Forgery, fiction and pseudonym in the collection of medical letters prefacing Marcellus’s De medicamentis

Abstract

In this article the corpus of eight letters serving as a preface to the pharmaceutical recipe collection which constitutes Marcellus’s De medicamentis is examined from a literary point of view. The classification of the various letters in the epistolographic genre is discussed; the identities of the writers and the addressees are investigated, and in cases where the names are fictitious or incorrect, an attempt is made to determine the reason. Finally, the question is posed: why do all these apparently unrelated letters form part of this collection?