Medicine and science

Abstract

Linda Voigts's survey of manuscript book production in England between 1375 and 1500 demonstrates the multi-lingual character of most medical and scientific books. That is to say, Middle English and Anglo-Norman are to be found alongside the Latin of the scholastics. The fifteenth century is the first for which we have a number of commonplace books written by practitioners. One example is the Practica and surgery written by Thomas Fayreford, a medical practitioner in north Devon and Somerset in the first quarter of the century. Access to scientific books of the sort Fayreford required was probably only available at Oxford and Cambridge, where both institutional and private collections were built up with a deliberate bias towards medicine and science. Roger Marchall's commissioning, purchasing, annotating and disposing of books gives us an idea of how a fifteenth-century academic and medical practitioner might have used manuscripts. The scientific best-seller of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was undoubtedly the almanac.