In Nostro Vulgare Dicuntur Lo Tac. The Complexity of Naming Diseases In Latin and French Texts

The article examines the different meanings assumed over time, and in different sources, by the French expression lo tat (or lo tac), which seems to make its first appearance around the twelfth century. Also used to indicate a livestock’s disease, the term emerges in healing miracle tales written in Latin in southern France at the end of the fourteenth century, meaning a mortal symptom detectable on the body of individuals suffering from a ‘pestilential disease’. The unique medical texts describing the term is Raymond Chalin’s Liber de peste, written in Latin at the end of the fourteenth century and still unpublished. This treatise is always quoted by means of Jacques Daléchamps’s 1552 printed edition even if, in comparison with the manuscripts which convey the text, this edition differs from the original, especially regarding the lexicon of disease, and lo tat is not included. Later, in the fifteenth century, the term appeared in accounts written in northern France, expressing a totally different disease without links to the plague. This case study assumes a heuristic value to demonstrate how the past terms of the pathology did not have an unambiguous meaning and therefore, to be understood, must be historicized and evaluated according to sources and context.