RE: Macer Floridus' "De Viribus Herba"...

["GC" <glenclaston@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick,

There are two copies of Macer's Herbal (1590, 1595) on Gallica,
http://gallica.bnf.fr/
 and several copies of the English translation available on EEBO.
http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo

Unfortunately neither comes up with anything specifically relating to
Messahala, so I'll try the links and sources so kindly provided.

GC

-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Pelling [mailto:incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2002 4:29 PM
To: voynich@xxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Macer Floridus' "De Viribus Herba"...


Hi GC,

>After 1525 there were several abbreviated versions of the Herball printed
in
>English, one especially from 1543 that claims it to be a translation of
>Macer's Herball.  The true translation of Macer's Herball seems to be "The
>Great Herball", and not the Banckes' Herball, although Banckes' seems to be
>somewhat based on Macer's Herball.

Note that Gosta Frisk's 1949 book "A Middle English Translation of Macer
Floridus" is (it says here) based on MS. X91 in the Royal Library at
Stockholm. You can search this (plus a load of other Swedish libraries)
from the Royal Library's Web OPAC interface, on http://www.kb.se/

However, they've changed their indexing since 1949, so MS. X91 (as a
reference) appears to be no more. Searching for "Macer Floridus" gave two
16th Century hits, one from 1515 and another from 1540, the latter marked
as having been printed in Fran[cofurti] - so perhaps the 1515 edition is
the Middle English one? I guess you'd need to look at Gosta Frisk's book to
determine if that's the case - I'll see if I can get a look at the BL's
copy of it. :-/

Also: here's a rather nice web-page, describing Burgess MS 34 held by the
University of Oregon, which is a manuscript copy of Macer Floridus (but
without illustrations), almost certainly from Bolognese Italy, & dating
from somewhere in the late 14th to 15th century:-

         http://libweb.uoregon.edu/speccoll/mss/burgess/ms34.htm

This contains 41 of the 77 herbs listed by Frisk in the Middle English
translation of Macer Floridus (it says) - as opposed to the 131 (IIRC) of
the VMS.

At Durham University, here's a description of another Middle English
manuscript version of MF that dates from 13th and 15th century (I'm not
sure which, it's not completely clear from the text). But (it says) the
order of the plants in it is decidedly different from the order described
by Frisk:-

         http://www.dur.ac.uk/Library/asc/medmss/apvv15.htm

BTW: another search threw up this link:-

         http://www.ansteorra.org/pipermail/herbalist/2001-May/000065.html

.......which gave a list of references, one of which was:-

         Brodin, Gosta. (1950). _Agnus Castus: A Middle English Herbal
         reconstructed from Various Manuscripts_. Uppsala, Sweden:
         Almgvist & Wicksells Boktryckeri AB.

         This was Brodin's dissertation printed in Sweden and has no ISBN.
         The name Gosta actually has an umlaut over the "o", but I suspect
         most email packages will make it unreadable. This manuscript is
         dated at roughly the late 14th century. No author is known.

If you're looking for English herbal traditions that might have led into
the VMS, this might not be a bad place to start. The BL has two copies (of
course it does, Nick).

This is probably linked with "vitex agnus-castus", which is the berry from
the chaste tree, AKA the chasteberry. There's a small (£2.99) recent (1992)
book on this by Simon Mills called "Woman medicine. vitex agnus-castus, the
herb", which also includes a bibliography.

         http://www.scientificherbals.com/chasteberry.asp

As (according to the links I've just followed) chasteberry was originally
found around the Mediterranean, it might well be a thing we'd expect to see
in the VMS? Dana? :-)

>   Bancke's Herball is heavy into female
>disorders, and Anthony's writings even more so, and both also have a higher
>focus on treatments of the eyes.

Nancy Siraisi makes it clear both that eye problems were extremely common
all through the Middle Ages, and that people often looked to herbals for
things that might help their eye problems. Also: the degree to which the
VMS contains eye-related herbs and/or recipes is far from resolved yet. :-/

>This is a long way from our understanding of medicine, but whoever wrote
the
>Voynich had a working knowledge of these systems, and it is in our best
>interest to develop some semblance of that knowledge as well.

Agreed! But it's great that we are now starting to produce possible
candidates - we'll almost certainly learn a great deal from comparing those
to the VMS, and by testing predictions based on those candidates'
contents.  :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....