De simplici medicina

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De simplici medicina ( About the simple drug ) is an herb book - manuscript from the last quarter of the 14th century. Today it is kept in the University Library of Basel under the catalog number Mskr. K. II. 11. Alsace and is also known as Alsatian ' Circa instans '.

Description and content

The manuscript comprises 36 sheets of sheep parchment , which are described in the 14th century Bastarda , a delicate current script with loops of the lowercase letters protruding from the lines. The images are watercolors bound with vegetable glue ( gum arabic ). The manuscript contains a total of 412 plant sections with 394 images. The cover (lapwing marble cardboard tape) dates from the 19th century. The state of preservation is good, but there is occasional water damage and numerous fly droppings on the leaves. The format is approx. 25 × 33.5 cm.

Around half of the roughly alphabetical chapters come from the Circa instans from the Salerno school . The remaining chapters only rarely contain pharmacognostic properties of medicinal plants , such as the primary qualities (warm, cold, dry, moist) and their degrees. In some cases, these chapters only contain the plant name and synonyms in addition to the illustration.

Towards the end of the handwriting, the texts become shorter and shorter and sometimes break off in the sentence. Entries for the letters Y and Z are missing. In the text accompanying the facsimile published in 1961, Arnold Pfister assumed that the pictures were first made and then, depending on the space available, the descriptions were added. Pfister cites the entry for Aloes lignum ( aloe wood ) on page 1 on verso, which was the only one made in Textura . Since this took up a lot of space, Pfister concludes, the clerk switched to Bastarda. Numerous German names and synonyms were added by the same scribe. The last entry contains only a pre-drawn figure. Color and text are missing.

Due to the less innovative texts, the significance of the manuscript today lies in the plant miniatures it contains . For them, different, shaded green tones in a wide temperature range were used, which are effectively staged by splashes of color (especially red). For Pfister, the miniatures for a transalpine manuscript are of outstanding quality. In this regard, he refers to the illustrations of the crabapple tree (sheet 20, column 2), the rose (sheet 26, column 2) and, above all, the wind (sheet 33, column 1), which for him to suggest models from Italy.

At the time of the 1961 edition, nothing was known about the exact origin of the manuscript.

expenditure

  • De simplici medicina. Herbal manuscript from the 14th century. 2 volumes. Edited from the original in the possession of the Basel University Library as a facsimile with accompanying text. by Arnold Pfister, (Sanz AG) Basel 1960; 2nd edition ( 'De simplici medicina'. Herbal book manuscript from the last quarter of the 14th century in the possession of the Basel University Library ), ibid. 1961.

literature

  • Garrido Anes / María Edurne: De "simplici medicina" (Circa instans) en inglés medio. Vernacularización del tratado salernitano de Mateo Plateario , Universidad de Huelva 2005.
  • Paul Dorveaux: Le Livre des simples médicines. Traduction française du Liber de simplici medicina dictus Circa instans de Platearius, tirée d'un manuscrit du XIIIe siècle (Ms. 3133 de la Bibliothèque de Ste Généviève de Paris et publiée pour la première fois par le Dr. Paul Dorveaux), avec un fac -simile d'une page dudit manuscrit, Paris 1913 (= Publication de la Sociéte française d'Histoire de la Médicine, 1).
  • Walther Damm: The only previously known German version of the book Circa instans (de simplicibus) based on a manuscript from the 15th century (Leipzig, University Library, No. 1224). Mathematical and scientific dissertation Berlin 1929.