Out of Sight, Out of Catalogue: The Neglected Grey Collection Medical MS G.4.c.14, Its Problematic Provenance, and Its Colonial Context

Abstract

Cape Town National Library of South Africa’s Grey Collection MS G.4.c.14 is a fifteenth-century paper manuscript that contains three medical works and a series of recipes. This article briefly explores MS G.4.c.14’s contents before examining the story of the manuscript itself. Containing commentaries on Book IV, fen 4 of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine by well-known instructor of surgery Leonardo di Bertipaglia (d. 1448), and by the more obscure Maffeus di Laudi (fl. 1392–1417), and a summary of Benevenutus de Grassus’s De oculis (ca. 11–13th c.), MS G.4.c.14 has the potential to add greatly to our understanding of medieval medicine. However, medieval manuscripts also have histories outside the texts they contain. An exploration of the provenance and history of MS G.4.c.14 brought to light how it moved from Rome to Cape Town, through the antics of an infamous book thief, Guglielmo Libri (1802–69), and its purchase by Sir George Grey, colonial governor of the Cape Colony in South Africa between 1854 and 1861. Although neither British in origin nor explicitly Christian in content, like many other European manuscripts, MS G.4.c.14 played an important role in informal processes of colonialism and cultural imperialism. We examine why MS G.4.c.14 had been ignored in research and catalogues of medieval medical and ophthalmological works for decades, despite being digitized and available at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in 1990 and being included in a modern catalogue of the Grey Collection since 2002. We suggest that looking outside Europe to find manuscripts like MS G.4.c.14 requires scholars to confront the colonialist history in the disciplines of medieval and manuscript studies. This has become even more important as technologies of digitization have made it possible to examine a manuscript without any recognition of its history or provenance.