MARÍA JOSÉ CARRILLO LINARES

UNIVERSIDAD DE HUELVA

POPULAR VERSIONS OF ACADEMIC TREATISES: DIFFUSION OF COPIES OF THE ANTIDOTARIUM NICHOLAI IN MIDDLE ENGLISH

The pharmacological medieval treatise known as Antidotarium Nicholai is preserved in Middle English in several versions from, at least, four different manuscript families. The Latin version of this treatise was a requirement in the medical curriculum at medieval European universities, while the text in Middle English circulated among members of the medical class with no university training. The origin and relationship between two of the copies that belong to the same family has been undertaken in another paper, and the purpose of the analysis I propose here is to arrive to a conclusion about the diffusion of this work by comparing the results of my previous paper with the conclusions obtained from the analysis of two other copies belonging to a different family. The analysis proposed is that of the dialects and other linguistic and textual evidences of the copies found in Corpus Christi College Cambridge Ms. 424 and in London British Library Harley 2374. This analysis would enable us to determine the filial relationship between both texts, and to place each copy within a specific dialectal area.