I've just read the summary of the discussion of the Y1K meeting in November 2000 that was posted on the SSHM webpage. Peregrine asked if I could write up some quick reactions to the summary (and to the whole Y1K endeavor). The following, therefore, is both a 'fan letter' and some suggestions for future directions.

As I said to Peregrine, I am absolutely delighted to see this wave of new interest in the early medieval period. As I suspect most of you know, I attempted to make some sense of the late antique/early medieval materials for gynecology in my 1985 Ph.D. dissertation. Although I have spent most of the last 10 years or so working on Salernitan material and its afterlife, I have kept up my work cataloguing all early medieval texts on women's medicine. (A list of everything I've found thus far, whether early or later medieval, can be found as the Appendix to my volume, Women's Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS680 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).)

Mostly, my comments on the report are Yes, Yes, YES!! I find myself in agreement with most of the questions about the challenges of text-editing, the potential uses of paleopathology (I'm already been planning to write up a summary of what paleopathology and modern anthropological studies might tell us about women's health), difficulties of determining practice, etc. I guess my gut feeling is that, still, the most necessary work is philological. I gave a talk in London in January 2002 calling for some kind of fusion of Lachmannian and 'new' philological principles. I think some kind of editorial intervention is useful in laying out a 'core' text against which variant versions can be compared and, as a historian, I cannot (nor do I want to) rid myself of some basic motive of finding out when and where things 'originated.' On the other hand, I think it absolutely necessary to also explore ways (whether electronic or not) to acknowledge and analyze the mouvance of these texts and to make sense of when and how transformations took place in succeeding periods.

One thing I noticed missing: no mention was made of how we must ally paleographers in our endeavor; updated assessments on dates and localizations of the mss described by Beccaria would be tremendously useful. Also, not all early medieval texts are extant in early medieval mss; I'm [slowly] starting a catalogue of 12th-century mss to serve as a supplement to Beccaria. Of my gynecological texts, for example, I find that of some 30 texts that are arguably pre-12th century, 13 are found only in s. 12 or later manuscripts. There are, moreover, quite a few s. 12 or later exemplars of early medieval texts known from ss. 8-11 mss that should be taken into account if new editions are being planned.

In case it didn't get mentioned at the meeting, a study worth looking at is Florence Eliza Glaze, 'The Perforated Wall: The Ownership and Circulation of Medical Books in Medieval Europe, ca. 800-1200.' Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1999. (This is available, like most U.S. dissertations, from University Microforms International, www.umi.com.) She did a terrific job, I think, in working out the 11th- and 12th-century circulation of various medical books and cleaning up some of the messes made by De Renzi. Particularly compelling is her working out of the genesis of Gariopontus's Passionarius, and the beginnings of a commentary tradition on the same.

These comments focus on the Latin part of the colloquium, but I am also very excited that the Byzantine and Arabic traditions are being incorporated into this dialogue. Charles Burnett's recent work has shown very compellingly how much we still have to learn about the translations and intersections between Latin, Greek, and Arabic in s. 11 southern Italy, and I think all of us would benefit by keeping this multi-lingual, 'global' perspective at the forefront of our thinking.

I very much hope some longer-term study group or research entity comes out of what you've started. Should an e-mail list or other communications network be set up, it might be worth contacting the following additional scholars: David Langslow at U. of Manchester, Florence Eliza Glaze, Francis Newton (Classics, Duke University). I would add, too, that since the Society for Ancient Medicine bibliography has gone into abeyance, some alternate forum for listing recent bibliography would be most welcome. I find it particularly hard to find citations to work on paleopathology; I'm just stumbling now, for example, on articles published in the early 1990s, and even these discoveries are more often than not accidental. The History of Science Society/Wellcome bibliography is a godsend, but it doesn't capture everything.

Monica H. Green