Stockholm, Royal Library, manuscript X. 90

Last updated

Stockholm, Royal Library, manuscript X. 90 (also known as Kungliga Bibliotek, handskrift X. 90 or 10. 90) is an early fifteenth-century manuscript noted for the Middle English medical texts that it contains.

Contents

Origins and provenance

The quarto manuscript is made almost entirely of 'greyish and thick' paper, but pages 7–10 are made of two folios of vellum, while pages 94–104 are dyed red. The codex seems to have been composed in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, and exhibits four hands (of which the first and fourth contributed most of the material). Mention of Frawsham Halle on p. 49 associates the production of the manuscript with Fransham in Norfolk. [1] :309 [2] :302 [3] Dialectal analysis using the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English supports the idea that the manuscript was a Norfolk production, though the texts it contains at least sometimes originated elsewhere. [1] :310–15 The final leaves of the manuscript have been lost.

The manuscript is thought to have been donated to Stockholm's royal library by Christianus Ravius, who spent time in Oxford, and served as Sweden's Royal Librarian 1655–59; [1] :309 the volume was accessioned in 1706. [4] :xvi

Contents and editions

Irma Taavitsainen summarised the English contents of the manuscript in the Index of Middle English Prose as follows [4] :xxv,22–25(with additional information added from other sources):

Item noContentsMS pagesMain editionsNotes
1Medical recipes1–18 [5] :27–4970 recipes in English followed by four in Latin
2Medicinal plants and their virtues18–32 [6] :77–78 (excerpt)
3Medical recipes32–35 [5] :50–5723 medical recipes in English ending with a Latin note
nonePoem on health35–47 [7] :295–307a 460-line poem of medical advice
4Medical recipes and charms47–48 [5] :57–598 texts
nonePoem on plants49–78 [7] :307–30A 1025-line poem on plants and their properties
5 Henry Daniel's translation of the treatise on rosemary80–86 [1]
6Medical recipes86–91 [5] :59–6514 medical recipes
7Medical recipes91–93 [5] :65–677 medical recipes
8Medical recipes93 [5] :67–68A recipe 'for the mygrym'
9Medical recipes and charms95–104 [5] :68–8360 medical recipes and charms
10Medical recipes and charms105–23 [5] :83–108115 medical recipes and charms
11Urinology123–26
12Medical rules126–27 [5] :108–9Four rules for interpreting pregnancy
13Medical recipes and charms127–50 [5] :109–3573 medical recipes and charms in English, with some in Latin in the middle
14Phlebotomy150–52The treatise lists the veins and gives guidance on bloodletting
15Medical recipes152–55 [5] :135–39
16 Agnus Castus 156–216 [8]

The distribution of scribal activity in the manuscript is as follows: [4] :25

pageshand
1–911
91–932
933
95–1044
104–2161

A selection of the prose texts from the manuscript was published by Ferdinand Holthausen in 1897. [6] Though superseded by other editions, Holthausen's selection remains in use as a convenient sample of Middle English medical recipes; he printed samples from pages 14, 26, 31, 33, 34, 35, 47, 85, 103, 104, 110, 117, 120, 121, 129, 136-37, 145, and 155.

Related Research Articles

In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone substantial regularisation and is associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record, etc. All linguistic features are subject to the effects of standardisation, including morphology, phonology, syntax, lexicon, register, discourse markers, pragmatics, as well as written features such as spelling conventions, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation practices. SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked, although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects, and it has very little of the variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects largely by a small group of grammatical "idiosyncrasies", such as irregular reflexive pronouns and an "unusual" present-tense verb morphology.

The Dialogue on Translation between a Lord and a Clerk, or Dialogus inter dominum et clericum, was written by John Trevisa. Along with the dedicatory Epistle, it forms the introduction to his 1387 translation of the Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden, commissioned by Trevisa's patron, Lord Berkeley. Written in Middle English, it consists of a series of arguments made by the clerk on why books should not be translated from learned languages such as Latin, each one followed by a rebuttal from the lord. The clerk eventually agrees, and the exchange concludes with a prayer for guidance in the translation.

<i>Alexander Romance</i> Account of the life and exploits of Alexander the Great

The Alexander Romance, once described as "antiquity's most successful novel", is an account of the life and exploits of Alexander the Great. The Romance describes Alexander the Great from his birth, to his succession of the throne of Macedon, his conquests including that of the Persian Empire, and finally his death. Although constructed around an historical core, the romance is mostly fantastical, including many miraculous tales and encounters with mythical creatures such as sirens or centaurs. In this context, the term Romance refers not to the meaning of the word in modern times but in the Old French sense of a novel or roman, a "lengthy prose narrative of a complex and fictional character".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wihtburh</span> East Anglian princess and saint

Wihtburh was an East Anglian saint, princess and abbess. According to tradition, she was the youngest daughter of Anna, king of the East Angles, but Virginia Blanton has suggested that the royal connection was probably a fabrication. One story says that the Virgin Mary sent a pair of female deer to provide milk for Wihtburh's workers during the construction of her convent at Dereham, in Norfolk. When a local official attempted to hunt down the does, he was thrown from his horse and killed.

The Pilgrimage of the Soul or The Pylgremage of the Sowle was a late medieval work in English, combining prose and lyric verse, translated from Guillaume de Deguileville's Old French Le Pèlerinage de l'Âme. It circulated in manuscript in fifteenth-century England, and was among the works printed by William Caxton. One manuscript forms part of the Egerton Collection in the British Library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kingdom of East Anglia</span> Anglo-Saxon kingdom in southeast Britain

The Kingdom of the East Angles, informally known as the Kingdom of East Anglia, was a small independent kingdom of the Angles during the Anglo-Saxon period comprising what are now the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk and perhaps the eastern part of the Fens, the area still known as East Anglia.

Egerton MS 1782 is the index title of an early sixteenth-century Irish vellum manuscript housed in the Egerton Collection of the British Library, London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Historical Archive of the City of Cologne</span>

The Historical Archive of the City of Cologne is the municipal archive of Cologne, Germany. It ranks among the largest communal archives in Europe.

The Durham Proverbs is a collection of 46 mediaeval proverbs from various sources. They were written down as a collection, in the eleventh century, on some pages of a manuscript that were originally left blank. The manuscript is currently in the collection of Durham Cathedral, to which it was donated in the eighteenth century. The Proverbs form the first part of the manuscript. The second part, to which it is bound, is a copy of Ælfric's Grammar. Each proverb is written in both Latin and Old English, with the former preceding the latter. Olof Arngart's opinion is that the Proverbs were originally in Old English and translated to Latin, but this has since been disputed in a conference paper by T. A. Shippey.

The Lincoln Thornton Manuscript is a medieval manuscript compiled and copied by the fifteenth-century English scribe and landowner Robert Thornton, MS 91 in the library of Lincoln Cathedral. The manuscript is notable for containing single versions of important poems such as the Alliterative Morte Arthure and Sir Perceval of Galles, and gives evidence of the variegated literary culture of fifteenth-century England. The manuscript contains three main sections: the first one contains mainly narrative poems ; the second contains mainly religious poems and includes texts by Richard Rolle, giving evidence of works by that author which are now lost; and the third section contains a medical treatise, the Liber de diversis medicinis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Swanton</span>

Michael James Swanton is a British historian, linguist, archaeologist and literary critic, specialising in the Anglo-Saxon period and its Old English literature.

The Poema Morale is an early Middle English moral poem outlining proper Christian conduct. The poem was popular enough to have survived in seven manuscripts, including the homiletic collections known as the Lambeth Homilies and Trinity Homilies, both dating from around 1200.

The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday is a list, popular in the Middle Ages because of millenarianism, of the events that are supposed to occur in the fortnight before the end of the world. It may find an origin in the apocryphal Apocalypse of Thomas and is found in many post-millennial manuscripts in Latin and in the vernacular. References to it occur in a great multitude and variety of literary works, and via the Cursor Mundi it may have found its way even into the early modern period, in the works of William Shakespeare.

The Brut Chronicle, also known as the Prose Brut, is the collective name of a number of medieval chronicles of the history of England. The original Prose Brut was written in Anglo-Norman; it was subsequently translated into Latin and English.

Norman Francis Blake was a British academic and scholar specialising in Middle English and Early Modern English language and literature on which he published abundantly during his career.

The Old English Dicts of Cato is the editorial name given to the Old English language text based on the Latin Distichs of Cato. It is a collection of approximately 80 prose proverbs, the exact number varying between each of the three manuscript versions. These can be found in MS Cambridge, Trinity College, R.9.17, MS British Library, Cotton Vespasian D.xiv and MS British Library, Cotton Julius A.ii respectively.

Henry Wood (1849–1925) was an American Professor of German Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Manfred Markus, is a German-Austrian linguist and university professor. He has been professor emeritus since 2009.

Alexandra Anne Talbot Barratt (née Carr) is a New Zealand academic, and is professor emerita at the University of Waikato. Barratt is a specialist in medieval manuscripts.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Martti Mäkinen, 'Henry Daniel's Rosemary in MS X.90 of the Royal Library, Stockholm', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 103 (2002), 305–27.
  2. Sudhoff, Karl 1909. 'Die gedruckten mittelalterlichen medizinischen Texte in germanischen Sprachen', Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin, 111 (1909), 273–303.
  3. George Stephens, Förteckning öfver de förnämsta brittiska och fransyska handskrifternauti Kongl. bibliotheket i Stockholm (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1847), pp. 40–43.
  4. 1 2 3 Irma Taavitsainen, Manuscripts in Scandinavian Collections, Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist 10 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), ISBN   0859914143.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 G. Müller, Aus mittelenglischen Medizintexten: Die Prosarezepte des Stockholmer Miszellan Kodex X.90, Kölner anglistische Arbeiten, 10 (Cologne: Kölner anglistische Arbeiten, 1929).
  6. 1 2 'Rezepte, segen und Zauberspruche aus zwei Stockholmer handschriften', ed. by F. Holthausen, Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 19 (1897), 75–88 (pp. 75–86); doi : 10.1515/angl.1897.1897.19.75.
  7. 1 2 'Medicinische gedichte aus einer Stockholmer handschrift', ed. by F. Holthausen, Anglia, 18 (1896), 293–331, doi : 10.1515/angl.1896.1896.18.293.
  8. Angus Castus. A Middle English Herbal, ed. by Gösta Brodin, Essays and Studies on English Language and Literature, 6 (Uppsala: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln; Copenhagen: Munksgaard; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950).