Out of Sight, Out of Catalogue: The Neglected Grey Collection Medical MS G.4.c.14, Its Problematic Provenance, and Its Colonial Context-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

Out of Sight, Out of Catalogue: The Neglected Grey Collection Medical MS G.4.c.14, Its Problematic Provenance, and Its Colonial Context

Published:2024-02-01 Issue: Volume:37 Page:151-171
ISSN:0709-5201
Container-title:Florilegium
language:en
Short-container-title:Florilegium

Author:

Foran Alec¹,Trembinski Donna¹

Affiliation:

1. St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada

Abstract

Cape Town National Library of South Africa’s Grey Collection MS G.4.c.14 is a fifteenth-century paper manuscript that contains three medical works and a series of recipes. This article briefly explores MS G.4.c.14’s contents before examining the story of the manuscript itself. Containing commentaries on Book IV, fen 4 of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine by well-known instructor of surgery Leonardo di Bertipaglia (d. 1448), and by the more obscure Maffeus di Laudi (fl. 1392–1417), and a summary of Benevenutus de Grassus’s De oculis (ca. 11–13th c.), MS G.4.c.14 has the potential to add greatly to our understanding of medieval medicine. However, medieval manuscripts also have histories outside the texts they contain. An exploration of the provenance and history of MS G.4.c.14 brought to light how it moved from Rome to Cape Town, through the antics of an infamous book thief, Guglielmo Libri (1802–69), and its purchase by Sir George Grey, colonial governor of the Cape Colony in South Africa between 1854 and 1861. Although neither British in origin nor explicitly Christian in content, like many other European manuscripts, MS G.4.c.14 played an important role in informal processes of colonialism and cultural imperialism. We examine why MS G.4.c.14 had been ignored in research and catalogues of medieval medical and ophthalmological works for decades, despite being digitized and available at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in 1990 and being included in a modern catalogue of the Grey Collection since 2002. We suggest that looking outside Europe to find manuscripts like MS G.4.c.14 requires scholars to confront the colonialist history in the disciplines of medieval and manuscript studies. This has become even more important as technologies of digitization have made it possible to examine a manuscript without any recognition of its history or provenance.

Publisher

University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)

Link

https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/flor-2021-0007

Reference90 articles.

1. Please note that the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town is different from the University of Cape Town’s library which tragically burned down in a wildfire in April 2021.

2. By the time MS G.4.c.14 arrived in Cape Town in 1862, it was missing three folios (1, 10, and 102). The absence of these folios was noted by Grey’s librarian, Wilhelm Bleek, in his initial catalogue of Grey’s South African collection. See Wilhelm H. I. Bleek, The Library of his Excellency Sir George Grey, K.C.B., Presented by him to the South African Public Library: Manuscripts and Incunables, vol. 3, part 1 (London: Trübner, 1862), 4. The folios in the codex have been renumbered. The initial folio numbers, which are at the top centre of each recto, have been rewritten at the top right of each page, copying the style of the medieval Arabic numbers, then crossing the rewritten old folio number out and replacing it with a new number, written in a more modern font, also in the top right of each page, that reflected the absence of the missing folios. This means that MS G.4.c.14 has three different sets of folio numbers, a formula for considerable confusion. Indeed, there is slippage between the sets of folio numbers in the newest catalogue of the Grey Collection. See Carol Steyn, The Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts of the Grey Collection of the National Library of South Africa, Cape Town. 2 vol. (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2002), 2:105–9. For the purposes of this article, all folio numbers refer to the original pagination, found in the top centre margin of each recto.

3. The foundational work on the concept of cultural imperialism is Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

4. These were David Lindberg, A Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Ophthalmological Manuscripts (Toronto, PIMS, 1975), and Laurence Eldredge, "The Textual Tradition of Benevenutus Grassus' De arte probatissima oculorum," Studi medievali 34, no. 1 (1993): 95-138

5. Laurence Eldredge, "A Thirteenth-Century Ophthalmologist, Benevenutus Grassus: His Treatise and Its Survival," Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 91, no. 1 (January 1998): 47-52 and Laurence Eldredge, "A Locator List of Some Medieval Ophthalmological Texts," Canadian Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 24, no. 2 (February 2007): 467-77.