Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
An Irish Materia Medica (Author: Tadhg Ó Cuinn)

Introduction

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The author and his sources

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subsection 1

Circa Instans

Ó Cuinn's principal source, and the work whose format he followed, was the Liber de simplici medicina, usually known, from the opening words of the introduction, as Circa Instans. Joannes Platearius is named as the author of Circa Instans in the early printed versions of the text.

George Sarton (1931, ii 241) refers to Joannes Platearius the Younger, who lived in the second half of the eleventh century, and

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Matthaeus Platearius (‘probably the son of Joannes’) who died in 1161. Beck (1940) dates the original writing of Circa Instans rather convincingly to shortly after 1070, and this supports the statement in the printed editions that Joannes was the author. That Joannes, and not Matthaeus, was the author is the view of Schuster (1926, p. 205), Fischer (1929, p. 20) and Morton (1981, p. 107, n. 36). Beck shows, however, that the original text was added to later, and it may be that Matthaeus had a hand in the developing of it. What is most relevant about the book is that it emanated from the town of Salerno, whose citizens were developing a great interest in medicine and were rapidly gaining a reputation for their medical skill.

Circa Instans is a list of more than 200 simple (i.e. not compound) medicines, arranged alphabetically, with a chapter on the uses etc. of each one. Claus H. Beck (who dates his Vorwort, poor man, Im Felde, im Februar 1940) and Hans Wölfel and others, working under the tutelage of Dr. Julius Schuster in Berlin in 1939–40, have contributed substantially to our knowledge of this work. Wölfel printed the copy of the text which is preserved in Erlangen, and Beck studied the three earliest known manuscripts, that of Breslau, which was written about 1180, that in Vienna, which was written at latest about 1250, and that in Erlangen, which was written between 1250 and 1300. Beck finds so many points of resemblance to the Liber de gradibus of Constantine the African, monk of Monte Cassino, and to the Corpus Hippocraticum, that he feels that these, together with Arabic works similar to Abu Mansur's Liber fundamentorum pharmacologiae, were the main sources of the text. Schuster's own contribution (1926) was

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a study of certain illustrated manuscripts and early printed herbals, and the identification of some 94 plants, in the course of establishing that the illustrations in Gart der Gesundheit (a German herbal printed in 1485) of the plants in question were copied from manuscripts of Circa Instans.

I have relied principally on the version of Circa Instans which was printed in Venice in 1497, supplemented by Wölfel's Erlangen text and by the substantial extracts from Circa Instans which Rufinus included in his herbal in the 13th century. The 1497 version is likely to be the closest to the text that Ó Cuinn had before him.

Another text that is of assistance is the Tractatus de herbis. What appears to be the original is contained in the 14th-century MS Egerton 747 in the British Library. The Tractatus was compiled by Bartholomeus Mino da Siena, of whom nothing is known except that he is described in the Explicit as an expert in the spicer's art. The book began as a copy of Circa Instans, but additional material was added from the writings of Pseudo-Apuleius, Macer Floridus, Pedanios Dioscorides, Ysaac Iudaeus, Avicenna, the Antidotarium Nicolai, and some others. The text is accompanied by illustrations of the plants discussed. Later copies of the Tractatus are contained in three other manuscripts, including MS Lat. 993 of the Biblioteca Estense, Modena. This Modena copy was made, complete with illustrations, in Bourg in France in 1458 by a scribe calling himself ‘Le petit pelous’. I have used this Modena copy.3

The greatest of the recent contributions to our knowledge of Circa Instans is the facsimile edition of the 15th century manuscript,

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Livre des simples médecines (1980 and 1984), annotated by Carmélia Opsomer, Enid Roberts and William T. Stearn. This is a French version of Circa Instans with many additions, mainly based on the aforesaid Tractatus de herbis, and beautifully illustrated by paintings of which a significant number were made from life. The beauty and botanical accuracy of certain of the illustrations are the subject of praise by Dr. E. Charles Nelson in Pteridologist 2, 1 (1990) 21–23. Opsomer describes the text it contains as one of the major texts of medieval science, and she states that it constitutes the end-point and indeed a balance-sheet showing the assets and the liabilities of a long scientific and medical tradition going back to antiquity, that of the medieval herbal. The manuscript did not come to light until 1975, and it is now preserved in the Bibliothéque Royale, Brussels (IV. 1024). She states that Platearius based his Circa Instans on the works of Pedanios Dioscorides, Galen, Oribasius and Constantine the African, as well as on the experience of his family, of himself and his colleagues at Salerno, notably Gariopontus and ‘Magister Salernus’.