The Friar Portrait in Bodleian Library MS. Douce 104: Contemporary Satire?

The illustration in Bodley MS. Douce 104 of Sir Pentrans-domos (C.22), unusual in its representation of a friar in a medical role, i.e., holding a urine flask (jordan), recalls the Dominican of C.15.39-184, the lines often regarded as an allusion to the contentious defender of mendicant prerogatives, friar William Jordan. WL; and perhaps the Douce illustrator may also have had in mind another Dominican, the friar-physician Henry Daniel, who translated into Middle English Constantinus Africanus’s version of Isaac Judaeus’s De urinis, as well as produced a tract on the herb rosemary (cf. C.22.336).