‘Every practitioner his own compiler’: practitioners and the compilation of Middle English medical books, with special reference to York Minster Library, XVI E. 32

Cubas-Peña, Rebeca (2017). ‘Every practitioner his own compiler’: practitioners and the compilation of Middle English medical books, with special reference to York Minster Library, XVI E. 32. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

By analysing the codicology and other features of a group of fifteenth-century medical manuscripts, my thesis aims to shed some light into the unexplored role of the compilers of medical material. These individuals assembled a number of booklets mostly produced in Middle English, and put them together with the intention to create volumes entirely dedicated to medicine. The thesis proposes a typology that will show the existence of a type of medical codices, whose substantial codicological alteration evince the involvement of the medical practitioners and earliest owners of the volumes in their making. I will argue that the manuscripts were gathered, arranged, and sometimes copied by these practitioners, who, in an attempt to create their own medical handbooks, customised their books in a manner they considered to be pertinent and useful for their practice. A comprehensive analysis of York Minster Library, MS XVI E, one of these practitioner-compiled composites (as I have labelled them) will offer new insights into a codex which has never been examined in detail.
The study will eventually demonstrate that medical practitioners played a significant role in the production of fifteenth-century English medical books, especially in the compilation and arrangement of the codices’ booklets.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):