Middle and Early Modern English Texts – serie

The present edition offers the diplomatic transcription of MS Wellcome 542, housing a late Middle English hitherto unedited remedy-book based on the medical lore of Hippocrates, Socrates and Galen. A glossary, notes and introduction also accompany the edition. The introduction has been conceived as a state of the art of this scientific treatise, and deals with the textual transmission of the text, a codicological/palaeographic description together with the scribe’s dialect and idiolect. The edition therefore conforms itself as a primary source for research not only in Historical Linguistics but also in other related fields such as the History of Medicine or Ecdotics.

One of the three most important medical herbals composed in Middle English, both in terms of physical length and for the number of species treated, and regularly quoted not only by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary or the Middle English Dictionary but also by historians of Natural Sciences in Britain since the 1700s, a printed version of the treatise compiled in 1373 by the otherwise unknown Herefordian schoolmaster John Lelamour was surprisingly not yet available to the general public. The present volume fills this gap by offering a critical edition of the text contained in the sole extant copy, together with a detailed introduction discussing such topics as authorship and Quellenforschung, the dialect of the text, or the history of the manuscript; a large collection of explanatory notes which throw light on the textual transmission of the text, translation and copy mistakes, identification of parallel passages, and species identification; a full glosary, and two appendixes, one with the current botanical names of the plants mentioned in the text, and another crossreferencing diseases to the lines in the edition where these appear.

This book offers the semi-diplomatic edition of the Late Middle English manuscript Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun.A.3.127, which is housed at Chetham’s Library in Manchester. This codex contains a number of recipes to cure illnesses, a previous list of herbs and plants and an outline. This volume is accompanied by an introduction, a physical description of the witness and a glossary. Because of that, this book is a primary source of research in historical linguistics and in other fields of study such as the history of medicine.