Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500

Bibliographic Data

ID5773580
AuthorsHannah Bower (Junior Research Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year2022
Publication date2022-03-24
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueMiddle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University PressOxford (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780192849496.001.0001
OpenAlexW4220935450
Open LibraryOL35865532M
ISBN9780192849496
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited15

This volume 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

Middle English · Historical Studies of British Isles · Medieval Literature and History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity