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Acknowledgements
The texts edited in this article are published by permission of the British Library (for BL MSS Additional 5467, Sloane 7, and Harley 978 and 3383 [© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved]), the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (for CUL MS Dd.10.44), the Master and Fellows of Jesus College, Cambridge (for Jesus College Library MS Q.D.1), the Master and Fellows of St. John's College, Cambridge (for St. John's College Library MS B.15), and the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London (for Wellcome MSS 405 and 409). I am grateful to these institutions and to their always helpful staff for access to their collections and permission to publish these texts.
Notes
1Keiser, “Verse Introductions,” 310 – 14.
2Keiser, “Verse Introductions,” nn. 23 – 4. For earlier notices and studies of the Lettre d'Hippocrate and some of its manuscripts, see Meyer, “Les manuscrits II,” 274; “Les manuscrits III,” 84 – 5 (TCC O.1.20); “Sloane 1611,” 536 – 9; “Sloane 2412,” 45 – 53; Wiese (Escorial I.III.7); Brunel, 81 – 118 (Arch. départementales du Gers I 4066); Tovar, “Contamination,” 128 – 33 and passim; La Lettre (cited by Hunt, Popular Medicine, 100 n. 2); Södergård (Vat. Reg. lat. 1211); Kibre, 223 – 6; Hunt, Popular Medicine, 100 – 41 (BL Harley 978, Royal 12 B XII, Sloane 3550; Bodleian Digby 86; and descriptions of other manuscripts); Anglo-Norman Medicine 2:259, 264 (TCC O.5.32); Hunt, ed., Receptaria, 85 – 160, esp. 85 – 93 (CCCC 388); Fery-Hue, 117 – 21 (Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève 2261). Most of these studies focus more on the recipe collection than on the humours and urines material that introduces those recipes. For the Middle English texts, see Keiser, Works of Science: Manual, 10: no. 302, 3662, 3852 – 3.
Meyer, “Les manuscrits III,” 84, reported of the Lettre that “les manuscrits latins en sont fort nombreux”, but he reproduced no Latin texts of the Lettre, and later scholars appear to agree that the treatise is “an essentially vernacular work” (Hunt, Popular Medicine, 101; see also Kibre, 223 – 4). That vernacularity does not, however, preclude the existence of Latin versions of the texts, or references to such versions: Hunt, Popular Medicine, 124 – 36, provides an edition of Latin recipes derived from the Lettre and found in BL Royal 12 B XII, suggesting that they were translated from French (101). Kibre, 225, notes that a rubric in a French manuscript of the text (BN fr. 573) refers to a translation from Latin into French, though it appears that this rubric refers only to the preceding text, a translation of Giles of Rome's De regimine principum.
3For a listing of Anglo-Norman manuscripts containing all or part of the Lettre d'Hippocrate, see Dean, 223 – 5, which may be supplemented by Hunt's fuller descriptions of those manuscripts and briefer mention of selected continental manuscripts (Popular Medicine, 104 – 6). Editions and transcripts of texts in the Lettre d'Hippocrate, usually from individual manuscripts, may be found in the works of Meyer, Wiese, Brunel, Tovar, Södergård, Hunt, and Fery-Hue cited in n. 2. The Letter of Ipocras is to be distinguished from another common ME medical text pseudonymously attributed to Hippocrates, The Book of Ipocras of Death and of Life (Keiser, Works of Science: Manual, 10: no. 116, 3623, 3779).
4A full analysis of these recipe collections, in their French, English, and Latin forms, remains a desideratum. As Hunt, Popular Medicine, 100, observes, “the so-called ‘Lettre d'Hippocrate’ was the most influential collection of vernacular medical receipts before 1300. A considerable number of the Old French receipts that have so far been published clearly derive from it … and many of those that remain in manuscript constitute as yet unrecorded witnesses to the work's popularity.” Many Middle English recipe collections derive from it as well.
6Texts from originally separate manuscripts.
7Dated to the fifteenth century by Keiser, Works of Science: Manual, 10:3853; and Voigts and Kurtz; dated by Hunt, Popular Medicine, 106, to the fourteenth century.
5Other copies may still remain unidentified, especially if embedded in longer texts. Manuscript dating is based on dates given by Hunt, esp. Popular Medicine; Keiser, Works of Science: Manual, 10; “Verse Introductions”; Voigts and Kurtz; Ker et al.; selected volumes in the Index of Middle English Prose; and editions of texts in individual manuscripts.
Middle English texts edited in this article are provided with modern punctuation, word-division, and capitalization; abbreviations are silently expanded; interlinear additions by the original scribes are indicated by paired backward and forward strokes: \ / . Variants are selective, focusing mainly on semantically substantive differences. Collated witnesses not listed after a lemma agree substantively with the text as edited.
8 The Index of Middle English Verse (IMEV), see Brown and Robbins.
9Keiser, “Verse Introductions,” 310 – 13, observing inter alia that IMEV entries 1605 and 4182 should be taken as “variant forms of the same work” (311).
10For an alternate syntactic interpretation and punctuation of the Wellcome 409 prologue, see Keiser, “Verse Introductions,” 311.
12The forms taken by this prologue in Jesus Q.D.1, TCC R.14.32, and Sloane 706 are very closely related, as are the assemblages of texts that follow it in all three manuscripts, as we will see below. The version in CUL Dd.10.44 differs at several points, but is still recognizably akin to the other three: “This booke did Ipocrase send vnto Sezar for a gret tresour and therfor kepe it well as your own lyfe. For he made it for help & helth of his body for all maner of yuyles for to exchew [sic]” (114r).
11Quoted by Keiser, 311.
13Hargreaves, 446; Fery-Hue, 118; Keiser, “Verse Introductions,” 310.
14Meyer, “Les manuscrits III,” 84.
15Hunt, Popular Medicine, 104 and passim; Dean, 223; see also Tovar, “Contamination,” 129.
16For a parallel application of the word humour to the elemental qualities, seeMED, s.v. humour, sense 5 (quoting Speculum Sacerdotale).
17See n. 20.
18The original of the text is likely to be similar to the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman versions published by Hunt and Meyer, from Harley 978 (ca. 1240 – 50) and TCC O.1.20 (s. xiii2) respectively:
Des humurs: Une est chaude, le autre freide, le tierz sec, le quart muiste. Par chalur sunt tutes choses sustenues par lesqueles nus vivums. Nos os sunt seccs, que il nus dunent force a suffrir travail. Freides sunt les entrailles, dunt nus espirums, e li sanc est muiste, lequel nurist la vie. Par les os e par les entrailles curent les veines ki guverne [sic (in orig.)] le sanc e le sanc la vie e la vie le cors sustient. (Hunt, Popular Medicine, 109; italics in orig.)
Chascun veraiment, & home & beste & oisel, qui cuer a en soi, a .iiij. humors, meismement cors d'ome, et quele sont les humors? Ce est a savoir l'une est chaude, l'autre est seche, la tierce est moiste, la quarte est froide. Par la chalor sont soustenues totes iceles choses par lesqueles nos vivons. Nostre os sont sec qui force nos donent a soffrir travail. Froides sont les entrailles dont nous espirons, & li sans est moistes qui norrist la vie. Par les os & par les entrailles corent les veines, lesqueles governent le sanc; li sans la vie; la vie le cors sostient. (Meyer, “Les manuscrits III,” 84 – 5)
19Dean records nine Anglo-Norman witnesses, the largest number of surviving manuscripts for an Anglo-Norman medical text listed in her Guide except for the omnibus categories “Medical Prescriptions” and “Medical Charms, Prayers, Exorcisms, Talismans” (223 – 37). Continental copies were probably available in England as well; for some now in the Sloane collection, see Hunt, Popular Medicine, 106.
20The full compendium consists of the following texts: 1) the “great treasure” prose prologue; 2) the “Man Bird and Fowl” form of MBB; 3) “Dieta Ypocras,” a regiminal treatise structured around the four seasons and probably seen by the compendium's compiler as the “boke” sent by Ipocras to Caesar; 4) “De quatuor infirmitatibus”; 5) a treatise on nine pulses; 6) “To know the ix sage leaves”; 7) “To wit and know the veins of bloodletting”; 8) a treatise on the four complexions (not in Sb); 9) a treatise on the number of bones, veins, and teeth in the body (not in Sb); 10) “De quatuor qualitatibus (planetarum),” a description of the planets in terms of the four qualities; 11) John of Burgundy's four-chapter plague treatise. The order of the last four items is somewhat variable and may be interrupted by one or two other short pieces.
22Published parallel texts appear in Södergård, 9 – 10; Hunt, Anglo-Norman Medicine 2:259; Hunt, Receptaria, 92.
21Cf. Hunt's comment on the Middle English versions and CUL Dd.10.44: “Whilst a number of English texts offer the introductory section on the humours and on urines, there is little evidence of complete translations. An exception is MS Cambridge, University Library Dd. X.44 (s.xiv) ff. 114r – 117v.” (Popular Medicine, 106). Of the versions of the Lettre d'Hippocrate that I have seen in print or manuscript, the following include longer forms of the uroscopy section, all with fourteen or more uroscopic signs: Harley 978 (fourteen signs), Sloane 2412 (fourteen signs), CCCC 388 (fifteen signs), Wellcome 546 (sixteen signs), TCC O.5.32 (twenty signs), Vat. Reg. lat. 1211 (twenty-six signs, some corrupt; closely related to Harley 2558), and Harley 2558 (twenty-eight signs).
24Numbering and collations are mine, but indebted to the published notices and editions by Meyer, Södergård, and Hunt for MSS Sloane 2412, Vat. Reg. lat. 1211, Harley 978, and CCCC 388. It should be noted that in TCC O.5.32, the uroscopic tokens from the Lettre d'Hippocrate appear without the remaining texts in the ensemble (prologue, humoural tract, the customary recipe collection) and are split into two sections preceding and following a French translation of the pseudo-Hippocratic De urinis (Hunt, Anglo-Norman Medicine, 2:259 – 64).
23Wiese dates Escorial MS I.III.7 to the beginning of the fourteenth century, following the manuscript's catalogue description, and notes that “la langue des recettes présente des traits normands” (663). Of Sloane 1611, Meyer notes that “le copiste était du nord de la France, de Picardie ou d'une région voisine”; he goes on to suggest that the exemplar used for the Lettre d'Hippocrate in Sloane 1611 may have been Anglo-French and that the manuscript might even have been copied in England, though by a French or Picard scribe. The manuscript contains Latin, French, and English marginal notes written in an early fourteenth-century, English cursive script (“Sloane 1611,” 534 – 5). The copy of the Lettre d'Hippocrate in Digby 86 (a late thirteenth-century French/English/Latin common-place book; facsimile: Tschann and Parkes) contains only five tokens, omitting the diagnosis of golden, clear urine in a woman as a sign of “talent de homme”.
25Found, sometimes in abbreviated forms, in at least ten manuscripts: BL MSS Add. 4698, Sloane 121, Sloane 3466, Sloane 3542; Bodleian MSS Add. C.246, Ashmole 1438, Hatton 29, Rawlinson C.299; CUL Dd.10.44; and National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 388C. Insofar as possible, I have modernized this and the following incipit to represent the two groups of texts collectively (cf. the comments on modernized incipits in Voigts and Kurtz, “Introduction—Language”).
26Found, with some variation, in at least twenty-four manuscripts: BL MSS Arundel 42, Egerton 2433, Royal 12.G.4 (3x), Royal 17.A.3, Sloane 5, Sloane 7, Sloane 357, Sloane 635, Sloane 963 (2x), Sloane 1388 (2x), Sloane 2584; Bodleian MSS Ashmole 1393, Ashmole 1413, Ashmole 1438 (2x), Hatton 29; CCCC 388, CUL Ff.2.6, Gonville and Caius 84/166 (2x), TCC R.14.51; Wellcome 8004; National Library of Wales MS Sotheby C.2; York Minster Library MS XVI.E.32; Surrey History Service LM1327/2; and Columbia University Library MS Plimpton 254. I am in the process of analysing the relationships among the multiple forms of these “white-red-white” and “white-brown” uroscopy texts. Another uroscopy beginning with white and brown urine as a sign of health, but then containing a much different set of tokens, is the “Judicium Perfectum Omnium Urinarum” found in at least thirty-five of the fifty-plus copies ofThe Doom of Urines compendium. Whether there are close French equivalents to the “white-brown” texts is a question that remains to be answered.
27Found complete in Sloane MSS 7 and 297; Durham University Library, Cosin V.III.10; and Wellcome 564 (s. xvi; possibly copied from Cosin V.III.10 or a very closely related manuscript). Incomplete in Sloane 433 (due to a lost folio), Hatton 29 (where two tokens are omitted and the remainder are rearranged in more or less reverse order), and Sloane 1388 (similar to Hatton 29 but with further omissions and greater corruption in the text).
28Matheson, ed., see Appendix II.
29The omitted tokens (items 2 – 4 in Yo, 1 – 4 in As8) were probably excluded because versions of those tokens already appear in the “white-brown” list that precedes the remaining ST tokens.
30This variant is distinguished by its reduction or omission of the first sign and the use of “droue” or “drowuy” (“murky, turbid”) instead of “blody” in the second; I have seen it only in Bodleian Add. A.106 and CUL Dd.6.29.
31“The Tokens of Ipocras,” also found in Oxford, Magdalen College MS 221; Huntington Library MS HM 64; Digby 29; and Sloane MSS 405 and 1388.
32Hunt, Popular Medicine, 100; cf. Tovar, “Contamination,” 130: “un texte extrêmement modeste, on pourrait dire rustique.”
33For example, in Henry Daniel's Liber Uricrisiarum (over twenty-five witnesses); the Twenty-Jordan Series of colours, contents, associated illnesses and recommended medicines (with over sixty witnesses; Tavormina, ed.); the uroscopic compendium sometimes calledThe Doom of Urines (over fifty witnesses); a uroscopic overview that presents ten hot and ten cold colours followed by eighteen contents (with at least ten witnesses, including Harley 1735, John Crophill's manuscript; Ayoub, ed.); brief lists and ring-diagrams of the twenty Aegidian colours and the states of digestion that they are associated with (at least twenty-five instances); and many others.
34These quaternities were familiar to educated persons before the rise of the universities, of course: they are spelled out in the widely disseminated Flos medicinae scholae Salerni (Renzi, ed., 5:47 – 50); cf. Byrhtferth's diagram in Oxford, St. John's College MS 17, dated to 1110, reproduced as the colour frontispiece in Hanna.
1 hemours: cf. the variant spelling “emour” in MED, s.v. humour.