Some Notes on the Transmission of Auraicept na nÉces

Abstract included in text

Alas, Poor Yorick: Digging Up the Dead to Make Medical Diagnoses

Is it ethical to dig up famous dead people to make tissue diagnoses

‘A medieval Irish dialogue between Priscian and Donatus on the categories of questions’

The abstract is included in the text

A Medieval Irish Commentary on the Magister

Three medieval Irish manuscripts, two of which are almost entirely medical in content, preserve a hitherto unpublished passage of commentary in Irish on the meaning of the Latin word magister (‘teacher’ or ‘master’). The text in question consists chiefly of a series of expositions on the eight letters of the term magister that serve to highlight various attributes associated with an individual bearing that title. Each explanation cites a different Latin word, the initial letter of which corresponds to one of the letters in the word magister. These Latin terms are then translated into Irish, and followed in turn by succinct interpretations of how each concept relates to the function and duties of a magister. The present contribution offers an annotated edition and translation of this passage, and attempts to situate its contents within the wider context of medieval Irish intellectual cultur

Old English in the Irish Charms

This article presents a reassessment of the evidence provided by the extant medieval Irish medical manuscripts for ritualized healing charms, focusing on a group of blood-staunching incantations preserved in a substantial, but hitherto largely unstudied, medical remedy book written primarily by the sixteenth-century Irish medical scribe Conla Mac an Leagha (fl. 1496–1509). It is argued that some of the charms in question may have been composed in the early medieval period, and reflect currents of intellectual exchange between ecclesiastical centers in Ireland and southern England, especially Canterbury, prior to the twelfth century. The apparently obscure lexical items in one of these blood-staunching charms may point to the participation of Irish literati in broader European trends relating to esoteric writing and “hermeneutic” vocabulary, and to its potential for articulating the concerns of the educated elite regarding the perceived exclusivity of literate knowledge

The Lexicon of Pulmonary Ailment in Some Medieval Irish Medical Texts

The term loch tuile is not recorded in published lexicographical sources for the Irish language, but is used to refer to pulmonary ailment in Irish medical ma- nuscripts copied during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in one case oc- curring as an interlinear gloss on the Old Irish legal text known as Bretha Déin Chécht (‘The judgements of the [mythological physician] Dían Cécht’). This contribution will examine some attestations of this term and its derivatives from the corpus of unpublished Irish medical tracts, with the dual aim of shed- ding further light on the technical terminology of medieval Irish medicine, and of offering some preliminary observations regarding the relationship between texts extant in four separate medical manuscripts

A Sixteenth-century Irish Collection of Remedies for Ailments of the Male Reproductive Organs

This article presents an edition, translation and discussion of an Irish collection of cures for ailments of the male reproductive organs. The collection, now preserved in RIA MS 23 N 29 (467), originally formed part of a much larger medical treatise found in RIA MS 24 B 3 (445), a composite codex written primarily by the North Connacht physician Conla Mac an Leagha in the early sixteenth century. While most of the therapeutic remedies examined here simply call for different herbal and animal ingredients, the text also includes verbal incantations and other instructions that might be described as ritualistic in nature, some of which are of interest for their wider literary resonances. This material is significant not only for the insight that it provides into the transmission of late antique medical learning in premodern Ireland, but also for our understanding of the relationship between medical remedy collections compiled in various medieval vernaculars