Two weeks ago we examined the lovely dentelle initial on folio 1r of 10a 189. On that same page are the Duke of Ferrara’s coat of arms, also painted. The coat of arms consists of a dark red carnation and green leaves on either side, inside a gold-leafed ring set with a blue stone.
In medieval medicine, humoral medicine was a common practice. (For more about the humors, see my earlier post here.) When patients were ill, food and drugs – often plant-derived – were prescribed, taking into account not only the symptoms, but also his or her temperament, age, location, and time of year.
Balancing the humors seems to me to have been somewhat precarious at times. If one was too choleric (hot and dry), foods and herbs that were considered cold and moist were prescribed. However, too much could cause a swing in the opposite direction. Foods were assigned qualities similar to those of the four humors – for example, cucumbers and watermelons were considered cool and moist.
Last week we went back in time to read about a researcher’s experience with 10a 189, de Argenta’s De fructibus. Mentioned briefly were the illuminations on folio 1r; this week we’ll look at the decorated initial in more detail, and later this month, talk about the inks used in the coat of arms.
This month we will be looking at 10a 189, Baptista Massa de Argenta’s De fructibus virtutibus. De fructibus is a 15th-century Italian treatise on fruits, their properties, and their medicinal uses. The Library’s copy also contains a short treatise on how to make barley water.
(This is our second blog entry in The Recipes Project’s virtual conversation, “What is a Recipe?” For a bit of background or to read the first article, on a 19th Century recipe manuscript from Lancaster, PA, click here.)
Magia Naturalis, or Natural Magick, written by Giambattista della Porta was first published in 1558 in Naples when the author was fifteen years old. Della Porta was an Italian scholar and playwright known for his expertise and knowledge of a wide variety of subjects, and for having contributed many advances to the fields of agriculture, optics, pharmacology, hydraulics and more.
The edition held at The Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia is the first English translation published in 1658, 100 years after its initial publication. It contains some of the additions added by della Porta in subsequent editions, most notably, the first published description of the convex lens and camera obscura. Though he did not invent these, his work in perfecting and describing them, and their inclusion in Natural Magick, contributed to the dissemination of this knowledge.
But, you may be asking by now, what does this have to do with recipes? A quick look at almost any page in volume reveals the answer.
When the Black Death arrived in England in summer 1348, it had already hit China, middle Asia, the Crimea, and Sicily, and had begun moving inland to the rest of continental Europe. The death rate varied from region to region, but it is probably fair to say that it ranged from about 12% to 66% of the population. Some evidence points to the Black Death being the plague, a fever caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis; while other evidence suggests it was viral in origin. Regardless of the cause, it was extremely infectious and caused upheaval for decades everywhere it hit.
Bernard de Gordon, in his Lilium medicinae, enumerates some signs of impending plague in the chapter entitled “Pestitential fevers.” Each chapter in Lilium is divided into 6 sections: the first included the definitions, names, and types; the second, the causes; the third, the diagnosis; the fourth, the prognosis; the fifth, the treatment; and finally, the sixth – the clarification. The following is a loose translation of a 1551 version of Lilium, from the second section of “Pestilential fevers.”
– by Jessica Sara Sternbach*
The frontispieces and title pages of early anatomical texts served as teasers for many Early Modern readers, offering the primary information necessary to engage with the text. Once the spine was cracked opened, the viewer would encounter these new medical ideas for the first time, whether it be the authority of a post-Vesalian anatomist as in the Anatomia reformata by Steven Blankaart (1695), the philosophical prowess and artistic pride of William Cheselden and Gerard van der Gucht’s Anatomy of the Human Body (1740), or the sublime awe of the embryology of Nicolaas Hoboken’s Anatomia secundinae (1675). The illustrations in these books drew upon existing visual language in order to decrypt the unfamiliar medical subject matter. Mastery was needed from both the artist and the anatomist, who were trying to comprehend and clarify what it meant to be human.