1 Vernacularisation of scientific and medical writing in its sociohistorical context

In the history of the English language, the register of scientific writing is one that shows almost unbroken continuity from the earliest periods to the present. However, the conception of what counts as science and scientific writing has undergone fundamental changes in the course of time. Medieval classifications of knowledge include fields like music, physiognomy, and areas that border on the occult andmagic.1 Distinctions between various branches of science were not made in the present way, for example astronomy was a main scientific interest of the scholastic age with astrology as its application; it also formed an integral part of medical theory and practice (see e.g. French 1994).The influences of the macrocosm projected on the microcosm of man, the centre of the universe. The heavens influenced all worldly conditions and affairs from health to appropriate times for performing various actions (see Plate 1). The earliest layer of scientific writing in English dates from the Anglo-Saxon period. A continuous line of development can be traced from the end of the fourteenth century up to the present in the field of medicine, which provides us with the perspective of register and genre conventions vacillating and developing over seven centuries. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, i.e. the time when scientific texts started to appear on a larger scale in English, fall within the prime of scholasticism in England. Thus the vernacular tradition emerges from the background of already established conventions of scientific writing in Latin. The Latin tradition and its conventions also provide a point of comparison for the assessments of early vernacular scientific writings in the present volume. One of the most distinctive characteristics of scholasticism has been said to be its unfailing persistence in examining its own progress (Jacquart 1998: 197).This feature is attested in the layered nature of learned texts of the period. Western science was initiated by ancient Greek scientists in their search for principles of nature and, at the same time, for principles of argumentation for presenting their ideas (Crombie 1995: 225). New generations of scientists based their studies on texts written by their predecessors, quoted and elaborated them or explicated