Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. Analysing recipe collections in over seventy late medieval manuscripts, this book explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to those texts' healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose. The study therefore presents a challenge to recipes' traditional reputation as mundane, unartful texts written and read solely for the sake of directing practical action. Crucially, it also relocates these neglected texts and overlooked manuscripts within the complex networks forming medieval textual culture, demonstrating that--though marginalized in modern scholarship--medical recipes were actually linguistically, formally, materially, and imaginatively interconnected with many other late medieval discourses, including devotional writings, romances, fabliaux, and Chaucerian poetry. The monograph thus models for readers modes of analysis and close reading that might be deployed in relation to recipes in order to understand better their allusive, fragmentary, and playful qualities as well as their wide-ranging influence on medieval imaginations.

Hannah Bower is a Junior Research Fellow in English at Churchill College, Cambridge and she specializes in medieval literature. Her research focuses on the boundaries, overlaps, and exchanges between literary writings and other, apparently practical or scientific texts. Her PhD, funded by the Wellcome Trust and completed at the University of Oxford, explored the linguistic and imaginative connections between medieval medical recipes and more canonical literary writings. She also completed a six-month secondment fellowship at the London Science Museum which explored the editorial history and reader reception of eighteenth-century medical pamphlets. Her current research investigates the representation of human-made marvels in all kinds of medieval and early modern writings.

- Introduction - Literary Fragments - 1.: The Poetics of Prose Cures - 2.: Making Verse Remedies - Collecting Fragments - 3.: The Idea of the Remedy Collection - Fragments in Play - 4.: Recipe Time: (Re)Imagining Bodies - 5.: Experiencing Boundaries - Conclusion