Meet 10a 215 (Composite medical miscellany), my personal favorite.
There are so many reasons I love 10a 215, and we’ll be looking at a few of them over the next several weeks. Some background information:
10a 215 is a composite medical miscellany and dates to 15th century England. It is comprised of three separate texts – Bernard de Gordon’s Tractatus de regimine sanitatis; “In tractatu isto qui initulatur De regimine sanitatis aliquid breviter dicendum est Christi adiutorio et de aliquibus que pertinet ad santiatem corporalem…”; and The Wyse Boke of Mayster Peers of Salerne. Interesting fact 1: The first text is on parchment; the second and third are on imported paper. Interesting fact 2: The first two texts are in Latin, while the third is in Middle English. Interesting fact 3: Lots of manuscript waste was used as binding strips for 10a 215. Interesting fact 4: The limp vellum cover was used as a page in its own right, and that’s what we’ll look at today.
10a 215 is bound in a medieval limp vellum wrapper, and if you look closely, you can see that the inside of the front cover was used as a sort of “accounts paid” listing.
This happened after the manuscript was bound – the script keeps to the margins set by the fold. The glue residue you may spot is not from a contemporary paste-down, but rather from a book label which was previously affixed when the College acquired this volume for $205.18 in 1921.
And finally, one more fascinating feature of 10a 215: it was clearly well-used; the cover is dirty and torn, but the (original?) owner tried his or her best to protect the pages. The back cover features a flap which folders over the front cover and has remnants of string used to keep it shut.
*Special thanks to Peter Kidd for his brilliant work in A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in the Library of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia.