[Sca-cooks] partial BMCR review of 'Medicina Plinii'

[Sandra J. Kisner]

Part of the review on a book of possible interest, especially if you can borrow it from a library (eventually).  They had me at garum and moretum.

Sandra

Yvette Hunt, The 'Medicina Plinii': Latin Text, Translation, and Commentary. Scientific writings from the ancient and medieval world. London; New York: Routledge, 2019. ix, 302 p. $124.00. ISBN 9781138934825.

Reviewed by Winston Black (winston.black at alumni.utoronto.ca)

Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia was, by all accounts, one of the most influential texts of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Yet its encyclopedic scope and length proved too much for many readers seeking information on just one topic. So, in the later Roman Imperial period, several intrepid editors provided syntheses of sections from Pliny's Historia. These include Solinus's Collectanea rerum mirabilium, the Medicina Plinii, and the Physica Plinii. The Medicina Plinii(hereafter MP) was compiled during the later third or fourth century CE by someone writing as Plinius Secundus Junior, or the "Second Pliny the Younger". This Pseudo-Pliny gathered together over one thousand of the medical remedies described by the genuine Pliny (primarily in books #20-27, on herbs, in his Historia) and arranged them in three books according to malady, from head to foot in the first two books, ending with skin conditions, diseases of the whole body, and poisons in the third book. The MP was a key medical text of early medieval "monastic medicine" before the rise of a more formal medical curriculum in the High Middle Ages. 

In the book under review, ancient historian Yvette Hunt presents the first complete English translation of this important text, supported by an extensive commentary on terms and themes in every one of the chapters. The volume also includes a detailed index of diseases and conditions, medicinal ingredients and compound remedies, as well as medical tools and methods, as they are found in both the Latin and English texts and in the commentary. Hunt undertook this task of translation, she explains, at the request of Kai Brodersen, who recently published his own German translation of the MP. Brodersen contributes an all-too-brief introduction (ten pages) to Hunt's book, in which he places the MP in the Late Antique tradition of euporista (easily obtainable remedies). He aptly compares it to the euporista compilations of Theodorus Priscianus, Oribasius, and Pseudo-Galen, as well as to the Herbarius of Pseudo-Apuleius. Brodersen's discussion of the popular drinks and sauces that appear frequently in the text (passum, mulsum, pusca, garum, moretum) is helpful for readers unfamiliar with these terms, as is his outline of the weights and measures employed in the MP (uncia, drachma, cochlear, denarius, and so on). Brodersen's comments are clearly intended for the novice reader in ancient medicine and he has made no effort to discuss the scholarship on the MP or its textual history. Much of this introduction is translated directly from Brodersen's introduction to his own translation of the MP, [1] a point that should have been made clearer for readers expecting in this book an original introduction to the work.

The rest of the review should be available at https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2020/2020.04.24/