The fourteenth-century Dominican friar Henry Daniel holds a place of honor in the history of English medicine and medical writing. He was the first author to produce a substantial medical treatise in Middle English, the Liber Uricrisiarum (Book about Judgments of Urine), which he wrote and then revised c. 1375–1382. Uroscopy, the ancient art of diagnosis through examination of urine, and all that it relates to—including astronomy, calendric computation, physiology, humoralism, and human anatomy—was central to medieval medical training and practice. Although not a formally trained medical practitioner, Daniel was evidently well read and had some hands-on experience: in producing his treatise, he was able to blend information compiled from a variety of Latin, Greek, and Arabic sources with his personal empirical knowledge that sometimes contradicted his sources and at others filled gaps. His primary contribution to medical practice in England was making information about uroscopy available in the English language for the first time. His treatise is organized into three parts or chapters: the first defines urine and methods for examining it; the second describes its various colors; and the third explains how to interpret the various contents found in it. Throughout the chapters, Daniel digresses to discuss a range of related matters such as the etymologies of medical terms, the classification of fevers, signs of disease, pregnancy, and calendric concerns. The success of his effort is evidenced in its survival: thirty-five manuscript copies identified thus far represent two principal versions (an “alpha” text with long chapters and a “beta” text with shorter ones), hybrid texts, and various abridgements, adaptations, and excerpts. One Latin version survives. The Liber Uricrisiarum also appeared in print in 1527.

Henry Daniel and his work have received some scholarly attention in recent decades. It is only through the efforts of the Henry Daniel Project team (based at the University of Toronto, but drawing on the expertise of scholars elsewhere in Canada, the United States, England, and France), however, that Daniel is finally being given the historical credit that he is due. The overarching purpose of the project is to make Daniel's writing accessible to a much wider audience. Liber Uricrisiarum: A Reading Edition is the first monograph to emerge from that project. Its editors, E. Ruth Harvey, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Sarah Star, are careful to point out that given the Liber's complicated textual history and their desire to make it available quickly, this book is not a traditional critical edition. Instead, what they offer is representative of Daniel's work. They rely on the witness in British Library MS Royal 17 D.i, an early and careful copy, and collate it with five other surviving copies that, together, represent the main variants of the alpha version of the text. The result is a careful and highly readable reproduction that makes the entirety of the three books of Daniel's Liber Uricrisiarum available to modern scholars for the first time.

This stellar edition is far from being the only valuable component of Harvey, Tavormina, and Star's volume, however. Liber Uricrisiarum opens with a detailed introduction that familiarizes readers with the uroscopic tradition of ancient and medieval medicine. We learn of the transmission of that tradition (via Salerno) and its evolution, from the Hippocratic Aphorisms through Galen's De Crisibus, Theophilos's Peri Ouron, Isaac Judaeus's Kitāb fī’l baul, Giles of Corbeil's De Urinis, and various well-known commentaries on them. Giles's work forms the foundation of Henry Daniel's Liber Uricrisiarum, yet Daniel also quotes Theophilos and the others, indicating that he had copies of or commentaries on their work readily at hand. An insightful elucidation follows of what is (and can be) known about Daniel himself; although no actual records survive of Daniel, Harvey, Tavormina, and Star show with skill what may be learned about the course of his life by parsing the information that he provides in his own writing. They likewise demonstrate how Daniel's writings provide significant insight into the many players and ways of working in the medical world of fourteenth-century England. While Daniel himself was likely university-educated and was certainly bookish, it is evident that he also drew knowledge from a wide variety of other practitioners, both male and female, high and low status, as he traveled around the country. Anecdotes about their insights pepper the Liber Uricrisiarum, making it more than a simple rendering of Latinate medical knowledge for a learned audience. Instead, this was a treatise meant for practitioners who wanted access to academic medical knowledge but lacked the Latin skills to acquire it. A general overview of the manuscript witnesses of Daniel's Liber Uricrisiarum, a description of those manuscripts used to produce the reading edition, and an explanation of editorial practices round out the volume's introduction.

Five appendices follow the edition of Daniel's Liber Uricrisiarum. The first three provide original Latin text for the Liber Uricrisiarum's prologue and the Regule Isaac and an English translation of the epilogue; two others discuss astronomical measurements and the language of the scribe who penned the text that underscores the reading edition. Thereafter are three highly significant and incredibly useful additions. A lengthy section of explanatory notes not only clarifies some of the treatise's difficult or unusual phrases and references, but also compares Daniel's wording against his original sources and indicates important variations across the witnesses. The editors point out where the Liber Uricrisiarum offers clear evidence of the use of English words that predate their mention in the Oxford English Dictionary or the Middle English Dictionary. A ninety-five page general glossary provides a wealth of detail about the peculiarities of Middle English vocabulary—if only words such as gleymousehede (stickiness) or clomprish (somewhat thick) had survived into modern English! Finally, a guide to the proper names appearing in the Liber Uricrisiarum rounds out the volume.

Liber Uricrisiarum: A Reading Edition is a carefully crafted and indispensable contribution to medieval medical history scholarship whose value goes far beyond uroscopy or even Henry Daniel himself. The next edited volume emerging from the Henry Daniel Project, a companion volume of essays about Daniel's work, its contexts, content, and legacy, will surely increase this volume's value and contribution even further.