9 - Sources for Old English texts

Summary

In the preceding chapters I have frequently referred to borrowing by the Anglo-Saxons and to the knowledge of medicine they acquired from Mediterranean sources. It is time now to describe these sources and their availability to the Anglo-Saxons.

Until quite recently it was a common opinion that medieval medicine was rather poor stuff and that a medicine worthy of the name was introduced into Northern Europe only as a result of the impetus to learning supplied by the Arabs and introduced into Italy at Salerno when Constantinus Africanus began to teach there shortly before AD 1100. A careful analysis of the texts left to us from Anglo-Saxon England will show whether this opinion was justified. The best way to do this is to examine the sources of these texts and to compare them with their Greek, Roman, Byzantine, North African and native origins.

Because Leechbook III is the only representative of the corpus of ancient northern medicine surviving from the Anglo-Saxon period, our comparison of sources must be chiefly to the medicine of Mediterranean cultures. By comparing texts of Anglo-Saxon origin with contemporary and earlier Latin medical texts we can determine to some extent what medical texts of Mediterranean origin were known to the Anglo-Saxons and what use was made of them. Only works in Latin need to be considered, for there is no evidence that Anglo-Saxons other than those under the immediate teaching or influence of Theodore and Hadrian at Canterbury could handle Greek well enough to be able to use medical texts in Greek.