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Harley MS 2558

Record Id:

040-002032705

Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:

040-002032705

MDARK:

ark:/81055/vdc_100000000153.0x000203

LARK:

SLARK:

Format:

ISAD(G)

Reference (shelfmark):

Harley MS 2558

Title:

Thomas Fayreford, Medical miscellany and commonplace book

Scope & Content:

The manuscript is a composite miscellany of botanical, surgical, medical, magical, astrological and prognostication texts written in the 13th-14th centuries and assembled with his own autograph additions by the 15th-century English physician, Thomas Fayreford. The texts include:

1. Two dictionaries of botanical synonyms (ff. 1r-5v);

2. Medical annotations including four medical recipes for coughs, a charm and notes on various herbs (ff. 6r-6v);

3. Novele cirurgerie, excerpt (365 lines) (ff. 7r-8v);

4. Thomas Fayreford, List of medical cases (ff. 9r-9v);

5. Table of contents of the herbal included in ff. 13r-64v (ff. 10r-11v);

6., 7. Tables of contents of Thomas Fayreford's medical commonplace book and surgical commonplace book (ff. 12r-12v);

8. De saporibus et gradibus (culinary recipe) (f. 12v);

9. Herbal (ff. 13r-64v);

10. Pontius de Sancto Egidio, Cure or Modus medendi (ff. 65r-72r);

11. Thomas Fayreford, Medical commonplace book (ff. 72v-124v);

12. Thomas Fayreford, Surgical commonplace book (ff. 125r-151r);

13. An alchemical treatise (f. 151v);

14. Treatise relating to urine and uroscopy (ff. 152r-160v);

15. Treatise relating to urine and uroscopy (ff. 161r-166r);

16. Note on how to facilitate human conception and embryonic development (f. 166r);

17. Two diagrams of the female hand for pronostication and one charm against toothache (f. 166v);

18. Miscellaneous notes relating to Thomas Fayreford's medical compendium (ff. 72v-124v) (ff. 167r-172v);

19. Medical recipes (circa 40 recipes) (ff. 173r-174v);

20. Pseudo-Hippocrates, Letter to Caesar (Regimen sanitatis) (ff. 175r-184v);

21. Epistula (ff. 185r-185v);

22. Treatise relating to anatomy (ff. 186r-187r);

23. Medical recipes (circa 30 recipes) (ff. 188r-188v);

24. Rogerius de Barone ( Roger de Baron), Rogerina minor, excerpts (ff. 189r-190v);

25. Lunary (ff. 191r-193r) with a weather prediction from Christmas day (f. 191r);

26. Somniale Danielis, excerpt (ff. 193r-193v);

27. Pseudo-Aristoteles, Epistula ad Alexandrum Magnum de corpore humano sanando (excerpt from the Secretum Secretorum) (ff. 194r-195r);

28. Charms against fevers and tooth pain (ff. 195r-195v) ;

29. Macer Floridus (Odo de Meung), De viribus herbarum (ff. 197r-223v) ;

30. Lunary relating to medicine (ff. 224r-224v);

31. Pseudo-Hippocrates, Calendarium dieteticum (ff. 224v-225v);

32. Medical recipe (f. 225v);

33. Marbodus Redonensis, Liber lapidum seu de gemmis, fragment (ff. 226r-227r);

34. Weather prognostications, proverbs and Synonyma Abuali (f. 227v).

Decoration:

Border decorated with penwork and a foliate bar motif in gold, blue, red and purple (f. 13r). Other borders decorated with small bezants in gold with foliate motifs in purple (ff. 65r, 73r). Initial and Fayreford's name in gold with penwork decoration in purple (f. 72v). Initials in blue or red, plain or with penwork decoration in red. Paraphs in red or blue. Maniculae in red. Cadels with human or animal features in black ink. Marginal pen-drawings representing plants, a monk, a goat (?), a penis, and a woman (42v, 63r, 85r, 97v, 112v, 118v, 139v).

Collection Area:

Western Manuscripts

Project / Collection:

Harley Collection
Harley Science Project

Hierarchy Tree:

