In the library of the Beaux-Arts de Paris is a late fourteenth-century manuscript known today as Masson 116.

The name is modern. It comes from the collection of Jean Masson, who later donated the manuscript. The book itself is much older: catalogues generally date it to approximately 1365–1375, or more broadly to the final decades of the fourteenth century, and associate its production with northern Italy, particularly Padua.

At first sight, Masson 116 appears to be an illustrated herbal.

Its pages contain plants laid out for inspection, animals, minerals, human figures and occasional scenes. Short Latin names identify many of the depicted objects. The surviving material is arranged broadly according to alphabetical categories.

But the book contains almost none of the continuous explanatory writing normally expected from a medical herbal.

It is full of medical images and nearly empty of medical instruction.

That absence is the beginning of the story.

[edukate_atlas_case case=”masson-116″]

A Book of Natural Materials

The catalogue of the Beaux-Arts describes Masson 116 as a collection of natural-history images arranged alphabetically. Its drawings were made in pen and enhanced with colour. Plants predominate, but animals and figurative scenes also appear. Simple Latin labels survive, while the expected explanatory text does not.

This was not botany in the modern sense.

A medieval book of materia medica could include anything believed useful in maintaining health or producing remedies:

• leaves, roots, flowers and seeds;
• trees, gums and resins;
• animals and animal parts;
• stones, minerals and earths;
• substances produced through human work;
• materials imported through distant commercial routes.

The organising question was not simply:

What species is this?

It was also:

What substance is this, by what names is it known, and how might it enter medicine?

This explains why a medicinal image collection could move without difficulty from a lily to a deer, from a fruit to a mineral, or from a plant to a scene of extraction.

The book was mapping a therapeutic material world.

The Images Came Before the Missing Explanation

Most of Masson 116’s plant imagery derives from an earlier illustrated medical work associated with Manfredus de Monte Imperiale, preserved today as Bibliothèque nationale de France Latin 6823.

Manfredus described his purpose as learning the properties and medicinal powers of simple substances and demonstrating them through figures. His manuscript combined words and images: written authorities supplied names, properties and uses, while the pictures made the substances visible.

Masson 116 inherited much of this visual corpus.

The Beaux-Arts catalogue states that most of its plant iconography was copied from Manfredus’s Tractatus de herbis. Some specimens may instead have been painted from direct observation, while animals and narrative scenes often derive from the accompanying tradition of medical material drawn from animals.

This places Masson inside a transmission system:

[
\text{medical literature}
\rightarrow
\text{illustrated exemplar}
\rightarrow
\text{copied image collection}
\rightarrow
\text{later manuscripts}
]

It was not an isolated album produced by someone independently drawing hundreds of plants.

It belonged to a visual lineage.

Yet something changed during transmission.

The images crossed into Masson 116.

Most of the explanatory apparatus did not.

Was Masson 116 Intended to Be Textless?

The surviving book may look like an intentionally visual encyclopaedia, but its physical organisation suggests a more complicated history.

Scholars have noted ruling prepared for writing and page layouts that appear to leave room around the illustrations for columns of text. Larger trees are positioned so that writing could have passed beside them rather than being displaced entirely by the image. The most likely conclusion is that Masson 116 was planned as a more complete illustrated medical book but was never finished in that form.

The images were completed to varying degrees.

Labels were added.

The larger explanatory layer was not.

This produces an unusual artefact:

The visual identification system survives.
The textual medical system is largely absent.
The page still preserves evidence that both were meant to coexist.

Masson is therefore not merely a book without text.

It is a book whose material structure remembers the text it was prepared to receive.

What the Empty Space Tells Us

Blank parchment is not automatically evidence of lost knowledge.

A scribe may have stopped working. A patron may have withdrawn funding. A workshop may have changed its plan. The book may have been repurposed before completion. The text may simply never have been written.

We cannot select one explanation without further evidence.

But the empty areas still reveal something important about manuscript production.

The book was assembled in stages.

