‘Star of the Eye’ in English Historical Dictionaries

The Middle English Dictionary (MED) lists as separate entries the homonymic nouns sterne n.(1) ‘star’ and stern(e) n.(2) ‘stern of a ship’. Besides their most common applications, both words have developed some extended meanings. Under the entry for stern(e) n.(2), sense group 2, it is stated that the combinations stern(e) of the eie and eie stern(e) denote the cornea, the plural form sternes of the eie signifying the pupils of the eyes. The quotations illustrating the anatomical uses come from a single source, a fifteenth-century translation of the French surgeon Guy de Chauliac’s Inventarium seu collectorium in parte cyrurgali medicine.1 The English text was edited by Margaret Ogden.2 In its lexical analysis, Michael McVaugh’s edition of the original Latin work often provides indispensable information for understanding the words and phrases used by the translator.3 In the light of the available evidence, stern(e) of the eie and eie stern(e) were rare terms in Middle English medical writing. Ogden’s edition is the only text where they have been recorded. There are no occurrences in the Middle English versions of Benvenutus Grassus’s De Probatissima Arte Oculorum, which use the loanwords cornea and pupilla instead, also mentioning that the latter has the English equivalent apple of the eye.4 A corpus of circa 11,500 manuscript and book pages, gathered from seventy-two medical treatises written in English or translated into English during the period 1375–1550, did not reveal any additional occurrences, either.5 The passages below, from Ogden’s edition, thus contain the four attestations of stern(e) of the eie or eie stern(e) that are known at the present moment. The corresponding Latin term in McVaugh’s edition is given within square brackets.