Henry Daniel and the Rise of Middle English Medical Writing ed. by Sarah Star (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Henry Daniel and the Rise of Middle English Medical Writing ed. by Sarah Star
• Claire Burridge

Sarah Star, ed. Henry Daniel and the Rise of Middle English Medical Writing. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. xii + 212 pp. $55.00 ( 978-1-4875-2953-6).

Henry Daniel, an English Dominican friar active in the fourteenth century, is not a household name in the history of medicine, even among many medievalists. Yet, as Henry Daniel and the Rise of Middle English Medical Writing readily illustrates, Daniel and his surviving Middle English medical treatises (the Liber Uricrisiarum, a diagnostic text on uroscopy, and the so-called Aaron Danielis, a herbal) deserve to be better known and further studied—and not exclusively by medical historians.

Edited by Sarah Star, Henry Daniel and the Rise of Middle English Medical Writing introduces Daniel and the significance of his work, focusing primarily on the major Liber Uricrisiarum, a text produced and revised between c. 1375–82, while also considering his slightly later herbal treatise. Daniel was a pathbreaker in the vernacularization of medicine, a fact to which he alerts his readers: he explicitly [End Page 513] claims to be the first person to write on uroscopy in English. Indeed, Daniel consciously chose to write these works in English—despite the challenges this presented—in order to "increase access to this important knowledge" (p. 4). The present edited volume now "aims to extend Daniel's project" (p. 4) by opening up his work to wider audiences, including historians of medieval medicine, religious communities, and the English language as well as scholars in adjacent and intersecting disciplines, such as philology and lexicology, literary studies, and manuscript studies. The assembled chapters do precisely that, not only contextualizing the development and legacy of the Liber Uricrisiarum but also demonstrating its importance to multiple fields.

Star's opening introductory chapter sets out the surprising state of scholarship on Daniel and his works: although the Liber Uricrisiarum was penned "on the cusp of what would become a burgeoning vernacular movement" (p. 3) and contributed to the development of Middle English medical writing, it has remained largely overlooked and understudied. This volume, a product of the Henry Daniel Project at the University of Toronto and a companion to the Liber Uricrisiarum: A Reading Edition, represents an important step in introducing Daniel, his writings, and their long-term significance.¹

Following Star's introduction, the volume is divided into two parts: "Contexts" (Chapters 1–3) and "Texts and Legacies" (Chapters 4–7). Faith Wallis' chapter begins Part I, establishing the textual background to the Liber Uricrisiarum by demonstrating the centrality of "urine science in Western medicine" (p. 18) and reviewing four of the key Latin uroscopic texts in circulation, Theophilus' De urinis, Isaac Judaeus' De urinis, Gilles de Corbeil's Carmen de urinis, and Avicenna's Canon. These works provided Daniel with essential building blocks when composing his text, which—in contrast to the traditional view—was not simply a translation of earlier Latin material into Middle English but rather an innovative and original piece of scholarship that brought together a range of sources. In the next chapter, Winston Black continues to explore questions of authorship, concentrating instead on the Aaron Danielis herbal. By investigating Daniel's "double translation" (p. 39) of two of the herbal's primary sources (Macer Floridus' De viribis herbarum and Henry of Huntingdon's Anglicanus Ortus), that is, translating from Latin into English and from verse into prose, Black provides rich insights into both Daniel's knowledge of herbal medicine and his authorial strategies. The final chapter of Part I moves from the sources of Daniel's texts to his contemporaries: Peter Murray Jones contextualizes Daniel and his work alongside other English medical authors from the period, and especially those from mendicant orders. In doing so, Jones draws out "what is novel and different about Daniel's work" (p. 63), such as his intended readership and emphasis on uroscopy, as well as approaches shared more widely among these authors, including the incorporation of prognostic experimenta to forecast patients' outcomes. [End Page 514]

The chapters of Part II turn to the text(s) of the Liber Uricrisiarum and...