Rosa Anglica Seu Rosa Medicinae Johannis Anglici

Cur síos

An Early Modern Irish Translation of Part of John of Gaddesden’s Text-Book of Medieval Medicine

Winifred P. Wulff (foilsithe den chéad uair / first published 1929)

lVIII + 436 pp. ISBN 1 870 16625 6

This tract is a translation from Latin into Irish of a medical text written in 1314 by John of Gaddesden. The Irish translation, possibly made about 1400 by Nicholas O’Hickey, a member of a well known medical family, reads easily, is clear and to the point. Its value has been described by its editor, Winifred Wulff, as ‘chiefly lexicographical’ and as representative of a vast body of manuscript material containing ‘great resources in scientific and medical terminology and expression’. Miss Wulff’s introduction explores, among many other aspects of the text, the subject of hereditary physicians in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales . The same editor was preparing for the Society an edition of an Irish translation of Hortus Sanitatis Hibernicus, the so-called Herbal Volume but, very unfortunately, this remained uncompleted.