A trial of witches: a seventeenth-century witchcraft prosecution

also how the teachers were far from being mere theorists but were concerned also with the consequences of their interpretations for medical practice. When these lectures were delivered is difficult to decide, for there are hints both for and against a date around 550. While the commentary on On the nature of the child is edited from the single surviving manuscript, the other two have a much more complicated textual history. All derive from fragments preserved in manuscripts of a Greek translation of an Arabic book, the Zad alMusdfir of Ibn al-Jazzar. Eighty years ago, Mercati argued that Vatican gr. 300 was the single source of all other manuscripts. It was the property of a medieval Italian Greek doctor from Reggio, who copied into its margins the opinions of much earlier Alexandrian lecturers. But while Dr Xeros certainly had some involvement with the Zad al-Musdfir in Greek, Vatican gr. 300 cannot be his personal copy or the source of all the other manuscripts, for they preserve good readings that it has lost. Hence the need to collate a further twenty-three manuscripts scattered across Europe, of which eight have been selected as adequate witnesses. The result is a complex textual history that allows the editors to produce a much more accurate text than that presupposed by Mercati. Like De Lacy's edition of Galen, this volume shows the remarkable resurgence of studies of ancient medicine over the last few years, and, not least, the important role in this played by the Corpus Medicorum series.