[{ "id" : "040-002032705", "parent" : "#", "text" : "Harley MS 2558: Thomas Fayreford, Medical miscellany and commonplace book" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} },{ "id" : "041-002041404", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 1r-5v: Two dictionaries of botanical synonyms" },{ "id" : "041-002041405", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 6r-6v: Medical annotations including four medical recipes for coughs, a charm and notes on various herbs" },{ "id" : "041-002041406", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 7r-8v: Novele cirurgerie, excerpt" },{ "id" : "041-002054633", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 9r-9v: Thomas Fayreford, List of medical cases" },{ "id" : "041-002054634", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 10r-11v: Table of contents of the herbal" },{ "id" : "041-002054635", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff. 12r-12v: Tables of contents of Thomas Fayreford's medical commonplace book and surgical commonplace book" },{ "id" : "041-002054636", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, f 12v: De saporibus et gradibus" },{ "id" : "041-002054637", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 13r-64v: Herbal" },{ "id" : "041-002054638", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 65r-72r: Pontius de Sancto Egidio, Cure or Modus medendi" },{ "id" : "041-002054639", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 72v-124v: Thomas Fayreford, Medical commonplace book" },{ "id" : "041-002054640", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 125r-151r: Thomas Fayreford, Surgical commonplace book" },{ "id" : "041-002054641", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, f 151v: Alchemical treatise" },{ "id" : "041-002054643", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 152r-160v: Treatise relating to urine and uroscopy" },{ "id" : "041-002054644", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 161r-166r: Treatise relating to urine and uroscopy" },{ "id" : "041-002054645", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, f 166r: Note on how to facilitate human conception and embryonic development" },{ "id" : "041-002054646", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, f 166v: Two diagrams of the female hand for prognostication and one charm against toothache" },{ "id" : "041-002054647", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 167r-172v: Miscellaneous notes relating to Thomas Fayreford's medical compendium" },{ "id" : "041-002054648", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 173r-174r: Medical recipes" },{ "id" : "041-002054649", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 175r-184v: Pseudo-Hippocrates, Letter to Caesar (Regimen sanitatis)" },{ "id" : "041-002054650", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 185r-185v: Epistula" },{ "id" : "041-002054651", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 186r-187v: Treatise relating to anatomy" },{ "id" : "041-002054652", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 188r-188v: Medical recipes" },{ "id" : "041-002054654", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 189r-190v: Rogerius de Barone (Roger de Baron), Rogerina minor, excerpts" },{ "id" : "041-002054655", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 191r-193v: Weather prediction from Christmas day and Lunary" },{ "id" : "041-002054656", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 193r-193v: Somniale Danielis, excerpt" },{ "id" : "041-002054659", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 194r-195r: Pseudo-Aristoteles, Epistula ad Alexandrum Magnum de corpore humano sanando (excerpt from the Secretum Secretorum)" },{ "id" : "041-002054661", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 195r-195v: Charms against fevers and tooth pain" },{ "id" : "041-002054662", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 197r-223v: Macer Floridus (Odo de Meung), De viribus herbarum" },{ "id" : "041-002054664", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 224r-224v: Lunary relating to medicine" },{ "id" : "041-002054667", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 224v-225v: Pseudo-Hippocrates, Calendarium dieteticum" },{ "id" : "041-002054669", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, f 225v: Medical recipe" },{ "id" : "041-002054670", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, ff 226r-227r: Marbodus Redonensis, Liber lapidum seu de gemmis, fragment" },{ "id" : "041-002054671", "parent" : "040-002032705", "text" : "Harley MS 2558, f 227v: Weather prognostications; proverbs; Synonyma Abuali" }]

Hierarchy Record Ids:

032-002045828
040-002032705

Is part of:

Harley MS 1-7661 : Harley Manuscripts

Harley MS 2558 : Thomas Fayreford, Medical miscellany and commonplace book

Contains:

Click here to View / search full list of parts of Harley MS 2558

Hierarchy:

032-002045828[2559]/040-002032705

Container:

View / search within Archive / Collection: Harley MS 1-7661

Record Type (Level):

File

Extent:

227 folios.

Digitised Content:

http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_2558 (digital images currently unavailable)

Thumbnail:

Languages:

Anglo-Norman
English, Middle
Latin

Scripts:

Latin

Start Date:

1200

End Date:

1499

Date Range:

13th century-15th century

Era:

Access:

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User Conditions:

Physical Characteristics:

Materials: Parchment and paper codex (Paper leaves: ff. 78-81, 84-87, 90-93, 96-99, 102-105, 108-111, 113-151, 167-168, 171-172).

Dimensions: 212 x 150 mm (some portions of the manuscript are slightly smaller).

Foliation: ff. viii + 227 (all unfoliated flyleaves are paper). Fayreford's foliation in black ink in the upper right corners '1-78' (ff. '73-151'; repeating no. 72), continued by a 17th-century hand '79-153' (ff. 152-227); a second foliation by the same 17th-century hand at the centre of the lower margin '1-72' (ff. 1-72; repeated in the lower right corners on ff. 1-20), continued by a third, possibly 18th-century hand '73-227' (omitting no. 160 and parchment strip stitched to f. 101); modern foliation in pencil '1-227' (including as f. 102 the parchment strip stitched to the verso of f. 101; ff. 20v, 22v, 30v, 43r, 49v, 170v-171r blank; f. 157r a half leaf).

Collation: Gatherings (individually mounted on guards): i⁶, ii², iii⁴, iv-xi⁸, xii-xiv¹², xv¹⁴, xvi¹², xvii^14-1 (sixth cancelled), xviii⁶, xix², xx^6-1 (fifth cancelled), xxi-xxiii¹⁰, xxiv¹², xxv-xxvi⁴, xxvii-xxviii⁸, xxix^8-2 (third and fifth missing), horizontal catchwords on gatherings vi-x; gatherings xii-xiv and xxi on mixed parchment and paper, gatherings xv-xvii on paper.

