The manuscript contains texts written by authors of the Salernitan school of medicine in the 12^th century. Founded in the 9^th century, the school of Salerno in southern Italy soon became the most important source of medical knowledge in Western Europe. The manuscript begins with the Practica of Johannes Platearius (active c. 1150, fols 1r–22r): a handbook of medical treatments that was copied throughout Europe until the 15^th century. The rest of the manuscript is devoted to five works by Bartholomeus of Salerno (active c. 1150–80). Bartholomeus wrote innovative commentaries on the Articella: an anthology of medical treatises that served as a foundational text in medieval universities and schools.

The entire manuscript is written by the same scribe and decorated with red and green initials. The scribe has drawn attention to certain parts of the text with bestial marginalia, many resembling eels and bird-like creatures.

 

Literature: Neil R. Ker and Alan J. Piper, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, Volume IV: Paisley–York (Oxford, 1969), pp. 618–19; Paul O. Kristeller, Bartholomaeus, Musandinus and Maurus of Salerno and other early commentators of the “Articella”, with a tentative list of texts and manuscript (Padua, 1976), pp. 57–87, 59–63, 72–74, 77–79, 85–87; Paul O. Kristeller, ‘La Scuola Medica di Salerno secondo ricerche e scoperte recenti’, Quaderni del Centro studi e documentazione della Scuola Medica Salernitana, 5 (Salerno, 1980), pp. 1–16, 7–9; Paul O. Kristeller, Studi sulla Scuola medica salernitana (Naples, 1986), pp. 100-05, 124, 136; Mark D. Jordan, ‘Medicine as Science in the Early Commentaries on “Johannititus”’, Traditio, vol. 43 (1987), pp. 121–45, 131–32, 142–44; Paul O. Kristeller, Iter Italicum. Accedunt Alia Itinera. A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries, Vol. VI (Alia Itinera II): Great Britain to Spain (London, 1989), p. 275; Mark D. Jordan, ‘The Construction of a Philosophical Medicine: Exegesis and Argument in Salernitan Teaching on the Soul’, Osiris, Vol. 6 (1990), pp. 42–61, 57, n.57; Danielle Jacquart, ‘Minima in Twelfth-Century Medical Texts from Salerno,’ in Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories, ed. by Christoph Herbert Lüthy, John Emery Murdoch, William Royall Newman (Leiden, 2001), pp. 39–56, 42, 44, n.12, 49, n.25; Giles E. M. Gasper and Faith Wallis, ‘Anselm and the “Articella”’, Traditio, vol. 59 (2004), pp. 129–74, 147, n.45; 171, n.149; Michael Frampton, Embodiments of Will: Anatomical and Physiological Theories of Voluntary Animal Motion from Greek Antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages, 400 B.C–A.D. 1300 (Saarbrücken, 2008), p. 330, n.45; Faith Wallis, ‘The Ghost in the Articella: A Twelfth-century Commentary on the Constantinian Liber Graduum’, in Anne Van Arsdall and Timothy Graham (eds), Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West: Essays in Honor of John M. Riddle (Abingdon, 2012), pp. 107–152, 120, n.34, 35, 144–46; Nicoletta Palmieri, ‘Polemics on the Doctrines of Galen’s Ars Medica from Alexandria to Salerno’, Medicina nei Secoli: Arte e Scienza, 29/3 (2017), pp. 1033–76, 1070–71, n.58, 1071–72, n.63.

Provenance: Unknown, at Winchester College by 1660.

Location: Fellows’ Library