Someone had to:

1. prepare the parchment;
2. determine the gathering and page sequence;
3. rule the writing area;
4. allocate space to images;
5. obtain or consult an exemplar;
6. transfer the images;
7. apply colour;
8. add identifying labels;
9. supply the explanatory text;
10. revise, bind and deliver the completed volume.

Different specialists could perform different stages.

The failure of one stage did not erase the work completed by the others.

Masson 116 may therefore preserve a broken production sequence. The object survived because enough of the sequence had been completed for it to remain valuable, even though the planned textual layer was absent.

Its incompletion became a new kind of completion.

Padua Around 1370

To understand why such a book could be produced, we must move away from the manuscript and reconstruct its city.

Masson 116 is commonly associated with Padua through a combination of dating, iconography, artistic style and a difficult note on its opening folio. Its imagery has been compared with works connected to Altichiero da Zevio and Jacopo Avanzi, artists active in Padua during the 1370s.

This was not a quiet provincial setting.

Fourteenth-century Padua brought together several powerful knowledge environments:

University
Court
Church
Workshop
Market
Apothecary
Merchant network
Household

Each handled medical knowledge differently.

The university taught and disputed learned medicine.

The court commissioned prestigious books and recruited scholars.

Artists converted textual descriptions and earlier images into visible forms.

Apothecaries encountered drugs as physical goods.

Merchants moved substances, recipes and names between regions.

Households retained practical treatments.

Religious institutions cared for bodies, copied books and maintained libraries.

Masson appeared where these systems overlapped.

The University as a Knowledge Engine

The University of Padua had been established in 1222 by scholars and students who had left Bologna. By the period in which Masson was produced, the university was already a deeply embedded part of the city’s intellectual life.

Medieval university medicine was built from authoritative textual traditions.

Students encountered works associated with Hippocrates and Galen, Latin medical compilations, pharmacological writings and texts transmitted from Arabic. Medical knowledge could therefore travel across several transformations:

[
\text{Greek}
\rightarrow
\text{Arabic}
\rightarrow
\text{Latin}
\rightarrow
\text{university teaching}
\rightarrow
\text{vernacular practice}
]

Each transformation created opportunities for learning, but also for error.

A medicinal substance might have:

• a learned Latin name;
• a Greek-derived name;
• an Arabic transliteration;
• a local Paduan name;
• a merchant’s trading name;
• an apothecary’s shop name;
• several regional synonyms.

The problem was not merely knowing that a remedy existed.

The user had to connect the name in the book to the material in the hand.

An image could act as a bridge.

The Court as a Convergence Point

Padua was ruled for much of the fourteenth century by the da Carrara family. When Masson 116 was probably being made, Francesco I da Carrara was the city’s lord.

The Carrara court patronised artists, scholars and monumental cultural projects. Petrarch was connected to Francesco I, while courtly commissions drew on classical history, family memory, moral philosophy and the visual language of rulership. A great hall in the Carrara palace was decorated with a cycle of illustrious figures inspired by Petrarch and associated with the artistic environment of Altichiero and Jacopo Avanzi.

This matters because the same artistic ecosystem did not work only on devotional or political images.

Its painters and workshops could also produce:

• animals;
• plants;
• courtly figures;
• medical materials;
• historical scenes;
• diagrams of useful substances.

The visual language of medicine did not exist outside courtly art.

It could be produced by some of the same hands, workshops and methods.

Masson 116’s more delicate and naturalistic imagery has consequently been compared with Paduan courtly manuscript production. That does not prove that Francesco I commissioned or owned it. It establishes a credible artistic environment in which such a book could have been made.

That distinction must remain intact:

Paduan production is strongly supported.
A direct Carrara commission is not established.

The Workshop Between Art and Medicine

A medical author did not need to be the person who drew the plants.

An illuminator did not need to understand every therapeutic property of the substance being painted.

A scribe did not need to have observed the living plant.

The exemplar connected them.

A workshop could copy a plant image because the image belonged at a particular location in an established sequence. It could preserve the visual identity of an entry even if the artist had never seen the plant itself.

This explains why medieval medical illustrations may contain several visual layers at once:

• inherited convention;
• copying error;
• local artistic style;
• direct observation;
• symbolic attribute;
• narrative memory;
• practical identifying detail.

