The Medical Culture of Early Medieval Montecassino
Abstract
This dissertation explores the place of medical learning in southern Italian monastic culture during the late ninth and early tenth centuries, largely through an investigation of the manuscript now identified as Montecassino, Archivio dell’Abbazia, cod. 69 (“MC 69”), a product of the Benedictine abbey of Montecassino under Bertharius, likely completed before the second destruction of 883. Despite recent interest in early medieval medicine as well as a substantial awareness of southern Italy’s importance in the transmission of ancient and medieval medical knowledge, MC 69 has not received much scholarly attention to date. This important manuscript is written in the Beneventan script of southern Italy and contains thousands of medical recipes along with many unique copies of medical texts. The manuscript is an important witness to the medical interests and sensibilities of the Montecassino community and provides a wealth of codicological and textual evidence of the scholarly aspirations and priorities of that community. Using MC 69 as a touchstone, this dissertation assesses the historiographical traditions surrounding the concept of “monastic medicine,” and provides a re-evaluation of the written evidence for medical knowledge at Benedictine monasteries in light of a ninth-century Carolingian commentary on the Rule also copied by the Montecassino community. The study continues with a paleographical and codicological analysis of MC 69 alongside other Cassinese medical manuscripts identified by scholars as nearly contemporary in date, and concludes with a critical comparison between contemporary medical texts and the contents, wording and organization of MC 69’s two large pharmaceutical recipe collections and its corpus of reference materials. The construction and contents of MC 69 in comparison with other medical manuscripts of the period reveal a medical culture that was interested in procuring some of the best texts available in Latin medicine, especially those focused on pharmaceuticals, but also in arranging and preserving those texts in a navigable encyclopedic format. The monks of early medieval Montecassino had multifaceted interests in medicine; as the manuscript evidence shows, the Cassinese saw medicine as both a practical need for their monastic community as well as a metaphor for monastic life itself.
Subject Area
Medieval history|European history|History
Recommended Citation
Doolittle, Jeffrey B, "The Medical Culture of Early Medieval Montecassino" (2021). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI28264947.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI28264947
