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This volume is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. It explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to late medieval manuscripts' healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose.
List of contents
- 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
About the author
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.
Summary
This volume is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. It explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to late medieval manuscripts' healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose.
Additional text
Bowers urges us to look beyond medical recipes' practical, conventional nature, insisting that we be open to their purposeful aesthetics, imaginary value, and, most importantly, their emotional and physical effects on people's minds and bodies...her work could influence the way we reread historical recipes for wounds, apostemes, broken bones, worms, aches, and fevers
