sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 10

Wendy Pfeffer (ed.): Medieval Diet and Medicine

Using the somewhat pompous main title "Medieval Diet and Medicine", Wendy Pfeffer, emerita professor of French at the University of Louisville and an expert on Romance languages with numerous publications, presents a new edition and translation of a brief text that has been known to specialists for quite some time. It is a relatively short didactic poem in Occitan, which was already critically edited by Hermann Suchier at the end of the 19th century (Halle 1894). It contains instructions on daily hygiene, nutrition, and social life, which are intended to maintain health and prevent illness, in the form of rhymed verses addressed to the character of "King Alexander". Rules of conduct during various times of the year are also taken into account.

The text was probably written in the 13th century; the textual witnesses do not supply a recognizable title, and nothing is known about the author. In scholarly literature, the work is referred to as "Provenzalische Diätetik", "Diététique provençale" or "Epistola ad Alexandrum de dieta servanda". Pfeffer introduces a new title because she associates "dieta" and its vernacular equivalents primarily with food history but wants to de-emphasize this aspect of the writing. She would much rather see the piece as a health guide. Perhaps at this point she neglects the contemporary range of meanings of dietetics and adapts a little too much to modern usage. Arguing that the language of the title should correspond to the language of the work, she opts for "Conselhs occitans de santat", which she consistently translates into English as "Occitan Health Advice" (OHA).

The present volume is divided into two parts, namely the actual edition of the Occitan text with English translation, preceded by a comprehensive contextualizing introduction of around 100 pages. These two parts should be looked at in a nuanced manner.

First, the edited text and its translation. Two manuscripts from the late Middle Ages serve as witnesses, which transmit the text extensively but differ in their textual content, partly because each contains verses that the other does not. There are also two further manuscripts, each conveying short fragments of verse, as well as two fragments in prose in other witnesses. On the basis of this rather scanty tradition, the editor creates an idiosyncratic text by combining elements from the different versions. She thus follows the hypothesis of earlier scholars, according to which the various versions must be traced back to a common source text (28). In addition, she inserts two lines of her own composition "to complete rhyming couplets" (105). Overall, the chosen method increases the number of verses in this edition compared to earlier ones. While Suchier's edition has 456 verses, the poem comprises 484 in Pfeffer's version.

This is not a critical edition, nor is it designated as such. There is also no critical apparatus, for example, although variants from other manuscripts are given for many words, and some are compared with the readings in earlier editions. However, Pfeffer's volume provides a solid edition for study. The line-by-line English translation, which fortunately does not make the effort to imitate the rhymes of the Occitan text, is a great asset.

In contrast to the text edition, the long introduction cannot be regarded as satisfactory in all respects. It is certainly useful and helpful to identify various lines of tradition that are echoed or that provide sources in OHA. The traditions of the Secreta secretorum, the Hippocratic-Galenic humoral theory, which was (most) notably communicated by the Tacuinum sanitatis of Ibn Butlan, and the medieval Latin diet calendars, especially the Regimina XII mensium, are correctly included in this context and briefly presented. However, the author repeatedly intersperses speculations about direct sources, which do not allow any compelling conclusions to be drawn about a direct dependence - despite comparing the wording of one of the supposed sources with the edited text (17, 21-24). There appears to be little more than a similarity of certain concepts and ideas. The assumption that the didactic poem at hand is a "translation" of a Latin prose model (41), though not new, must still be doubted at present due to a lack of evidence.

In addition to linguistic analyses, on the basis of which Pfeffer locates the author of the Occitan text and its scribe in the region of Nîmes, Montpellier or Narbonne, she offers an extremely helpful "Vocabulary of Specific Interest". More than 60 Occitan terms that play an important role in the text of the edition are translated, explained and put in relation to other contemporary texts. This is certainly a valuable aid to understanding the poem. Each of these words is mentioned only once or twice in the OHA, so it remains a mystery why one of the most important terms was not included in the glossary: "gaug" ("joy") appears 13 times in the final section, which comprises 28 verses. It seems that in this introduction the meaning of the medieval concept of "dietetics" has not been considered in all its dimensions; emotions are only mentioned here in passing (11). However, in the contemporary context of res non naturales, dealing with one's own grief and joy as so-called accidentia anime was very much one of the core medical topics of dietetics. [1] It would be worthwhile to analyze the newly edited text regarding this meaning; it seems to be one of the most important aspects of this poem.

Throughout the book, the author sprinkles in various illustrations, most of them from the Tacuinum sanitatis of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, NAL 1673. Since the textual witnesses of the present edited text provide no images that could have been reproduced, Pfeffer includes illustrations of supposedly similar assertions from the Tacuinum in places she deems appropriate. These appear without further explanation or contextualization. According to the editor, the selected images simply fit the content of the poem very well, and they were chosen because they were available in open access online (3).

However, this means that historical accuracy falls short: if art historical research had been taken into account, it should have been pointed out that the text-image compositions within this specific manuscript are highly idealized and shaped to meet the interests of an elitist audience around the Milanese Count Giangaleazzo Visconti. Accordingly, contemporary access to the book was very restricted. [2] It appears not suitable as a representative example of medical literature or the reality of life at the time, and it therefore should not be used as a source of images for any medieval text just to fill the book with beautiful, supposedly "authentic" pictures. At times, the depicted accompanying Latin text of the Tacuinum (which, as mentioned, is never addressed by Pfeffer) contradicts some of the assertions in the introduction, for example regarding the harmful effects of drinking wine (84-86). The blending of historically separate elements of medieval culture into a scintillating, seemingly harmonious overall picture may be acceptable for historical novels à la Noah Gordon or Umberto Eco, but it cannot meet the requirements of a scholarly presentation of a text edition and its accompanying materials.

However, if one disregards the shortcomings of the introduction and the unnecessarily prettified presentation, this new edition with its expert translation and explanatory glossary provides the modern reader with an appealing approach to a text that was previously reserved primarily for specialists to read and understand. The material presented here enriches research into cultural and medical history with more insights and a low-barrier basis for further work.

Notes:

[1] On this background in recent research, cf. Naama Cohen-Hanegbi / Piroska Nagy (eds.): Pleasure in the Middle Ages, Turnhout 2018; Naama Cohen-Hanegbi: Accidentia anime in Late Medieval Medicine, in: Before Emotion. The Language of Feeling, 400-1800, ed. by Juanita Feros Ruys / Michael W. Champion / Kirk Essary, New York / London 2019, 131-141.

[2] Cf. e.g. Cathleen Hoeniger: The Illuminated Tacuinum sanitatis Manuscripts from Northern Italy ca. 1380-1400: Sources, Patrons, and the Creation of a New Pictorial Genre, in: Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1500, ed. by Jean A. Givens / Karen M. Reeds / Alain Touwaide, Aldershot / Burlington 2006, 51-81.