LEIGHEAS Manuscript of the Month: May 2024

Dublin, King’s Inns Library MS 17

Deborah Hayden

Dublin, King’s Inns MS 17 (15^th century), fol. 1r: Beginning of a tract on purging by means of laxatives, vomiting, vein-letting and cupping. Image courtesy of Irish Script on Screen.

View the manuscript online

This vellum manuscript dates to the fifteenth century and consists of three separate fragments of medical material. The first contains a tract on purging by means of laxatives, vomiting, vein-letting and cupping, citing authorities such as Hippocrates, Galen, Rhazes and Avicenna. Another incomplete copy of this tract is found in the fifteenth-century Dublin, TCD MS H. 2. 15a, which may have used this manuscript as an exemplar. The second fragment deals with eye ailments and their cures, while the third section contains an incomplete Irish version of a tract on diseases. This last part of the manuscript appears to draw principally on the Viaticum of Constantinus Africanus, the prolific translator who rendered many Arabic medical texts into Latin in the latter half of the eleventh century. The Viaticum was an adaptation of the popular medical handbook of Ibn al-Jazzar (d. 979), Kitab Zād al-musāfir wa-qūt al-ḥaḍir (‘Provisions for the Traveller and Nourishment of the Settled’) and was intended to serve as a convenient handbook for medical practice, presenting illnesses and remedies in head-to-toe order. The last two pages of King’s Inns MS 17 contain a text on wounds and brief notes on the medicinal properties of various ingredients. In addition to the illuminated first page (above) and several elaborate initials, the manuscript contains a number of marginal drawings, such as the figures shown below from the bottom of folio 5v, who appear to be engaged in ploughing, digging and threshing.

Dublin, King’s Inns Library MS 17, fol. 5v: marginal drawings of figures ploughing, digging and threshing. Image courtesy of Irish Script on Screen.

Further reading:

The Constantinus Africanus blog: https://constantinusafricanus.com/

De Brún, Pádraig, Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in King’s Inns Library Dublin (Dublin, 1972), pp. 45–9

Wack, Mary, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990)

Wulff, Winifred (ed.), A Mediaeval Handbook of Gynaecology and Midwifery preceded by a Section on the Grades and on the Treatment of Wounds and some Good Counsel to the Physician Himself finishing with a Discussion on the Treatment of Scabies, in Irish Texts Fasciculus V, ed. by J. Fraser, P. Grosjean & J. G. O’Keefe (London, 1934)