A guest post by Winston Black

In the last post, Brian Long asked the important question, “What good were Constantine’s translations?” Yes, it’s impressive that some 1000 medieval manuscript copies survive of Constantine the African’s medical works, but large numbers alone don’t tell us how those books were actually read or used in medical practice. To understand that, we need to look at individual manuscripts for evidence of physicians and students of medicine closely reading and commenting on Constantine’s work. In this post, I’ll look at three medical manuscripts from early twelfth-century England that illuminate how Constantine’s works were copied and read far from his Italian home, and how Constantine himself came to be seen (at least in one of those manuscripts) as a medical “star” alongside the ancient authorities of Hippocrates and Galen.

Anglo-Norman England (the period of direct Norman rule, 1066-1154) is important in the history of medieval medicine because many of the earliest copies of medical works by Constantine or other southern Italian authors were written there. Historians of medieval medicine (like Monica Green and myself) are still exploring the mechanisms by which medical texts moved quickly from Monte Cassino and Salerno in Italy to Normandy and England around the turn of the twelfth century. The easiest answer (albeit still insufficient) is the Norman connection: during the eleventh century Norman nobles and mercenaries conquered both England (William the Conqueror) and southern Italy, including the island of Sicily (Robert “Guiscard” de Hauteville). Thus the dukes and kings of Normandy, England, and Sicily all shared a common language, ancestry, and culture during the twelfth century, which encouraged literary and intellectual connections between those regions. Furthermore, most of the new bishops and heads of religious houses after 1066 (usually appointed by the king or with his cognizance) came from Normandy or the Île-de-France and presumably had closer ties to other continental cathedrals and monasteries. These Frenchmen include Abbot John of Tours at Bath (r.1088-1122) and Abbot Baldwin at Bury St Edmunds (r.1065-1097), whose abbeys produced all of the manuscripts discussed here.

Two Anglo-Norman medical manuscripts (figs. 1-2), which indicate those ties between England and southern Italy, are copies of Constantine’s Pantegni, both copied around 1125 in the wealthy English abbeys of Bath and Bury St Edmunds (now London, British Library, MS Additional 22719 and Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.34). The Pantegni, as we have seen in an earlier post, was a translation of the medical encyclopedia of ‘Alī ibn al-‘Abbās al-Majūsī, d. after 977). These manuscripts of the Pantegni are high-class productions: both have broad margins on finely and consistently prepared parchment, neat and professional scripts, and illuminated initials in red and green ink (usually six lines high). Throughout the Bath Pantegni (BL Add. 22719), the first letter of each sentence or paragraph is also highlighted in green and red ink, a significant level of labor and decoration for a medical text. These are large and valuable books, probably intended for reference in the library rather than for a doctor to carry around.

Neither of these luxury copies of the Pantegni, however, highlight Constantine’s authorship outside of instances where he named himself in the text. They indicate that powerful religious centers in England valued the Pantegni as a text, but not necessarily that they recognized Constantine as a “star” medical authority.  But in a third manuscript, Bethesda, National Library of Medicine, MS E8 (figs. 3-4), the compilers included numerous short passages from the Pantegni of Constantine as supplements to ancient and early medieval medical texts, and clearly indicate Constantine’s authorship in most of those excerpts.

Bethesda E8 is hardly a beautiful manuscript, but it has been recognized as the oldest European manuscript in the collection of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. It’s a rough and ready medical notebook produced most likely at Bury St Edmunds in the period ca.1110-1150 for use by physicians and teachers. It does not contain one main text, like the copies of the Pantegni discussed above, but is rather a compilation of about forty different short texts or excerpts on medicine and natural philosophy. Much of the manuscript is devoted to Latin translations of Greek works made in Late Antiquity, and in this respect it is similar to medical miscellanies of the Carolingian era. These include excerpts from the Synopsis and Euporista of the Greek imperial physician Oribasius (320-400 AD) and a complete “Old Latin” version of the Hippocratic Aphorisms with an extensive commentary produced in Late Antiquity (6^th or 7^th century).

Bethesda E8 shows us an eminently practical side to medical books of the twelfth century: it’s a smaller codex (22×14 cm [8.6 x 5.5 in]), probably intended to be carried, and made of whatever parchment was lying around, with leaves differing in size and quality, often with mended tears and holes. At least a dozen different people wrote anywhere there was room, at the ends of texts, on inserted scraps, and in the margins. The scribes were not professionals, but more likely students or practitioners of medicine in the monastery. Most of the texts are practical in nature, focusing on the basic tools a trained physician of the twelfth century needed: lists of antidotes and remedies for specific medical complaints, dictionaries of terms and symbols for pharmaceutical weights and measures, short texts on diagnosis by pulse and urine, and several texts on dietary regimen and the medicinal attributes of foods. The notebook has the information ready in short, memorable texts, and indeed, some are in verse to help with memorization.

The older texts in Bethesda E8 were written down in a first phase of production, probably ca.1110-1130, but in the following two decades (ca.1130-1150) later scribes added a range of newer medical texts associated with Monte Cassino and Salerno in the eleventh century. Notable among these is Constantine’s book on surgery from the Pantegni Practica, here called Liber Constantini de cirurgiis, “Constantine’s Book of Surgeries” (fols. 149-158, see fig. 3). Later additions to the notebook include several texts associated with the recently compiled medical curriculum known as the Articella: the De pulsibus of Philaretus, the Prognostics of Hippocrates (translated by Constantine), and excerpts from Constantine’s translations of the De febribus and De urinis of Isaac Israeli. These additions to Bethesda E8 coincide with another Anglo-Norman cleric’s discovery of Constantine: Henry of Huntingdon added material from Constantine’s De gradibus to his herbal Anglicanus Ortus during the 1130s or 1140s. However, unlike the scribes of Bethesda E8, he doesn’t name Constantine and it is not clear if he knew the origin of his new medical material.

