ABSTRACT
Historians of science and medicine know that the single most important research tool for the study of medieval science is the Catalogue of Incipit's of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin by Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kiore often cited with some affection as Thorndike-Kibre (TK). The author works with Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME) medical writing; he became over the years more and more aware of the difficulty of ascertaining the manuscript witnesses to these texts. The much smaller Old English section of two hundred entries is coded to distinguish it from Middle English for linguistic and orthographic reasons as well as for the fact that three centuries separate OE from ME texts. An overview of the proportions of data in the Catalogue of Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English in the present database may provide a sense of the topography of the vast body of ME scientific and medical writing.
