Overview

This volume contains nine of the most widely disseminated Middle English uroscopies, each of them short enough to be consulted quickly by practitioners and all of them commonly found in English medical miscellanies. Practical in their orientation, they are grounded firmly in Galenic humoralism and derive directly and indirectly from canonical Latin uroscopies, along with the Arabic and Greek antecedents of the Latin tradition. Together they occur in over 120 manuscripts. Despite the pervasive incidence of uroscopy in medieval medical manuscripts and medical practice, very few Middle English uroscopies have yet been edited, a gap that this edition seeks to reduce. Three of the texts edited are translated from widely circulated Latin originals; three are translated or adapted from a frequently copied French original (part of the Lettre d'Hippocrate); and three appear to be native English compositions. The Apparatus collates each text selectively against four to eight secondary witnesses, chosen primarily to represent different textual families for each item. The edition also contains a detailed Introduction; a Textual Commentary and a Medical Commentary; a detailed Glossary with special attention to medical vocabulary; and images of diagrams that accompany the texts. As a group, these texts provide an overview of the best-known elements of English vernacular uroscopy and a précis of western uroscopic knowledge more generally. They also shed light on the day-to-day application of uroscopic diagnosis by ordinary practitioners in the later Middle Ages, and thus on one of the central arenas of healer/patient interaction in the period.

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9780198845324

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M. Teresa Tavormina is Professor of English Emerita, Michigan State University. Her research interests include medieval and early modern medical texts, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, literature and medicine, and science fiction.

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