📄 Review of Edurne Garrido-Anes (2020) A Middle English Version of the Circa Instans, Middle English Texts Series, 59. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, pp. 209. ISBN 978-3-8253-4766-6

Summary

This is a short review by María José Esteve-Ramos of the 2020 edition by Edurne Garrido-Anes, which presents the Circa Instans as rendered into Middle English. The Circa Instans was a widely copied medieval herbal on simple (plant-based) medicines. The edition addresses a gap: the vernacular English version had no modern edition, even though the Latin original shaped medical practice for centuries. Garrido-Anes edits the copy in CUL MS Es 1.13 (Cambridge University Library). She frames it with an introduction covering:

• the text's sources and Salernitan background,
• its analogues and later printed descendants,
• how the English copies circulated,
• a dialect study that uses LALME methodology.

After the edited text come a commentary, a glossary, and two appendices: a comparative table of entries and a list of marginalia. The reviewer praises the work highly. She stresses its careful handling of the tangled relationships between manuscripts and its attention to the miscellany the text sits in, which points to non-professional users. She expects the edition to become a standard reference for philologists and historians of medicine.

Key points

• The Circa Instans (also called Liber de Simplici Medicina) is attributed to Matthaeus Platearius of the Salernitan School. It dates from the mid-12th century and stayed influential for about four centuries, until Paracelsus's chemical remedies displaced plant-based ones.
• The edition is based on CUL MS Es 1.13, ff 1r–91v. It is volume 59 of the Middle English Texts Series (Heidelberg: Winter, 209 pp.).
• More than fifty copies with a suspected or proven English connection have been identified, including an ornamented copy owned by Queen Philippa of Hainault. The English material falls into three groups, each reflecting a distinct translation or compilation from the Latin.
• The author did not use LALME directly. She applied its method to build scribal linguistic profiles and used the fit-technique to place features on a map. The results point mostly to the central and Eastern Midlands, with some southwestern traces and one northern witness. Ownership evidence links the volume to Norfolk.
• The codex also contains recipes, urine tracts, an agriculture treatise by Nicollas Bollard, a dyeing tract, alchemical recipes and the Philosopher's Stone. This mix suggests household or agricultural rather than purely medical use.

Interesting ideas

• I1. The dialect of an anonymous scribe is located by building a feature profile for that scribe and fitting it against reference profiles with known locations, without needing a labelled atlas entry for the text itself.
• I2. A text's purpose and audience are inferred from the other works bound in the same volume, treating neighbouring documents as evidence about the one being studied.
• I3. Instead of blending all witnesses, the editor picks one well-justified base copy and records only the significant variants from the others.
• I4. Herbals in one volume were designed to complement each other, with one treatise supplying the plant names another lacked.
• I5. The glossary opens with a summary of where its technical terms come from, which shows that a large share are non-native.

For Mova

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

• I1 (tokens): A similar fit of spelling and morphology features against reference variety profiles could decide which normalization and lemma tables the tokenizer should apply to non-standard English input.
• I2 (world): When building the world of a text, Mova could use its surrounding collection (the other stories in a fable book, the other chapters of a course) as a prior on genre and intended reader.
• I3 (learn): Silver data from several witness parsers could follow the same pattern, keeping one designated base parse and logging meaningful disagreements as explicit variants rather than averaging them away.
• I4 (world): Compiled lexicons (WordNet, FrameNet, Wikidata) could be merged on the principle that each fills gaps in the others, with the source of each entry kept so every fact stays explainable.
• I5 (tokens): Recording the origin of loanwords and technical terms in the lexicon could help the tagger and lemmatizer handle rare domain vocabulary that follows foreign morphology.