John de Foxton's Liber cosmographiae: An Edition and Codicological Study

Who can say how many books on Chaucer and his poetry or on the political ramifications of the Wars of the Roses were published in 1988, while literally hundreds of primary texts on the social, historical, and scientific background for those works remained unpublished, in medieval manuscripts, virtually inaccessible to the ordinary scholar. John B. Friedman's edition and codicological study of John de Foxton's 'Liber cosmographiae', published in 1988, is, then, a very welcome addition to the field, making available to us as it does the text of a significant compendium of fifteenth-century scientific lore. As Friedman points out in his introduction, the 'Liber cosmographiae' includes brief texts on "world history, angels, classical gods and personages, reason, memory and imagination, obstetrics, menstruation, diet, fortunes of men and women born in various astral conjunctions, eclipses, dew, comets, thunder, tides, and weather prediction according to the day of the week on which New Year falls, as well as the sort of straightforward account of the constellations and planets suggested by the title".