Henry Daniel and the Rise of Middle English Medical Writing

Intended to serve as a critical companion to the recently published reading edition of Henry Daniel's Liber uricrisiarum (ed. E. Ruth Harvey, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Sarah Star, University of Toronto, 2020), the present volume comprises an introduction, seven chapters, and an appendix in the form of a content guide for the Liber uricrisiarum. Its first three chapters deal with questions of Daniel's adaptive strategy as he selected, compiled, translated, and amended his herbal and uroscopic treatise. The second half of the volume, comprising chapters four through seven, focuses on Daniel's literary and medical legacy. Though its tight focus on the work of one medical author might suggest a limited scope, the volume's chapters illuminate a vibrant and capacious community of writers, readers, practitioners, patients, and bystanders. The diversity of medieval English healthcare is a subject explored elsewhere in detail by many of the authors whose chapters appear in the present volume. Here, however, their work brings into focus not only the sheer range of medical care available in late medieval England, but the strategies employed by authors and practitioners in making that care more accessible.A fourteenth-century Dominican friar, Daniel authored two works in Middle English: the Liber uricrisiarum, a lengthy uroscopic treatise that survives in thirty-seven manuscripts and two print copies; and an herbal, which survives in two manuscripts. Daniel's Liber uricrisiarum (ca. 1375–82) is an English translation of an original compilatory Latin work produced by Daniel himself, and it is this very Englishness that sets it apart from contemporary healthcare texts. Like many other medical writers, Daniel frames his didactic project—the dissemination of medical information—as one of charity, but his use of English in the mid-fourteenth century makes him a notable forerunner in the explosion of vernacular medical literature that occurred in the fifteenth. Despite its unique status, Daniel's work has historically suffered from a lack of publication due to editorial challenges. The 2020 reading edition of the Liber uricrisiarum provides some redress, and Sarah Star's introduction to this volume makes explicit the volume's dual purpose as both a critical counterpart to that edition and a standalone demonstration of the fields to which Daniel's work might apply, including the history of medicine, vernacularization, and Manuscript Studies, among others. In its efforts to facilitate access to Daniel's work, the project's ethos mirrors Daniel's own self-declared intent to make medical knowledge more widely available.In her opening chapter, Faith Wallis provides an overview of the learned medical context from which Daniel's work emerges, focusing particularly on uroscopy's meaningful duality as both a theoretical science and a "cornerstone" of medical practice (p. 19). Its blend of theoretical and practical content, she concludes, means that though the Liber uricrisiarum relied heavily on numerous authoritative Latin sources, Daniel's "final confection was original, and entirely his own" (p. 31). Winston Black's chapter, the second in the volume, is the only one dedicated specifically to Daniel's herbal. It explores Daniel's work translating and adapting the herbal's two Latin verse sources: Macer's De viribus herbarum, produced in the eleventh century, and Henry of Huntingdon's Anglicanus Ortus, produced in the early twelfth. Black argues that Daniel's act of double translation—shifting his sources first from Latin into English, and again from verse to prose—involved not only the selection, translation, and censorship of particular texts, but also their comparison and juxtaposition. This attention to Daniel's work with historic sources is followed by Peter Murray Jones's chapter on Daniel's engagement with his contemporaries—which, Jones admits, is seemingly nonexistent, as neither the herbal nor the uroscopic treatise reference any active English medical practitioners or compilers. Through comparison with both lay practitioners and compilers (including John Arderne, John Mirfield, John Bradmore, and Gilbert Kymer) and other friars (including William Holme and the anonymous authors of the encyclopedic Tabula medicine), however, Murray reveals Daniel's novelty and originality not only in his choice of the vernacular, but in his organizational and didactic approaches.In the second portion of the volume, chapters turn to Daniel's impact on late medieval medicine and literature. The most ambitious chapter is E. Ruth Harvey's, which offers a preliminary assessment of the complex layering of the Liber uricrisiarum, a text produced via a process of reflection and amendment. Harvey emphasizes that her conclusions in the chapter are tentative and that much work remains, pointing out that definitive identification of the stages of the text's production is made difficult by extant copies of the treatise comprised of multiple different editions of the work. She ultimately proposes five distinct versions, or stages, of the text, with one major revision and expansion occurring between the production of the versions she refers to as alpha and beta respectively. The chapter highlights the way the unruly scale of Daniel's beta version shaped its navigation and circulation, and demonstrates the variety of ways that authorial investment in didacticism and accessibility was subject to the realities of scribal transmission. Usefully complementing Harvey's discussion of the Liber uricrisarum's creation, M. Teresa Tavormina's chapter traces its survival in later medical works. Identifying the text as among the "top five most frequently copied and/or reworked Middle English uroscopies," she moves from a discussion of Daniel as his own heir (in his lengthy revision of the alpha text) to tracing extracts of and supplements to the Liber uricrisiarum, longer extracts from its individual books, and finally adaptations of the whole text, including print editions (p. 108). In doing so, she offers a number of intriguing avenues for further research on Daniel's legacy, and on medieval English medical authorship in general.The volume's final two chapters attend to the literary qualities of Daniel's work. Hannah Bower's chapter explores what she calls the "polyvocal narrative of illness" offered by the storytelling in the Liber uricrisiarum (p. 148). Bower's analysis of the treatise's four anecdotes reveals their tendency to decenter the expertise of the physician and showcase alternative forms of knowledge and skill provided by bystanders and patients themselves. While a practitioner's authority was traditionally grounded in his ability to construct the story of an illness, she suggests, medical narratives such as those contained in Daniel's anecdotes could also complicate, undermine, or subvert that authority.Sarah Star identifies her short concluding chapter as a counterpart to Tavormina's earlier essay, one that explores Daniel's literary legacy rather than his impact on medical writing. Star argues, first, that the friar approached his work as a linguistic endeavor, "as much on English as in it," an investment demonstrated by his development of a new technical but accessible medical vocabulary in English (p. 160). The remainder of her chapter explores similarities between Daniel's concerns for medical language and those of fifteenth-century aureate poet John Lydgate, arguing that the poet's work "suggests his deliberate development of a medical poetics" (p. 166). Much briefer than the preceding chapters, this essay offers a provocative ending to the volume, demonstrating the potential usefulness of Daniel's work to fields outside the history of medicine, including philology, linguistics, and Literary Studies.Many chapters in the volume reveal tension between Daniel's ambitious didactic aims and the practical considerations that governed scribal transmission. Daniel's choice to subdivide his lengthy passages into smaller numbered sections in the beta version of the Liber uricrisiarum indicates an attentiveness to ease of use, but surviving manuscript witnesses demonstrate that scribes found the smaller chapter divisions onerous and difficult to maintain. As Harvey and Tavormina remark in their chapters, many simply stopped numbering. Then, too, there were conflicting opinions about what information was safe or worthy of transmitting. Winston Black observes that Daniel's herbal censors information on abortifacient plants included in his source material, while Harvey notes that a "squeamish" scribe copying Daniel's Liber uricrisiarum declines to include what the text declares to be the first step in determining whether a woman is pregnant: a set of explicit questions about the particular act of intercourse which might have resulted in conception (pp. 52–53). These examples and myriad others suggest the ability of the medical text to register and preserve the competing intentions, investments, and interests of a diverse array of users, and chapters by Bower and Star suggest that those investments were not limited to the medical sphere. As a whole, the volume is tightly focused but, excitingly, not comprehensive; each chapter makes explicit the value of Daniel's work in its own right, but also its importance as an underexplored means by which to develop a richer and more nuanced understanding of English healthcare practices.