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Manuscript relations through form and content in the Middle English Circa Instans

Paper · 2005 · Edurne Garrido Anes

Summary

This philological study maps the surviving Middle English copies of the Circa instans (CI), the twelfth-century Salernitan reference work on "simples" (single plant, animal and mineral drugs) attributed to Matthaeus Platearius. The goal is a classification of the English branch of its transmission, not a stemma. The author starts from catalogue work (chiefly Voigts & Kurtz 2000) and her own later finds. She compares the English texts against 29 Latin manuscripts and early printed editions, using the Lyons 1525 edition as the Latin reference. Copies are grouped by origin, physical and textual form, content selection, and apparent function. The main result is that the 27 known ME witnesses go back to three separate English renderings. One rendering dominates the tradition; the other two each survive in a single manuscript. The paper also describes individual manuscripts, such as the near-literal Sloane 105. It matters because it gives a structured starting point for later genealogical work on how a learned Latin text was reshaped as it moved into vernacular and practical use.

Key points

  • 27 Middle English manuscripts linked to the CI are known, all roughly dated to the fifteenth century. Evidence elsewhere shows the CI circulated in England from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.
  • Three distinct English translations or compilations exist:
    • Translation 1 is found in 25 of the 27 copies, with varying abridgements and expansions.
    • Translation 2 survives only in Gonville & Caius 609/340 and stays close to the Salernitan core.
    • Translation 3 survives only in BL Sloane 404 and blends Platearius with other sources.
  • Group A contains six copies opening with "Aloe is hot and dry" whose layout mirrors the Latin treatise. One of them, BL Sloane 105, is a close, direct translation. It even includes entries (asara baccara, altea, cerefolium, atriplex) that are absent from the printed Latin texts but present in the longer Breslau Codex CI.
  • None of the ME texts carries the Salernitan prologue, which survives in the Latin, French, German and Dutch versions.
  • A canonical Latin entry follows a fixed order: name, complexion (hot/cold, dry/moist, degree), additional facts (origin, kinds, adulteration), then virtues, recipes and administration.
  • Bibliographic note: the PDF header gives Selim 13 (2005–2006), pp. 201–226, by Edurne Garrido-Anes. This differs from the 2019 date in our library record.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Witnesses are grouped on two independent axes, form and content, before any claim about descent is attempted, so layout similarity and textual similarity are not confused.
  • I2. Every copy is compared against one fixed entry schema (name, complexion, extra facts, virtues, administration), which makes omissions, additions and reorderings visible.
  • I3. The same entry (Aloe, plantain) is printed from different translations side by side, showing identical content in very different wording and density.
  • I4. Suspected close links between specific manuscripts are reported as hypotheses and explicitly left unasserted until finer analysis is done.
  • I5. A feature shared by every vernacular copy, here the missing prologue, is used as a family-level marker that sets the English branch apart from other language traditions.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Disagreements between witness parsers could be bucketed separately as tokenization/format differences versus attachment/label differences, before deciding which parser is "related" to which or whom to trust.
  • I2 (world): Encyclopedic or recipe-like text could be compiled into a slot template per entity, so that missing or extra properties in a text's world become explicit and explainable rather than buried in prose.
  • I3 (back): Such aligned paraphrase pairs make a good test for the text → graph → text compressor, since two surface forms should collapse to the same meaning graph.
  • I4 (learn): Self-induced repair rules could carry a "suspected" status until checked against negative controls, keeping tentative patterns out of production.
  • I5 (tree): Systematic absences, such as a relation or construction never produced, could serve as fingerprints to detect which UD dialect or treebank convention a source follows before conversion.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksHistory · 66 worksClassics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Edurne Garrido Anes. 2005. Manuscript relations through form and content in the Middle English Circa Instans. SELIM 13.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.13.2005.201-226

@inproceedings{anes2005manuscript,
  title = {{Manuscript relations through form and content in the Middle English Circa Instans}},
  author = {Edurne Garrido Anes},
  booktitle = {SELIM 13},
  year = {2005},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.13.2005.201-226},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.13.2005.201-226}
}

References

35 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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