Lelamour Herbal (MS Sloane 5, ff. 13r-57r): An Annotated Critical Edition

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

One of the three most important medical herbals composed in Middle English, both in terms of physical length and for the number of species treated, and regularly quoted not only by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary or the Middle English Dictionary but also by historians of Natural Sciences in Britain since the 1700s, a printed version of the treatise compiled in 1373 by the otherwise unknown Herefordian schoolmaster John Lelamour was surprisingly not yet available to the general public. The present volume fills this gap by offering a critical edition of the text contained in the sole extant copy, together with a detailed introduction discussing such topics as authorship and Quellenforschung, the dialect of the text, or the history of the manuscript; a large collection of explanatory notes which throw light on the textual transmission of the text, translation and copy mistakes, identification of parallel passages, and species identification; a full glosary, and two appendixes, one with the current botanical names of the plants mentioned in the text, and another crossreferencing diseases to the lines in the edition where these appear.