Just like modern-day scholars have trouble reading some texts in medieval manuscripts because the handwriting is poor or sloppy; water-damaged, flaking, or torn; in a difficult dialect; or highly abbreviated, so too did medieval scribes. Texts were copied from an exemplar, and it was not uncommon for slight changes to exist among copies from the same manuscript. This could be due to line-skipping, the inability to read a word, or numerous other reasons.
Here, there is blank space on line 14 between the words “aut[em]” and “aut[em]”. What word did the scribe skip? This is the first text of the manuscript, and begins
Incipit tractatus de cura sterilitatis mulierum compositus a. m. R. de. / [S]apientis verbum est. data est particularibus virtus generative ut perpetuetur inde in- / dividum…
If only I had the time to search out other copies of this text, and compare what our scribe has done to others! I’ll leave it to you, fellow medievalists, library professionals, and history of medicine scholars to work it out.