Welcome to the Cotton MS Vitellius C III homepage. This manuscript contains four separate texts within its bindings: A Genealogia Christi (Genealogy of Christ), Medicina de Quadrupedibus (An Illustrated Pharmacopoeia, also called an Herbal), books 1 and 2 of Saturnalia, and the medical notes of William Harvey. The earliest of these texts was copied in the late 9th century, and the latest was copied between the late 16th and mid 17th centuries. Given the variety of the manuscript’s content, there are several languages used, including Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English, and Anglo-Norman.
The Cotton MS Vitellius C III (or the C III for the sake of brevity) has had multiple scribes. We know this less from scribal tics or attribution but rather due to the time disparity of the manuscript’s parts. None of the separate sections was written during the same century, much less by the same scribe. From the oldest to the most recent sections of the C III, there is a gap of almost 800 years; so unless there is an immortal vampire scribe somewhere in Europe, we can assume these separate pieces were originally sets of quires copied by different people and bound together after the majority (if not all) of the folios were already several centuries old.
To talk of the C III as one continuous book would be to do it an injustice. The C III seems similar to some sort of medieval literary magazine that pieced together excerpts of award-winning stories. Each piece is unique from the others not only in degrees of antiquity but in content, style, and even language; and it would be remiss not to look at each one individually.
Compendium in Genealogia Christi
The first of these sections is a genealogy of Christ by Peter of Poitiers, translated from Latin into Old English. While the scribe is not identified, this text was copied in England, likely during the first quarter of the 13th century. There is a mixture of copied text and illustrated charts that cover the pages, crisscrossing over each other at times. After having looked into other copies of Poitiers’s Compendium in Genealogia Christi, Poitiers was a French theologian and Chancellor of the University of Paris who lived from 1130 A.D. to 1205 A.D. The purpose of Poitiers’s work is considered to be as a teaching tool for Christians, and this copy was likely made after his death.
Medicina de Quadrupedibus and Illustrated Herbal
The second section shares the bulk of the manuscript with the third section. This is an illustrated catalog of medicinal herbs, complete with descriptions and recipes. This type of work is sometimes called Medicina de Quadrupedibus, Illustrated Herbal, or a Pharmacopoeia. Like the first text, this one is written in Latin and translated into Old English, though there is no recorded author. Despite these folios being bound behind the genealogy of Christ, they were copied in the first quarter of the 11th century in southern England. There are glosses in Latin, Old English, and Anglo-Norman, and each page has at least one illustration. For the most part, these illuminations are of the plants being described in the Herbal and occasionally of snake-like figures and scorpions, which are sometimes depicted attacking the plants or each other.
Saturnalia Books i-ii
The Saturnalia is a text made up of seven books originally written by Macrobius in the 5th century. In the C III, there are only two of these seven books present, taking up almost half of the manuscript. This edition was copied during the third quarter of the 9th century in northern France–so nearly 400 years after the Saturnalia was originally penned. Little information is provided by the archive regarding this particular section despite its prominence in the manuscript. We know little of the original author, though he is thought to have been Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, the praetorian praefect of Italy in 430 A.D. Much of the Saturnalia describes and considers pagan Roman holidays, which begs the question of why it would be bound in a manuscript that begins with an important Christian fixture.
The Medical Notes of William Harvey
William Harvey (1578 – 1657) was a physician in England, credited with first recognizing the circulation of blood in the human body. The final section of the C III contains Harvey’s medical notes and recipes, copied by Harvey himself, making this the only folio in the C III with a known scribe. These folios have no illustrations and are written not in the bookhands with which we have become so familiar but in a scrawling handwriting.
Cotton MS Vitellius C III 