Bifolium from a herbal glossary in the Synonyma tradition, in Latin, manuscript on parchment [France, twelfth century]

Two conjoined leaves, each with single column of 25 lines in a small and angular early gothic bookhand, with a few biting curves, plant names underlined in black ink, apparently reused on accounts in sixteenth century with probable date of those accounts 1592 added to bas-de-page of one page upside down, liberated from those accounts by the nineteenth century and with inscription of that date at head (Live de medicine fin XI ou comment du XII), cockling and stained areas, a few tears to edges, but without affect to text, overall good and presentable condition, each leaf 185 by 146mm.

These leaves contain numerous entries of medicinal plants (usually Latin transliterations of Arabic or Greek plant names), with brief glosses on alternative names and uses. They are most probably all that survives from a codex with a synonyma-text. These texts were composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a way to make practical sense of the waves of new herbal information that flowed into European hands from medical books discovered by Westerners in the Holy Land during the Crusades. In response to the discovery of the Ancient Greek medical writer Serapion and the Arabic physicians Rasis and Avicenna, anonymous authors in the West composed the Synonyma Rasis, Synonyma Serapionis and Synonyma Avicennae, as well as many others not devoted to a single author or text. In an effort to bring order to the cacophony of such texts with a single unified replacement, Simon de Gênes compiled the Clavis sanationis in the late thirteenth century. We have not been able to identify the present text among published examples, and this may well be the only recorded witness to this text.