Malachy the Irishman: On Poison: A Study and an Edition. Ed. Ralph Hanna (Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020.

• Rüdiger Spahl

Hanna’s book is the first edition of De veneno since 1518, and his excellent translation on facing pages makes the text easily accessible beyond a scholarly audience. De veneno was probably composed in the late 1270s or 1280s and served two purposes. First, it is a collection of similitudines for preachers who tried to guide their audience to leading a God-pleasing life. It provided the preachers with “[…] analogies between specific sins, spiritual poisons, and specific poisonous beasts, physical poisons, […]” and their corresponding antidotes. At the end of each example an auctoritas, i.e., a text of authority, is quoted. Second, De veneno also served as an ars praedicandi, an instruction on how to preach. Hanna sees this in Malachy’s use of parts of Gregory the Great’s treatise on the sins and their parts (Moralia 31), which he regards as hints to the reader to look up the complete text in the original and to thus educate himself on using citations from authorities and on properly structuring any argument he would like to make. Another feature that seems to point in the direction of an ars praedicandi is the fact that Malachy does not talk about sins in general but about those of a specific audience.