Aldobrandino of Siena

Aldebrandin de Sienne’s Régime du corps (the first treaty on hygiene and dietetics written in vernacular) has a very wide manuscript tradition. It is found inserted both in medical sums of Salernitan inspiration, in religious and devotional collections and in encyclopaedic collections of moral and literary inspiration in which its eclectic nature is more clearly manifested. In fact, the variety of topics covered by the text allows us to read the Régime according to different perspectives depending on the context in which it is inserted. The various redraftings of the treaty (cuts, additions, collages, rewritings) testify to its fluid status, aimed at bending its contents to the type of reception to which it was intended. In certain manuscripts the Régime is matched with Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour: this information (as well as other data) makes us wonder if there was a connection between the two texts from the reception point of view.

Le Régime du corps d’Aldebrandin de Sienne (le premier traité d’hygiène et de diététique en langue vulgaire) présente une large tradition manuscrite. Il est inséré à la fois dans des recueils médicaux, dans des recueils pieux, ainsi que dans des recueils encyclopédiques d’inspiration morale où sa nature éclectique se manifeste plus clairement. La variété des arguments traités par Aldebrandin permet de lire le Régime selon différentes perspectives en fonction du contexte dans lequel il s’inscrit. Son statut fluide est révélé aussi par les divers remaniements accomplis au cours des années de sa diffusion pour détourner sa vocation première au type de réception auquel il était destiné. En particulier dans certaines manuscrits le Régime est associé au Bestiaire d’amour de Richard de Fournival : cette information, ainsi que d’autres données, nous font nous demander s’il y avait une sorte de connexion entre les deux textes au niveau de la réception.

The Library of Ajuda, Lisbon, Portugal possesses a lavishly illuminated fifteenth-century copy of the popular late medieval dietetics book, Le Regime du corps by Aldobrandino of Siena. Decorated with a full-page frontispiece and one hundred and fifty historiated initials, Codex 52-XIII-26 was one of the latest illuminated manuscripts of this work to be made. This dissertation explores its artists, its production in Bruges in the workshop associated with Philippe de Mazerolles, the Master of the Harley Froissart, as well as its possible connection to the 1479 manuscript commissions of Edward IV of England. It also addresses its circulation in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English courts, and its path into Portugal by way of the international book and manuscript market of the eighteenth century. Additionally, this study addresses the codex's decoration and its iconography, comparing it with other known illuminated copies of Le Régime du corps, and providing a first hand overview of their decorative programmes. By offering a detailed study of Codex 52-XIII-26, and making an examination of the visual discourse of the illuminated copies of Le Régime du corps, this dissertation provides a case study for the research on the decoration of deluxe medieval and early Renaissance scientific manuscripts.

This essay sprang out of a simple question:  what evidence was there for medieval European women’s engagement as readers with the increasing abundance of medical literature in the High and later Middle Ages?  I was working in the mid and later ’90s on my edition of the so-called Trotula texts (including surveys of the circulation and uses of both the Latin originals and their many vernacular reincarnations) and I wanted to be able to make a declarative statement:  “The evidence for female audiences of the Trotula conform (or not) to evidence for women’s reading of other kinds of medical texts.”  But I couldn’t make that statement because no survey of that question had yet been done.  This comprehensive essay, therefore, represents my attempt to gather everything I could find to document that women (a) owned medical books or (b) had medical books dedicated to them (whether as individual readers or female audiences generally). 

The results were astonishingly meager:  although women are now widely documented as readers of religious texts in the Middle Ages and, to a lesser extent, as readers of romances and histories, evidence for women engaging with the technically specific field of medicine is limited.  In fact, that result is even more decisive for texts on women’s medicine, where female owners or addressees are notably rare.  When women did own or serve as (intended) audiences of medical texts, these were often books of regimen (how to stay healthy), herbals, or recipe collections.  French women (or at least those of the very highest social classes) were the most notable exception to this rule; of 27 women whose booklists had been published, a quarter of them were found to own medical books.  Still, these are small numbers, especially considering that one of the most famous medical books addressed to a lay reader was Aldobrandino of Siena’s Regime du corps (Regimen for the Body), written before 1257 for Beatrix of Savoy (d. 1287), countess of Provence on the occasion of her visit to her four daughters: Marguerite, wife of Louis IX of France; Eleanor, wife of Henry Ill of England; Sanchia, wife of Richard of Cornwall; and Beatrix, wife of Charles of Anjou.  Notably, of the 71 extant copies known at the time of writing, only 5 can be documented in women’s hands.

Tables included in the study identify (1) Individual Female Owners of Medical Books (identifying 43 women in all); (2) Medical Texts Commissioned by and/or Addressed to Women (identifying 51 texts in all); and (3) A Comparison of Texts Owned by and Addressed to Women (divided according to language and medical genre).  (For information on medical books owned by or associated with professional female practitioners and cloistered women, see my essay “Books as a Source of Medical Education for Women in the Middle Ages,” Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 20 (2000), 331-69; for further analysis of women’s relationships to the culture of literate medicine in high and late medieval Europe, see Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).)