Introduction

...[the skin which is around the tumor] but not with any fire-heated or cold iron or needle, because that pustule and swelling dread fiery and cold matter, so that danger would easily follow. But meanwhile, while the person suffers the swelling of this pustule, let them protect themselves from fire, from cold, from wind, and from damp air; and let them abstain from all hot, roasted, and heavy food and from wine, and avoid raw vegetables and raw apples, because these all [produce] harmful humors In medieval medicine, 'humors' refers to the four bodily fluids—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—which were believed to govern health. in them.... The original text contains a further 10 lines of detailed dietary instructions.

...[the skin which is around the tumor] but not with any fire-heated or cold iron or needle.

                                          But
meanwhile, while the person suffers
this pustule, let them protect themselves from fire,
cold, wind, and from damp
air; and let them abstain from all
hot, roasted, and heavy food and from
wine, and avoid raw vegetables and
raw apples.

A skilled copyist must therefore, after an initial transcript was made from the original toward the work Causes and Cures original: 'Causae et curae', have made a second transcript toward the Physica, leaving the basic text untouched while occasionally shortening the additional text in its wordiness so competently that no serious loss of content, nor any syntactic breaks, occurred. This competence, however, is almost certainly attributable only to Volmar Volmar of Disibodenberg (d. 1173) was Hildegard’s monk-secretary and closest collaborator. himself. Thus, we must assume the fact that all surviving manuscripts of the Physica stemmatologically A term used in 'stemmatology', the study of the relationships between different surviving copies of a text to reconstruct a 'family tree' of manuscripts. descend from this first transcript by Volmar, rather than directly from the original.

That Volmar still maintained the strict separation of the 'Basic Text' (= Book of Simple Medicine original: 'Liber simplicis medicinae') and the 'Additional Text' (= Book of Compound Medicine original: 'Liber compositae medicinae'), which was abandoned in the existing manuscripts, can now be conclusively inferred from the appearance of the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript. While the Florence Manuscript is distinguished by the fact that its scribe integrated the additional text (set in italics in this edition) almost always in the logically correct places within the basic text, one must deny the scribe of the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript any such reading comprehension in many cases. He integrates the additional text in many places randomly and nonsensically into the basic text, creating a sequence that must have seemed suspicious to any knowledgeable reader. This goes so far that parts of the additional text could even end up incorrectly in the preceding or following chapter. This proves, in turn, that such misplacements can only have been based on a specific physical page of the source material, where the coincidence of equal line heights likely led to the erroneous insertion. In the present text edition, the apparatus will note each instance of disrupted text sequence in the—

Volmar (Hildegard's secretary and editor), Copyist (a scribe who reproduces texts), Causes and Cures (Hildegard’s medical-theoretical work), Physica (Hildegard’s natural history), Basic Text (the core descriptions of natural elements), Additional Text (the expanded medical applications), Book of Simple Medicine, Book of Compound Medicine, Wolfenbüttel Manuscript (a key manuscript source held in Germany), Florence Manuscript (a high-quality manuscript source held in Italy), Stemmatology (the study of manuscript lineages).