Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS 23 F 19 (473)
Deborah Hayden
Fig. 1: Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS 23 F 19, fol. 89v: a page from the Irish version of the collection of texts on women’s medicine known as the Trotula (image courtesy of Irish Script on Screen).
This vellum manuscript, which is thought to have been written in the fifteenth century and had come to form part of the Royal Irish Academy’s collections by 1844, is now a fragment that consists of only 28 folios, but the seventeenth-century numbering of these folios indicates that at least a further 82 pages had previously formed part of the codex. The surviving portion of the manuscript contains 22 texts in total, comprising both translations of Latin texts and newly composed treatises, that deal with various branches of theoretical and practical medicine.
Folios 18ra1–24va16 of the manuscript contain the only known copy of a treatise on anatomy and medicine that was first composed, according to a colophon at the end of the text, in 1352, making it the only known Irish medical text that can be securely dated to the fourteenth century. The text in question is referred to in another manuscript as the Metegni Gaileni, but it is not a direct translation of the famous Galenic work known in its Latin translations as the Megategni or De ingenio sanitatis. Rather, Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha has recently shown that it is an independent work in five parts, each consisting of commentary and question-and-answer texts, that draw on a variety of sources such as the short anatomical treatise known as the Anatomia Galeni or Anatomia Ricardi, composed in Salerno during the twelfth century; the Compendium medicinae of the thirteenth-century English physician Gilbertus Anglicus; and Galen’s Tegni, which circulated widely in medieval Europe as part of the collection of Latin medical treatises known as the Articella or Ars medicinae.
RIA MS 23 F 19 also includes a treatise on wounds; a collection of medical recipes; various short texts on topics such as sterility, scabies, bathing and lovesickness; and an Irish version of the Expositio super Antidotarium Nicolai by the thirteenth-century pharmacologist Johannes de Sancto Amando, a professor of medicine at the University of Paris. It also contains an Irish rendering of the widely circulated collection of texts on women’s medicine known as the Trotula.
Further reading:
- Corner, George W. (1927), Anatomical Texts of the Earlier Middle Ages: A Study in the Transmission of Culture (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington)
- Green, Monica H. (1997), ‘A Handlist of Latin and Vernacular Manuscripts of the So-called Trotula Texts, Part 2: The Vernacular Translations and Latin Re-writings’, Scriptorium 51: 80–104
- Green, Monica H., ed. and trans. (2001), The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press)
- Nic Dhonnchadha, Aoibheann (2022), ‘Tráchtas leighis ón 14ú haois: lámhscríbhinn, téacs agus foinsí’, in Léann na Sionainne, ed. by Aengus Ó Fionnagáin and Gordon Ó Riain (Dublin: Cló Léann na Gaeilge), pp. 1–60
- O’Boyle, Cornelius (1998), The Art of Medicine. Medical Teaching at the University of Paris, 1250–1400, Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 9 (Leiden: Brill)
- Wulff, Winifred, ed. & trans. (1932), ‘De amore hereos’, Ériu 11: 174–81
- Wulff, Winifred, ed. (1934), ‘A Mediaeval Handbook of Gynaecology and Midwifery…’, Irish Texts 5 (London: Sheed and Ward)
- Wulff, Winifred, trans., On Wounds, digital edition by Beatrix Färber based on unpublished galley proofs, CELT: The Corpus of Electronic Texts T600012) (accessed 10 January 2024)