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Article: Medieval Embryology in the Vernacular: The Case of 'De spermate'.(Review)
- Article from:
- The Modern Language Review
- Article date:
- July 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Modern Humanities Research Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Medieval Embryology in the Vernacular: The Case of 'De spermate'. By PAIVI PAHTA. (Memoires de la Societe Neophilologique de Helsinki, LIII) Helsinki: Societe Neophilologique. 1998. xii + 328 pp. $45.
The fifteenth-century manuscript, Trinity College, Cambridge MS R.14.52, contains the only known translation into any vernacular language of a Latin text known as De spermate. The Latin De spermate exists in at least thirty-eight manuscripts, listed in an appendix, and it may have been responsible for introducing to the West the idea of a seven-celled uterus. The survival of only one vernacular translation may suggest that it was seen as too theoretical in an age when ...