ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the recently discovered individual manuscripts, and determines which manuscript comes closest to the archetype and should be used as the leading manuscript of a future critical edition, as well as the changes the text underwent in from circa 1300 to 1500. It discusses a topic on the manuscript tradition of Saint Hildegard's Physica, which is an unusual contest that the society started in 1984. The transmission of the Physica from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, as evidenced in the nine extant manuscripts, shows numerous attempts on the part of the audience to make the text more user-friendly. The different treatment of the indications and Latin synonyms of the drugs in the extant manuscripts of the Physica gives the impression that this information was not part of the archetype, but constitutes attempts by a later audience to turn Hildegard's description of nature into a text suitable for medical practice.
