A middle English text on phlebotomy

Abstract

This paper has a twofold objective. The first one is the edition of the text in Wellcome Library, MS5650, ff. 58v-61v, and the second one concerns the study of its language and its textual organisation. To my knowledge, this manuscript has not been edited before, and belongs to a volume of fifteenth-century medical items bound together. There is apparently no relationship among these items, and the only connecting thread is the practical nature of these texts. The analysis of the language will allow me to tentatively locate the text from a dialectal perspective. This detail along with the analysis of the physical features of the text will help me to provide a more exact date of production of MS5650, ff. 58v-61v. For a more comprehensive study of the text, its characterisation from a genre perspective is offered. The conclusions of this paper comprise all the partial findings, and in so doing a complete picture of MS5650, ff. 58v-61v as both a social and a linguistic object is presented.