Alienation by Expertise

Abstract

Chief among the corpus of extant functional pharmacopeias—lists of drugs of existing collections—are apothecary inventories. These documents provide historians with valuable snapshots of living and regularly utilized collections of medicaments, instruments, and the paraphernalia necessary to run an apothecary shop. This article shows the deep, medieval roots of this tradition, and what it reveals about the highly regarded technical expertise of apothecaries. Apothecaries in medieval Provence composed such inventories themselves, seemingly without the intervention or supervision of a notary, customs officer, or any other public official. Notaries did not copy these inventories into their registers, as was typical for other lists of goods found in post-mortem inventories, guardianship inventories, and dowry contracts. Instead, notaries stitched apothecary inventories into the binding of their registers, without even attempting to copy them. This article argues that by the late fifteenth century, apothecaries had developed such highly specialized technical knowledge that the information contained within their inventories became unintelligible to others, including well-educated public officials. Only apothecaries possessed the arcane knowledge necessary to comprehend the contents of their craft. This observation sheds new light on apothecaries, their stocks, and the ability of the law to govern them.