This was an invited blogpost for the now-defunct blog on History of Medicine, REMEDIA. Published in 2015, the blogpost documents the revival and then transformation of written traditions in European surgical writing, at a time when a substantial corpus of new medical works were being absorbed from the Islamic world. The general barrenness of the surgical landscape in early medieval Europe disappeared quite suddenly between the later 11th and the later 12th century when four new Latin surgical texts came into being. One arose out of a continuous written tradition that stretched back to the ancient Greek world, another out of empiricism that captured local Italian practices. The third and fourth show fusions of the learned and the empirical, creating a new, uniquely European tradition of medical writing. The essay is illustrated with five images from medical manuscripts from the period. (Note that the author’s email contact has changed: it is now monica.h.green@gmail.com.)