Masson is particularly valuable because it shows these layers separating.

Some images remain close to the inherited model.

Some are adapted.

Some appear more naturalistic.

Several artistic hands seem to have participated.

The manuscript is therefore not one act of observation. It is a production ecology recorded on parchment.

The Wider Family Around Masson

Masson 116 becomes easier to understand when it is placed among neighbouring manuscripts.

Manfredus, Latin 6823

This is one of Masson’s major visual sources.

It combines medical writing with illustrations and belongs to the Tractatus de herbis tradition. Manfredus organised knowledge of simple medicines through both textual authority and visual demonstration.

Morgan M.873

The Morgan Library’s Compendium Salernitanum, M.873, was produced in northern Italy, possibly Venice, around 1350–1375. It contains hundreds of coloured representations of medicinal plants and other therapeutic materials. Its pages include not only plants but mining, collection, vessels, animals and substances being obtained from the environment.

Morgan M.873 demonstrates that a northern Italian medical image collection could operate as a broad inventory of natural and processed materials.

Vatican Chigi F.VII.158

This illustrated herbal, dated broadly to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, preserves another image-led branch of the same medical tradition. The Vatican catalogue identifies it as an illustrated herbal containing a Tractatus de herbis.

Sloane 4016

Around the middle of the fifteenth century, another northern Italian manuscript reproduced much of Masson’s visual material.

The British Library classifies Sloane 4016 as a copy of Masson 116. Its pages contain coloured plants, animals and people, now reorganised into full-page compositions and accompanied by captions.

This later copy is crucial.

It proves that Masson, or a very close intermediary, remained useful even in its unusual state.

The copied images were not treated as meaningless decoration.

They were extracted, resized, regrouped and installed inside another book.

That gives Masson an afterlife:

The unfinished book became a finished source.

Images Could Travel Separately from Explanations

The relationship between Masson and its descendants reveals something fundamental about medieval knowledge transmission.

A manuscript was not necessarily copied as an indivisible whole.

Later producers could separate its components:

image
caption
entry order
synonym list
medical description
decorative scene
page layout

They might preserve one component, omit another and redesign the rest.

A plant could retain its recognisable posture while moving to a different folio.

Several images could be compressed onto one page.

A label could be shortened.

A courtly figure could be modernised to match contemporary clothing.

A medicinal entry could become more decorative.

A practical picture could acquire prestige.

The manuscript family therefore behaved less like a chain of exact facsimiles and more like a modular transmission system.

Masson was one important node within that system.

From University to Apothecary

A learned pharmacological tradition did not become medicine merely because it existed in a university book.

It had to cross into the material world.

Someone needed to:

• recognise the substance;
• obtain it;
• judge its quality;
• distinguish it from substitutes;
• store it correctly;
• prepare it;
• combine it with other materials;
• determine its amount;
• administer it;
• observe the result.

Apothecaries occupied a critical position in this chain.

They dealt not only in words and images, but in actual roots, powders, resins, syrups, minerals, oils and animal products. Merchants and apothecaries also helped move medical knowledge beyond universities, translating and adapting learned material for commercial and household use. Late-medieval recipes, merchant records and vernacular compilations show medicine circulating between scholarly, commercial and domestic environments.

This does not establish that Masson 116 was kept on an apothecary’s counter.

There is no secure evidence for that claim.

But it explains the larger problem to which a medical picture collection could respond:

How can the substance named by an authority be matched to the substance available in the world?

The image participates in that problem even when it does not complete the solution.

Recognition Is Not Yet Treatment

Masson’s surviving content appears strongest at the level of identity:

This is the named object.
This is approximately what it looks like.
This object belongs near these other objects.

But medicine requires additional layers:

[
\text{Executable Remedy}

\text{Identity}
+
\text{Selection}
+
\text{Preparation}
+
\text{Combination}
+
\text{Quantity}
+
\text{Application}
+
\text{Feedback}
]

Masson preserves parts of the first layer.

Its missing prose would probably have supplied at least some of the others, depending on the intended source text and final design.

That distinction prevents us from exaggerating the manuscript’s function.