Layout: Variously ruled for single or double columns of 31-51 lines.

Script: Gothic cursive (Anglicana); written by a number of scribes, including Thomas Fayreford (ff. 9r-151v, and possibly 167r-172v).

Binding: British Museum/British Library binding with the Harley arms and motto gilt-tooled at centre of covers. Covers from the previous Harleian binding of brown leather with gilt-fillet and blind-tooling decoration pasted onto the pastedowns of the present binding.

Custodial History:

Origin: England, S.

Provenance:

Thomas Fayreford (fl. 1400-1450), medical practitioner, active in Gloucestershire, Oxford, Somerset and Devon between c. 1400 and 1450 (see Jones 1995, 1998 and 2004): assembled and partly written by him; his name (ff. 9r, 12r, 12v, 72v, 125r, 227v; see Talbot and Hammond 1965; Hunt 1987; Jones 1995, 1998 and 2004).

John Covel (b. 1638, d. 1722), chaplain to the Levant Company at Constantinople, 1670-1676, and later Master of Christ's College, Cambridge: his inscription dated 1660 (f. i); sold to Edward Harley on 27 Feb. 1715/6 together with many other Covel manuscripts (Wright and Wright 1966; Wright 1972).

The Harley Collection, formed by Robert Harley (b. 1661, d. 1724), 1st earl of Oxford and Mortimer, politician, and Edward Harley (b. 1689, d. 1741), 2nd earl of Oxford and Mortimer, book collector and patron of the arts.

Edward Harley bequeathed the library to his widow, Henrietta, née Cavendish Holles (b. 1694, d. 1755) during her lifetime and thereafter to their daughter, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck (b. 1715, d. 1785), duchess of Portland; the manuscripts were sold by the Countess and the Duchess in 1753 to the nation for £10,000 (a fraction of their contemporary value) under the Act of Parliament that also established the British Museum; the Harley manuscripts form one of the foundation collections of the British Library.

Publications:

A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts, in the British Museum, 4 vols (London: [n. pub.], 1808-12), II (1808), no. 2558.

The Diary of Humfrey Wanley 1715-1726, ed. by Cyril E. Wright and Ruth C. Wright, 2 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1966), I: 1715-1723, pp. xxxiv-xxxvi; II: 1723-1726, p. 211 n. 1.

Cyril E. Wright, Fontes Harleiani: A Study of the Sources of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1972), pp. 114, 411.

E. Wickersheimer, Dictionnaire biographique des médecins en France au moyen âge,Hautes Études Médiévales et Modernes, 34 (Geneva, 1979), p. 669.

C. B. Schmitt and D. Knox, Pseudo-Aristoteles latinus. A Guide to Latin work falsely attributed to Aristotle before 1500, Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts, 12 (London, 1985; ), p. 64.

Tony Hunt, 'The "Novele cirurgerie" in MS London, British Library Harley 2558', Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 103 (1987), 271-99.

Peter Murray Jones, 'British Library MS Sloane 76: A Translator's Holograph', in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, ed. by Linda l. Brownrigg, Proceedings of the Second Conference of The Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford, July 1998 (Los Altos Hills, California: Anderson-Lovelace, 1990), pp. 21-39 (p. 39 n. 8).

C. B. Hieatt and R. F. Jones, La Novele Cirurgerie, Anglo-Norman Texts, 46 (London, 1990), (as MS. H), pp. viii, xiv. Peter Murray Jones, 'Harley MS 2558: A Fifteenth-Century Medical Commonplace Book', in Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: A Book of Essays, ed. by Margaret R. Schleissner, Garland Medieval Casebooks, 8 (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 35-54.

Peter Murray Jones, 'Thomas Fayreford: An English Fifteenth-Century Medical Practitioner', in Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, ed. by Roger French and others (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 156-83 (pp. 166-67).

R. J. Dean and M. B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature. A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, Anglo-Norman Text Society, Occasional Publications Series, 3 (London, 1999), pp. 173, 223, 227, nos. 314, 406, 414.

Der deutsche 'Macer'. Vulgatfassung. Mit einem Abdruck des lateinischen Macer Floridus 'De viribus herbarum', ed. by Bernhard Schnell and William Crossgrove, Texte und Textgeschichte, 50 (Tübingen, 2003), p. 32.

M. T. Tavormina, 'The Middle English Letter of Ipocras', English Studies, 88 (2007), 632-52 (p. 642).

Peter Murray Jones, 'Fayreford, Thomas (fl. 1400-1450)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/45762], accessed 3 April 2009.

Material Type:

Archives and Manuscripts

Legal Status:

Not Public Record(s)