ABSTRACT
In his master work, the Anatomy of Melancholy , the Oxford scholar Robert Burton (1577-1640) speaks twice of a “vast chaos and confusion”, both of medicines and, later, of books. Medicines and books or, here, remedies and manuscripts are the subjects of this study. The manuscripts under analysis record remedies ascribed to hospitals and are the only source through which we can catch sight of early pharmacotherapy and the composition of medicines of late Byzantium. The medicines are no longer dispensed, and all that remains are some manuscript copies of the recipes; of their number are the few copies of xenôn remedy texts of the period from 1204 to the fall of Constantinople in 1453; some are of later date, witness perhaps to the continuing interest in their contents.
