Note 2478 — Chapter XXVI · PSEUDO-LITERATURE IN NATURAL SCIENCE OF THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

The MS is said by Singer (1921) 60, to have now been removed from Vienna to St. Mark’s Library at Venice; it was procured from Constantinople in 1555 for the future Emperor Maximilian II (1564-1576). A photographic copy was published in 1906 in the Leiden Collection, Codices Graeci et Latini, by A. W. Sijthoff, with an introduction by A. von Premerstein, C. Wessely, and J. Mantuani (C. Wessely, Codex Anciae Iulianae, etc., 1906). See also A. v. Premerstein in the Austrian Jahrbuch (1903) XXIV, 105ff.

I have examined the facsimile of this MS and found the large but faded and partially obliterated illuminations which precede the text rather disappointing after having read the description of them in Dalton’s Byzantine Art, (1911) 460-61, which, however, I presume is accurate and so reproduce here. These large illuminations include a portrait of Juliana Anicia, an ornamental peacock with tail spread, groups of doctors engaged in medical discussions, and Dioscorides himself seated writing, and again seated on a folding stool receiving the herb mandragora (which, of course, was a medieval favorite) from a female figure personifying Discovery (Εὕρησις), “while in the foreground a dog dies in agony,” presumably from the fatal effects of the herb. There are rough reproductions of this last picture in Woltmann and Woermann, History of Painting, I, 192-3, and Singer (1921) 62. When the text proper begins the illuminations are confined to medicinal plants.

Other early Greek manuscripts are the Codex Neapolitanus, formerly at Vienna, now at St. Mark’s, Venice, an eighth century palimpsest from Bobbio, and a Paris codex, (BN Greek 2179) of the ninth century. An Arabic translation from the Greek seems to have been made about 850; a century later the Byzantine emperor sent a Greek manuscript of Dioscorides to the caliph in Spain.

For the full text of the De materia medica we are dependent on MSS of the 11th, 12th, 13th and later centuries.