Spending Time with Circa Instans, Now BHL’s Oldest Item

Reflections on Digitizing Medieval Medical and Botanical History

This post is part of BHL at 20: Treasures from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a series contributed by members of the BHL community, highlighting remarkable works from across the collection in celebration of its 20th anniversary.

Circa Instans (c. 1190), attributed to Matthaeus Platearius. Courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/65015749

Last summer, as the Archival Systems Intern for the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, I had the privilege of uploading several unique new items to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Among them was one of the earliest Western medical manuscripts, a medieval pharmacopeia known as the Circa Instans. This manuscript, digitized from the New York Botanical Garden’s physical collections, was written in approximately 1190, making it the oldest item in the BHL’s collection. Although I did not know that it would become the BHL’s oldest item when I added it to the library, I nevertheless found myself marveling at the Circa Instans and the history of this particular manuscript.

The origins of the Circa Instans are not definitively known, but it is widely believed that physician Matthaeus Platearius wrote the manuscript while working as a lecturer at Europe’s first medical school, the School of Salerno in Italy. The Circa Instans — also known as Liber de Simplici Medicina, Le Livre des Simples Médecines, or The Book of Simple Medicines — is written in Latin on vellum parchment. Composed of what was known as materia medica (“medical material”), the manuscript details the medicinal uses of plants, animals, and minerals in pre-Gothic script. It lists 258 items in alphabetical order and describes the appearance, effects, and applications for each. The majority of the items listed are common plants such as aloe, garlic, anise, dill, bitter almond, saffron, cardamom, and absinthe, among others.

At the time of its writing, the fields of botany, medicine, and pharmacology comprised one school of thought, and the manuscript helped to provide clarity to practitioners across medieval Europe by standardizing plant names and their uses. For this reason, it is considered to be a fundamental text in the development of modern botany. Due to its simple organization and accessibility for readers, many copies of the Circa Instans were created over the centuries, and it was translated from Latin into several languages, including French, German, Italian, Danish, Serbian, and English. The work was given no formal title by its author, and the name Circa Instans (“about the present”) was adopted simply because these two words begin its first chapter.

The particular manuscript digitized in the BHL is considered to be the earliest version of the Circa Instans still in existence, and its journey from 12th-century Italy to 20th-century New York City was precarious and fairly extraordinary. Almost 750 years after its creation, the manuscript was acquired by Emil Starkenstein, one of the founders of clinical pharmacology. A prominent Czech-Jewish pharmacologist, Starkenstein was deported by the Nazi regime to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1941. Shortly thereafter, his family sold his rare book collection to a local book dealer named Ludwig Gottschalk. The book dealer, also facing deportation to the camps, managed to hide the collection across several locations, including the Black Forest and, allegedly, the shelves of the Amsterdam Public Library. Tragically, Starkenstein was killed at Mauthausen-Gusen, but Gottschalk survived and later reassembled Starkenstein’s collection. In 1975, the New York Botanical Garden’s Mertz Library acquired a portion of the collection, including this copy of the Circa Instans. At the time of its acquisition, the New York Botanical Garden wrote that it was “an excellent example of the type of manuscript documentation that predated printed books and carried forward the knowledge of antiquity to the Dark Ages.”

Circa Instans (c. 1190), attributed to Matthaeus Platearius. Courtesy of the New York Botanical Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/65015641

This manuscript can now add “becoming the oldest item in a digital library containing hundreds of thousands of biodiversity materials” to its long and unique history. While preparing to import the Circa Instans into the BHL, I found myself reflecting on how remarkable it was to be able to peruse and add metadata to an ancient medieval work from the comfort of my own home. As a graduate student focusing on digital collections and archives, I recognize that virtual representations of a beautiful historical object such as the Circa Instans do not fully encapsulate what it is to experience it in person, but I cannot deny that leafing through the pages online allowed me to connect with medical and botanical history in a way I may never have otherwise. Although my interactions with the Circa Instans were mediated by bits and electricity, it felt exciting to explore its pages and marginalia and imagine a physician composing them more than 800 years ago. As someone who cares about increasing access to historical materials, I know that having easy access to a work like this will help future researchers in their quest to understand and learn from the past. I am delighted that we now have the ability to make this piece of medical and botanical history available using technologies that Platearius and early readers of the Circa Instans could have only imagined.

From the Biodiversity Heritage Library

As we celebrate twenty years of open biodiversity knowledge, we are also looking ahead to what comes next. BHL’s future depends on the global community that built it and continues to sustain it. If you value open access to biodiversity literature, we invite you to be part of the next chapter.

Sources

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Ventura, I. (2017, February 23) A Medieval Pharmaceutical Bestseller: The ‘Circa instans’. Brewminate: A Bold Blend of News and Ideas. https://brewminate.com/a-medieval-pharmaceutical-bestseller-the-circa-instans/

Ventura, I. (2015). Il Circa instans attribuito a Platearius : trasmissione manoscritta, redazioni, criteri di costruzione di un’edizione critica. Revue d’Histoire des Textes, 10(1), 251–362. https://doi.org/10.1484/j.rht.1.103260