• Work on editing the Herbal has moved on from transcript review to identifying Daniel’s sources, beginning with his overt and often covert use of definitions from the Alphita, a widely disseminated, Latin medico-botanical glossary.
• Social Science and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) funding for this project has been extended through 2021.
• Una Creedon-Carey and Iona Lister, the Research Assistants for this project, are giving a paper on good and bad smells in the Herbal: “‘Aromacite’ and ‘stinkyng thinges’: Smells that Warn and Smells that Cure in Henry Daniel’s Aaron Danielis” at the 41st Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum, Keene State College, April 2021.

Henry Daniel and the Rise of Middle English Medical Writing, a critical companion to the edition of Daniel’s Liber Uricrisiarum published last year, is forthcoming with the University of Toronto Press in February 2022. The companion will feature chapters written by Faith Wallis, Winston Black, Peter Murray Jones, E. Ruth Harvey, M. Teresa Tavormina, Hannah Bower, and Sarah Star.

On July 3, 2019, the copy-edited files of the Liber Uricrisiarum were sent to production at the University of Toronto Press.  The volume is scheduled to appear in Feb. 2020, and may be pre-ordered at a 25% discount ($75 instead of $100) through the Press’s online catalogue (Fall/Winter 2019/20), which also provides further description of Daniel’s master work, its significance, and the content of the edition.

On 10 January 2019, the Henry Daniel Project team met at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto to discuss current progress and future directions, with special attention to Daniel’s herbal, and to hear papers by Paul F. Schaffner of the Middle English Dictionary (“Language in Limbo”), and Winston E. Black of Clark University (“Macer and Henricus speken rigth prolix: Henry Daniel’s Reading of the Latin Herbals”). Professor Black is the editor of Henry of Huntingdon’s Anglicanus Ortus; he joined the team of Project contributors in 2018.  

In the fall of 2018, our reading edition of the Liber Uricrisiarum was accepted for publication by the University of Toronto Press.  We submitted the final typescript to the Press for copy editing in early January 2019, and are looking forward to seeing the volume through the production process.  Meanwhile, work on Daniel’s herbal continues, with a combination of raw transcript revision (95% completed [July 2019]) and source hunting as our primary current tasks.  We have updated the list of authorities in the herbal to reflect our findings to date. 

With the support of SSHRC and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Professor Everett organized the 52nd Conference on Editorial Problems at PIMS in November 2017, focused on editing medieval medical texts; several project members presented papers at the meeting. In 2018, we completed the reading edition of the Liber Uriciriarum and have now submitted it to a publisher for review. While waiting for readers’ reports, we have begun the long task of correcting a raw transcript of the Aaron Danielis in BL Add. MS 27329, again with support from SSHRC, and Star and Everett are in the process of collecting and editing chapters for the critical companion.