Practice, theory and authority in a Middle English medical text: “Barton’s Urines Which He Treated at Tilney”

Abstract A medieval English text on the theory and practice of uroscopic analysis is found in British Library, Sloane MS 280, and Cambridge, St. John’s College MS B.16. The treatise, the title of which is given in the fuller and earlier copy in Sloane 280 as “Barton’s Urines Which He Treated at Tilney,” offers an unusual mix of practical diagnostic methodology focused mainly on uroscopy, and a conceptual framework for that methodology which begins with humoral physiological theory but continues with digressions on astronomy, the calendar, Aristotelian psychology, reproductive anatomy and physiology, embryology and ensoulment. This paper discusses the possible authorship and dating of the original text, the author’s intellectual interests and habits, his approach to his vernacular audience, and the relation of the treatise to the Latin authorities on which it draws, particularly but not exclusively Isaac Israeli and Giles of Corbeil.