It may have supported recognition.

It may have served as an artistic exemplar.

It may have been intended as a complete medical compendium.

It may later have functioned as an image archive.

It may have carried prestige as a luxury natural-history book.

Different users may have used the same object differently.

What cannot presently be demonstrated is that the surviving volume alone constituted a complete treatment manual.

The Carrara Herbal Appears Later

Approximately a generation after Masson’s likely production, another major medical manuscript emerged from Padua: the work now called the Carrara Herbal, British Library Egerton 2020.

It was commissioned during the rule of Francesco II “il Novello” da Carrara, who governed Padua from 1390 until 1405. Unlike Masson, the Carrara Herbal contains substantial writing. It presents an illustrated vernacular version of pharmacological material associated with Serapion the Younger, whose work had circulated in Latin in Italian medical schools by the late thirteenth century.

The manuscript united several systems:

Arabic pharmacology
Latin medical transmission
Paduan vernacular language
University knowledge
Courtly patronage
Professional illumination
Carrara political identity

It demonstrates that medical books in late-fourteenth-century Padua could operate simultaneously as therapeutic knowledge, scholarly transmission, artistic production and political representation.

Masson and the Carrara Herbal are not the same kind of object.

They should not be collapsed into one category.

But together they establish the width of Padua’s medical manuscript environment:

Masson:
an unfinished or repurposed visual corpus with minimal text
Carrara Herbal:
a courtly, vernacular and extensively textual pharmacological book

The space between them is historically important.

One preserves an image system awaiting explanation.

The other joins illustration to an elaborate medical and political text.

A City Where Knowledge Had Several Forms

By the end of the fourteenth century, the same medicinal substance could exist simultaneously as:

• a plant growing outside the city;
• a dried material in an apothecary shop;
• an imported commodity;
• a Latin word in a university text;
• a vernacular word in a household book;
• a painted figure in a manuscript;
• an ingredient in a compound remedy;
• an entry in a courtly library;
• a remembered instruction passed between practitioners.

These were not duplicates.

Each was a different representation of the same object.

The difficulty was keeping the representations connected.

A name without the substance could be misunderstood.

An image without the name could be ambiguous.

A substance without preparation knowledge could be useless or harmful.

A recipe without quality control could fail.

A book without a trained reader could become ornamental.

Masson 116 preserves one part of this representational network with unusual clarity.

It is a visual index whose larger execution environment is only partially present.

The Political Rupture

The world surrounding these manuscripts was not permanent.

In 1405, Padua fell to Venice, ending Carrara rule. Francesco II and his sons were subsequently executed, and the city entered the Venetian mainland state.

A political rupture of this kind could alter:

• court patronage;
• workshop employment;
• institutional ownership;
• access to libraries;
• scholarly appointments;
• family archives;
• commercial routes;
• manuscript custody.

But caution is essential.

We cannot claim that Masson 116 left Padua because of the fall of the Carrara.

Its early custody is not sufficiently secure.

The political rupture matters because it changed the environment in which such objects had been produced and used, not because it supplies an automatic provenance story for every surviving manuscript.

The object and the historical event occupy the same broader landscape.

Their direct edge remains unproven.

The Apparent Void

Once Masson is placed inside its wider world, an unusual shape becomes visible.

We possess:

• medical source texts;
• illustrated source manuscripts;
• a largely textless Paduan image collection;
• parallel northern Italian visual compendia;
• later copies derived from Masson;
• university medicine;
• courtly pharmacology;
• vernacular medical translation;
• merchants and apothecaries moving therapeutic materials;
• evidence that images, labels and texts could travel separately.

What is less visible is the complete middle layer connecting these systems in everyday operation.

Where are the surviving working objects that consistently joined:

visual recognition
→ local name
→ acquired substance
→ preparation sequence
→ compound formula
→ application
→ observed result

Some of this knowledge survives in recipes.

Some survives in pharmacological texts.

Some survives in images.

Some survives in commercial records.

Some must have existed in practice, conversation, apprenticeship and memory.

But the complete operational bridge is rarely preserved in one place.

