Additions and Interpolations in the Low German Version of Hans von Gersdorff's Feldtbuch der Wundarzney

As my previous investigation of the language of Copenhagen GKS 1663 4to has shown, the manuscript constitutes the only witness of the diffusion of Hans von Gersdorff's field surgery manual in the Low German language area. A fragment of a Low German translation of the Feldtbuch der Wundarzney (Dat velt bock) can be found on fol. 15r-86v of the manuscript, where a series of thematic chapters from the High German manual are transmitted. A systematic comparison of the Low German text with its High German source - most likely the first, 1517 Strasburg edition - has shown that the Low German translator's way of dealing with the text is far from being linear. If, on the one hand, the above-mentioned thematic chapters are ordered randomly and only operative indications and recipes for the preparations of single medicaments are faithfully reproduced, whereas introductory considerations and discursive passages are usually left out or taken for granted, on the other, a series of recipes in the manuscript do not find any correspondence in the High German handbook. This is particularly evident towards the end of the fragment (from fol. 63v onwards), where a series of medical, surgical, but also simply hygienic sanitary indications not belonging to von Gersdorff's work have been written down. In this study I will, therefore, take into considerations these heterogeneous additions to the High German text trying to establish both their origin and the possible reason for their insertion in this epitome of von Gersdorff's surgical manual.