In 2022, the critical companion to Daniel’s Liber Uricrisiarum was published by the University of Toronto Press. It contains the following chapters:

• Faith Wallis, “Latin Traditions of Uroscopy”
• Winston Black, “Translation, Comparison, and Adaptation: Latin Verse Herbals in the Aaron Danielis“
• Peter Murray Jones, “Henry Daniel and His Medical Contemporaries in England”
• E. Ruth Harvey, “Textual Layers in the Liber Uricrisiarum“
• M. Teresa Tavormina, “The Heirs of Henry Daniel: The Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Legacy of the Liber Uricrisiarum“
• Hannah Bower, “‘Her ovn self seid me’: The Function of Anecdote in Henry Daniel’s Liber Uricrisiarum“
• Sarah Star, “The ‘almost-Latin’ Medical Language of Late Medieval England”

The research and annotation team has now completed a preliminary annotated draft of part 1 of the Herbal (herbs only, sometimes called the “Aaron” section); most primary sources for part 2 (sometimes called the “Abies” section, covering other materia medica and select medical terms) have been identified and draft annotations are under way. We have also compiled a concordance and word lists using the AntConc concordance, in preparation for glossary building.

• 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.

• Our reading edition of the Liber Uricrisiarum was delivered to the Press in early April, and the editors are now receiving their copies.  Orders may be placed on the University of Toronto Press website (https://utorontopress.com/9781487506018/liber-uricrisiarum/) for delivery to home postal addresses; the Press is not shipping to institutional addresses until shutdowns have been lifted.

  Both cloth and e-book versions of the book are available; both versions are currently discounted by 25% to $75. It is our understanding that this list price is in CAD for orders from within Canada, and in USD for orders from outside Canada. The discount should last for some but not an unlimited time.  (For a 500-page plus academic book, we think this is a pretty reasonable price; the text itself is about 250 pp. long and the Glossary, with many hitherto unattested technical medical terms in Middle English, runs to almost 100 pp.  And there are several diagram and text images from the base manuscript, BL Royal 17 D.i.)

• The manuscript of the Henry Daniel companion volume, Reading Henry Daniel: Contexts, Texts, Legacy, edited by Sarah Star, has been submitted to the University of Toronto Press for reader reviews. Contributors include Faith Wallis, Peter Murray Jones, Winston Black, E. Ruth Harvey, Hannah Bower, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Sarah Star.

• The SSHRC grant that funded some final work on the Liber Uricrisiarum last year and has since been supporting RAs working on Daniel’s Herbal has been given another year to use the balance of grant funds, which is very helpful during the institutional closures of this year. RAs Una Creedon-Carey and Iona Lister are working on transcript review and revision based on the colour digital photos they were able to take at the BL in July 2019, with travel support from the SSHRC grant. They have completed that work on BL Add. 27329, and are now making excellent progress through BL Arundel 42, picking up and fixing difficult readings and marginalia that were not clear or visible in the black and white microfilms. Their BL trip also gave them the chance to draft physical descriptions of the MSS for future use and eventual sharing, in brief format, on this website.

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.

Project Update: Since January, the Liber Uricrisiarum team has compiled a long list of potential glossary entries, with draft definitions. Based on that work, we’ve added language notes for a few more difficult or unusual words and corrected a number of readings in the edition, which is now receiving one more full proof-reading against the base manuscripts. We’ve also written most of the introduction and discovered new and interesting textual relationships among the witnesses to the Liber Uricrisiarum and several of its fifteenth- and sixteenth-century descendants.

We are currently working on generating a finished glossary, condensing the expanded Explanatory Notes, and finishing the introduction, in order to send a completed text to a potential publisher early in 2018.

Looking ahead, we have compiled two very preliminary lists of headwords (nearly 2000 herbs, fruits, trees, minerals, and miscellaneous medical terms) and cited authorities (over 50) in Daniel’s Herbal.