By analysing the codicology and other features of a group of fifteenth-century medical manuscripts, my thesis aims to shed some light into the unexplored role of the compilers of medical material. These individuals assembled a number of booklets mostly produced in Middle English, and put them together with the intention to create volumes entirely dedicated to medicine. The thesis proposes a typology that will show the existence of a type of medical codices, whose substantial codicological alteration evince the involvement of the medical practitioners and earliest owners of the volumes in their making. I will argue that the manuscripts were gathered, arranged, and sometimes copied by these practitioners, who, in an attempt to create their own medical handbooks, customised their books in a manner they considered to be pertinent and useful for their practice. A comprehensive analysis of York Minster Library, MS XVI E, one of these practitioner-compiled composites (as I have labelled them) will offer new insights into a codex which has never been examined in detail. The study will eventually demonstrate that medical practitioners played a significant role in the production of fifteenth-century English medical books, especially in the compilation and arrangement of the codices’ booklets.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:704851 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Cubas-Peña, Rebeca |
| Publisher | University of Birmingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/7222/ |
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