My latest book was released today (cue trumpet fanfare! 🎺), and there’s a whopping 20% discount on both the hardback and ebook versions if you order directly from Routledge online using the code 26AFLY3.
So, if you’re interested in medieval horse care, training and veterinary medicine, now’s the perfect time to get your discounted copy!
I can honestly say that translating this thirteenth-century treatise was a labour of love. It took me well over a year to complete, and there were three main reasons why I decided to take on the challenge:
- It was a hugely important text. Written in Sicily sometime around 1250, this treatise shaped virtually every subsequent work on horses, influencing the development of equine literature right through to the Renaissance. It was translated into multiple languages, including French, Occitan and Hebrew, and around 176 manuscript copies survive today—probably only a fraction of those originally produced. On the Medicine of Horses was, in many ways, the medieval bible of horse care: a practical guide not only to keeping horses healthy, but, crucially, to diagnosing and treating their diseases.
- The text was only available in Latin. Now, I don’t know about you, but I know very few people who can read or understand that language! I’ve been studying and teaching Latin for more than a decade, so I decided to put that experience to good use and translate the treatise into English. My aim was simple: to make this extraordinary work accessible to everyone interested in the history of horses, horse care and veterinary medicine.
- I’m a horse nerd. Learning how horses were looked after and treated almost 700 years ago was, quite simply, fascinating. What did medieval people know about horses? How did they train them or diagnose illness? What treatments did they use? And, perhaps most intriguingly, how much of what they knew would still make sense to us today?
If you want answers to these questions, or simply to know more about medieval horses and horse doctoring, grab yourself a copy
On the Medicine of Horses: An Edition and Translation of De Medicina E
Leave a Reply