Bethesda E8 is important for understanding the reception of Constantine not just because of the presence of his book on surgery and other translations, but also for the many excerpts and notes added to the manuscript which come from the Theorica of Constantine’s Pantegni. The physicians who used this notebook apparently had access to a copy of the Pantegni and used information from it to supplement the older texts in their manuscript. Wherever possible, readers of this notebook added useful passages from nearly every book of the Pantegni Theorica as supplements to, or commentary on, the older medical texts which made up the notebook in its first generation of use (ca.1110-1130). These include Constantine’s commentary on the complexion of the lungs, the humoral qualities of the blood, the bite of a rabid dog, eye problems, and the nature of hellebore as a medicine, to mention just a few cases.

The manner in which these Constantinian glosses were written into the notebook shows that the physician-scribes revered the authority of Constantine, a fellow Benedictine monk, and wanted to highlight the source of their new information. Wherever possible, his name is given, if only in abbreviation (see fig. 4). Quotations or summaries from the Pantegni are marked CON. or CONST, and other passages indicate more clearly the sort of medicine learned from Constantine: the scribes refer to the “Diet of Constantine”, the “Pills of Constantine”, and “the very best plaster of Constantine”. Some of these recipes do indeed come from the Pantegni, but others appear to be attributed to him merely by virtue of his medical authority.

A comparison of the Constantinian passages in Bethesda E8 with the Bury St Edmunds copy of the Pantegni provides an indication of how Anglo-Norman physicians were reading Constantine in the first half of the twelfth century. Nearly every page of the Bury Pantegni, unlike the Bath Abbey copy, has numerous marginal and interlinear notes and corrections, which show that the text was read closely and collated with another copy of the Theorica to produce the most accurate version for the Bury monastic library. Several of the excerpts from the Pantegni Theorica which were added to Bethesda E8 match with passages in the Bury Pantegni which are marked as important both in the margins and within the text (using small red flags). Figure 5 shows one case, in which Constantine’s passage on the humoral composition of “natural blood” (Sanguis naturalis), that is, blood as it comes out of the body and not as the purified humor sanguis, was highlighted in both of these manuscripts. The marginal note from the Bury Pantegni circled in red provides a summary of the very passage which was chosen to be excerpted in Bethesda E8. Given that both of these manuscripts were probably produced at the same time in Bury St Edmunds, it seems likely (though not definite) that the Bury Pantegni was used by the physician-scribes to supplement their medical notebook.

Even if the same people did not read or annotate these two manuscripts, their readers saw the value of specific passages in Constantine’s Pantegni. The difference is that the readers of the Bury Pantegni never acknowledged Constantine as the author of the text, while the scribes of Bethesda E8 recognized Constantine as a medical author and authority. By repeatedly invoking his name, they elevate him from a translator or compiler of medical texts to a star in the medical firmament. Part of the medical revolution of the High Middle Ages was acknowledging that a recent scholar, and not just ancient authorities like Hippocrates and Galen, had something important to add to medical learning and practice.

Further reading:

• Banham, Debby. “Medicine at Bury in the Time of Abbot Baldwin,” in Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, ed. Tom Licence (Cambridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), 226-246.
• Black, Winston. “‘I will add what the Arab once taught’: Constantine the African in Northern European Medical Verse,” in Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West: Essays in Honor of John M. Riddle. Ed. Anne Van Arsdall and Timothy Graham. Medicine in the Medieval Mediterranean 4 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 153-185.
• Burnett, Charles. “Physics before the Physics: Early Translations from Arabic of Texts Concerning Nature in MSS British Library, Additional 22719 and Cotton Galba E IV,” Medioevo: Rivista di Storia della Filosofia Medievale 27 (2002), 53-109, reprinted in Charles Burnett, Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages: The Translators and their Intellectual and Social Context (Ashgate/Variorum, 2009), Essay II.
• Gameson, Richard. The Manuscripts of Early Norman England (c. 1066-1300) (Oxford, 1999)
• Green, Monica H. “Salerno on the Thames: The Genesis of Anglo-Norman Medical Literature,” in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (ed.), Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100–c.1500 (York, 2009), 220-232.
• Green, Monica H. “Medical Books,” in The European Book in the Twelfth Century, ed. Erik Kwakkel and Rodney Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 277-92.
• Gullick, Michael. “An Eleventh-Century Bury Medical Manuscript,” in Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, ed. Tom Licence (Cambridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), 190-225.
• Henry of Huntingdon, Anglicanus Ortus: A Verse Herbal of the Twelfth Century. Ed. and trans. Winston Black. Studies and Texts 180. British Writers of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period 3. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies; Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2012.
• McLachlan, Elizabeth Parker. The Scriptorium of Bury St. Edmunds in the Twelfth Century. Outstanding Theses from the Courtauld Institute of Art (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986; reprint of a 1965 dissertation)
• Thouroude, Véronique. “Medicine after Baldwin: The Evidence of BL, Royal 12.C. XXIV,” in Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, ed. Tom Licence (Cambridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), 247-257.