an important resource for Greene and his fellow wits
and for much of the popular folklore about Bacon and the making of the
Brazen Head in early modern England.35 Bale listed a number of magical
works attributed to Bacon. Around 1527, a priest named Walter Stapleton
borrowed one such book named esaurus spirituum from a vicar to help
him nd treasure magically, and this title was attributed to Bacon (though
not by Bale). A pseudo-Baconian Necromantia of the seventeenth century
32
John Dee’s Library Catalogue, ed. J. Roberts and A. G. Watson (London, 1990); N. H.
Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (Oxford, 1988),
pp. 65–72, 170–6. See also Dee’s annotations analysed in W. H. Sherman, John Dee:
e Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, 1995).
33
A. Power, ‘A Mirror for Every Age: e Reputation of Roger Bacon’, EHR 121
(2006), 657–92.
34
As cited in Power, ‘Mirror’, p. 661.
35
On Greene’s play and its handling of Roger Bacon, see A. Kavey, Books of Secrets:
Natural Philosophy in England, 1550–1600 (Urbana, 2007), pp. 38–47.
230 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
included instructions for raising the spirits of the dead.36 But in the second
edition of Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum (1557–9), Bale reversed
himself, declaring that ‘he [Bacon] had incredible skill in mathematics and
was without necromancy although many have defamed him with it’. is
correction was probably the result of Bale’s consultation of the notes of
John Leland, who had examined many of Bacon’s extant manuscripts in the
course of his antiquarian travels. Bacon’s reputation was also distorted by
virulently anti-papal polemic in Protestant England. Stories of his arrest
on the orders of the pope, and the supposed eorts of the Franciscans to
suppress his ideas were picked up and used to establish his credentials as
a proto-Protestant hero. Notwithstanding, John Dee was not the last of
the English virtuosi to take Roger Bacon’s ideas on natural philosophy,
mathematics and alchemy seriously for their own sake. Kenelm Digby was
a keen collector of his manuscripts and projected a proper printed edition
of all Bacon’s works in collaboration with John Selden in 1637. e Royal
Society later revived this project after the Restoration in 1660.
Tabula medicine – Afterlife
On 2 February 1574, Simon Forman (1552–1611), astrologer and healer,
bought a manuscript of the Tabula medicine in Oxford, where he was a
poor scholar at Magdalen College. He went on to adapt the manuscript,
now Cambridge, King’s College, MS 16, for his own medical uses. e
two Latin texts in the manuscript had been written c. 1470 in an English
hand. Forman built the manuscript up further by making copious English
annotations to the second text, the Tabula medicine, in the margins and on
additional paper leaves he had bound into the book.37 e eect was to
make the composite volume his medical vade-mecum. He may well have
assumed that the text of the Tabula medicine was the work of the Oxford
physician John Cokkys or Cokkes, as the name ‘Io. Cokis’ was written on
the foredge of the book in Forman’s hand. e name of John Cokkys is
found in the original manuscript not only as one of the many authorities
for remedies cited in the Tabula medicine, but also inserted incongruously
36
ese examples are given by O. Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Ox-
ford, 2009), p. 37.
37
L. T. Kassell, ‘Forman, Simon (1552–1611), Astrologer and Medical Practitioner’,
ODNB, 23 September 23 2004, accessed 14 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/
ref:odnb/9884; see also Casebooks of Simon Forman, ed. Kassell; L. Kassell, Medicine
and Magic in Elizabethan England: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford, 2007) puts Forman’s life in a wider context.
Fig. . Zodiac man drawn by Simon Forman, after , in his interleaved copy
of Tabula medicine. Cambridge, King’s College, MS , fol. h. Indication lines
point to the names of the zodiacal signs and the parts of the body they inuence.
Instructions for interpreting the image are written sideways to the left.
232 The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England
within the text of the thirteenth-century Commentum super tabulas salerni
of Bernardus Provincialis (fol. 7).38 So Forman had no inkling that he was
building his customised book around a text originally compiled by friars.
He assumed instead he was adapting the work of an Oxford physician.
39
Ironically, this did not impress the learned physicians of the London
College of Physicians, who were keen to imprison or ban Forman from
medical practice within their sphere of authority, no doubt because they
feared the competition. In March 1595, he was called before the censors of the
college. According to the censors, he confessed that he had practised medicine
in England for sixteen years, but in London for only two, claimed to have
eected many cures, stated that the only medical authors he had studied were
‘Corkes and Waineeet’ and boasted that he needed no other help than the
ephemerides (tables of planetary positions) to know diseases. ‘Corkes’ is clearly
a reference to John Cokkys, and Waineeet is the name of one of the friars
most often cited as an authority in the Tabula medicine. Neither of these names
would have meant anything to the doctors of the College of Physicians, and
they scorned his manuscript, condemning him for his ignorant and unlicensed
practice of medicine. Examined again on 7 November 1595, Forman repeated
‘that he had never read any writer in medicine except one of a certain Cockis,
and he boasted that he practised medicine only by astrology’. e censors
described Cokkys as ‘an English writer, a very obscure man, absolutely
unknown, and certainly of no merit’!40 e censors ned Forman £10 and
committed him to prison, though he was released a few days later. ey failed
to stop Forman’s lucrative medical practice. Forman tried later to improve his
credibility, perhaps to head o the college from further action against him.
To this end, Forman went to Jesus College, Cambridge, for several months
in 1603 and obtained a doctorate in physic and astronomy and a licence to
practise medicine from the university.
41
38
Bernardus Provincialis, ‘Commentum super Tabulas Salerni’, in Collectio Salerni-
tana, ed. S. de Renzi, 5 vols. (Naples, 1859; repr. 2001), V, pp. 269–328. For John
Cokkys, see Jones, ‘Cokkys’; Talbot and Hammond, Medical Practitioners, pp. 134–
6, and above p. 218. For Cokkys’s part in the manuscript, see Jones, ‘Tabula medi-
cine’, pp. 62, 72–3.
39
For more on Cambridge, King’s College MS 16, see Edmond, ‘Simon Forman’s’,
pp. 44–60; and B. H. Traister, e Notorious Astrological Physician of London. Works
and Days of Simon Forman (Chicago, 2001), pp. 32–9.
40
Kassell, Medicine & Magic, pp. 78–9.
41
Curiously the library of Jesus College, Cambridge, also holds a fteenth-century
copy of the Tabula medicine (MS Q.G.12).