This creates an apparent void.

The void should not immediately be filled with a preferred answer.

It must first be measured.

Masson as a Surviving Interface

Masson 116 may be understood as an interface between several worlds:

Its most important property may not be that it lacks text.

It is that the remaining images continued to function after the expected text failed to arrive.

The manuscript demonstrates a form of partial survivability:

[
\text{Incomplete original object}
\rightarrow
\text{usable visual archive}
\rightarrow
\text{source for later complete objects}
]

A failed production process did not produce a worthless remnant.

It produced a different kind of machine.

What Masson 116 Establishes

The evidence currently supports several conclusions.

1. A substantial medical image corpus circulated in late-fourteenth-century northern Italy

Masson belongs to a recognised family of illustrated medicinal manuscripts rather than being an isolated curiosity.

2. Padua could support the convergence required to produce it

The city contained a university, a powerful court, manuscript workshops, artists and channels through which Mediterranean medical knowledge entered learned and vernacular culture.

3. Images could be transmitted independently of their original explanatory texts

Masson reused earlier iconography and subsequently supplied material to later illustrated manuscripts, especially Sloane 4016.

4. An unfinished manuscript could become a durable visual repository

Whatever its original production failure, Masson remained sufficiently valuable to be preserved and copied.

5. Medical knowledge occupied more than one institution

It crossed the university, court, workshop, marketplace, pharmacy and household rather than remaining inside a single professional enclosure.

What Masson 116 Does Not Establish

The manuscript does not presently prove:

• who commissioned it;
• who its first owner was;
• whether it belonged to the Carrara library;
• why its main text was never supplied;
• whether it was used by a physician;
• whether it was used in an apothecary shop;
• whether its images were intended principally for recognition, teaching, copying or display;
• how it travelled from northern Italy into the collection in which Jean Masson acquired it;
• whether another operational document was once attached to it.

These are open coordinates.

They should remain open until evidence closes them.

A Book-Shaped Absence

Masson 116 is often described through what it lacks.

No continuous explanatory text.

No secure commissioner.

No clear first owner.

No surviving account of use.

No complete early custody trail.

But the book is not empty.

Its surviving structure tells us that late-medieval medical knowledge could be separated into modules:

name
image
description
property
preparation
application
authority

Those modules could travel together.

They could also break apart.

Masson preserves the moment after such a separation.

The pictures survived.

The labels survived.

The page architecture survived.

The intended explanation became an absence.

Later manuscript makers encountered that absence and did not necessarily regard the book as broken. They copied from it, rearranged it and gave its visual knowledge another life.

Masson 116 therefore reveals something larger than an unfinished herbal:

Information does not have to survive in its original complete form to remain productive.

But once the components separate, later readers must reconstruct the relationships that earlier users may have taken for granted.

The World Around the Missing Centre

We can now see the surrounding structure.

To the south lies an earlier written and illustrated pharmacological tradition.

In northern Italy, visual collections expand and move.

In Padua, university medicine, courtly humanism and sophisticated manuscript art converge.

Merchants and apothecaries connect named substances to material supply.

A later Carrara commission joins Mediterranean pharmacology to Paduan language and princely identity.

Subsequent manuscripts copy and reorganise the images.

Then the political environment changes.

The network is visible.

The individual nodes are visible.

Several transmission routes are visible.

But the complete operational bridge between them remains only partly preserved.

That is the correct place to stop.

The gap is no longer an undefined mystery.

It has acquired boundaries.

It has neighbouring objects.

It has a date range.

It has a geography.

It has necessary components.

It has exclusions.

Masson 116 does not fill that space.

It helps us see its shape.

And before anything can be placed into an historical void, the void itself must first be made real.

[edukate_atlas_case_evidence case=”masson-116″]

Internal Links

• https://edukatesg.com/portfolio/the-carrara-herbal-when-the-medical-world-learned-to-speak-paduan/
• https://edukatesg.com/portfolio/manfredus-de-monte-imperiale-the-medical-book-that-still-contains-its-operating-system/
• https://edukatesg.com/portfolio/history-of-padua-from-patavium-to-city-of-science/