All posts by hillarynunn

Rhetoric and Recipes in the Composition Classroom

By Hillary Nunn

A composition class might seem an unlikely forum for discussing early modern recipes, and I have to admit I was wary to pencil them in. The class’s focus on the rhetoric of disease, however, made it hard for me to resist a quick foray into seventeenth-century ideas of health care – and in the end, I’m glad we took up the subject. My class’s brief consideration of early recipes for heart ailments helped students see the many ways metaphors influence perceptions of bodily health. By the end of our 50-minute class session, students could see that the terms associated with health conditions, both now and in earlier centuries, have an easily overlooked rhetorical power.

Before class, I asked students to read Natasha M. Wiggins’s editorial “Stop Using Military Metaphors for Disease” from the British Medical Journal. Wiggins argues that medical professionals rely too heavily on comparisons between disease and combat, ultimately leaving dying patients to look like “losers” who could not triumph in battle. My students were eager to debate this idea, some arguing that military language empowered patients while others countered that it could make weakened people feel even more hopeless and victimized. Students could see that such metaphors relied on images of conflict, and that the words strengthened the idea of competition between people and their own bodies.

From there, I asked students to consider the term “heart attack.” Is someone’s heart being attacked, I asked, or is it doing the attacking? As they debated, I handed out the Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition of the term, pointing out that it first appeared in 1836.[1]  It’s not like people didn’t have what we call heart attacks before then, I stressed. They just called them something else, described them in a different way. But how?

That’s where the recipes came in. We looked at two different seventeenth century recipes for dealing with heart ailments, both from Wellcome manuscripts. Not surprisingly, when students first read the recipe transcriptions, they joked about how little hope there was for the patients. I told them it wasn’t likely that either recipe treated what we would call a heart attack, but that their titles could show different attitudes attached to heart ailments.

The first recipe, “A fomentation to comfort the Heart,” lists herbal ingredients that promise to help the sufferer “find ease.”[2] The students immediately picked up on the emphasis on resting, some seeing that as a contrast to the idea of “fighting” while others argued that calmness actually worked toward the idea of accumulating strength for the battle.

But it was the unexpected turns that came with the second recipe — “For the passion of the heart” — that made me see the strength of the exercise.[3]

Heart2
Wellcome Library MS 8097, p. 63

I asked them what they thought of the term passion. First came associations with love; others saw hints of stress. Soon, students linked both states to symptoms like elevated heartbeat, sweating, and even paralysis. They talked about emotion’s ability to affect physical health, a few even laughing in recognition when I brought up the 1970s TV character Fred Sanford’s tendency to fake heart trauma in tense situations.

So, I asked, what do these recipes say about the way that early modern people thought about their hearts? What does it mean to suffer passion of the heart rather than a heart attack?

And that’s where the unexpected happened. One student observed that passion treated the ailment more like something internal, more natural than an attack that could be fended off. Then, another commented that this went along with the idea of “ease” from the first recipe – that you had to live with your disease, not just fight it. “Like hospice,” I said before I knew it. I hadn’t planned that as part of the conversation, but there it was.

“What’s the language of hospice like?” I asked, only to find two students willing to talk about recent experience with the process. They both stated that hospice tried to make death “peaceful,” which students immediately contrasted with the warrior ideas Wiggins condemned, and which many of them had earlier defended. Hospice emphasizes when to stop fighting, a student remarked. But it doesn’t call anyone a quitter, another said, and another noted that it’s about making people comfortable.

In the remaining minute of class, I pressed the students to see how we’d returned to the idea of “ease” that came up in the first recipe. Maybe, I suggested, our culture is still working to find the right way to talk about these health issues, and I asked them to think about what later centuries might think of our metaphors.

While I wouldn’t say this exercise helped students gain any greater respect for the recipes I study, the discussion left students more aware of how words shape our perceptions, and level judgment, about illness even when we think we’re using objective medical terms. Just as importantly, the activity helped them to see that science has a history, and that the words we use suggest something fundamental about the way we think about our own health.

[1] “Heart Attack,” The Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com.
[2] Wellcome Library MS 7818, p. 4.
[3] Wellcome Library MS 8097, p. 63.

Exploring CPP 10a214: Elizabeth Downing’s Busy Month of May

By Hillary Nunn with Rebecca Laroche

Elizabeth Downing was busy in the month of May. Several of her recipes in the opening section of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia manuscript 10a214 specify that they should be made only during that month, and other recipes in the collection call for “May butter” – unsalted butter made in spring – as a key ingredient. The array of herbal ingredients used in these recipes make it easy to picture them being concocted in a rural location, one with ready access to fields blooming with new Spring growth.

In the manuscript as a whole, only April, May, and June are explicitly designated as months when certain recipes should be prepared, presumably because that is when plant-based ingredients would be freshest. May is by far the busiest, with five recipes specifically designated for preparation that month. The recipe for an ointment for “aches, anguishe or swelling of wounds,” attributed to Hellen Jones and endorsed at its end by Elizabeth Downing, requires that it be “made in may and no time else.”

The Historical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Manuscript 10a214, fol. 10
The Historical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Manuscript 10a214, fol. 221.

April and June, moreover, are only named once each, and their mention seems designed to even out the workflow during May’s busier days. Downing, for example, offers her probatum to an “excellent Oyntment for the spleene,” which calls for fresh millelot that “groweth a mongst corne, and is to be gotten the latter end of May or Iune.” A cure for an old sore in the manuscript’s second part, meanwhile, suggests making the herb water on which it is based “in the moneth of Aprill or May, for it cannot be made all the year after.”

This recipe for an old sore, however, is the only one in the manuscript’s second section that explicitly associates a recipe with a production date. While the section includes recipes that demand may butter, it conjures few images of the practitioner gathering ingredients, yet alone collecting them from surrounding countryside. Reading the manuscript’s first section, however, we not only can imagine a housewife picking millelot from amongst the corn; we can also picture her in the fields before dawn assembling ingredients to treat a “blasting by lightning or otherwise”:

Take a faire linnen cloth, and in the
month of may in a morning before sunrise
wipe of the dew of the green wheat with
the cloth & wring it out into a basen
and keep it in a glass close stopped …

The first section’s recipes assume that the recipe maker will be near a wheat field, as well as fresh millelot. As Rebecca Laroche pointed out to me earlier, the ointment for “aches, anguishe or swelling of wounds” demands that it maker collect its ingredients – “the youngest bay leaues & wormwood of each halfe a pound” – during “the heate of the day,” suggesting the plants are readily available, growing nearby.

The manuscript’s second section, however, rarely offers such glimpses of the recipe maker outside the house, collecting her raw materials. This only compounds the mystery that Rebecca outlined in her last entry about the manuscript’s area of circulation. Does the collection, she asked, reflect a Middlesex or Essex location? Whether the first and second sections’ different images of the recipe makers at work hint at changes in the owner’s residence or social network remains unclear, but it is yet another aspect to consider in our attempts to place the manuscript.

This is the thirteenth post in a series on this topic.

Exploring CPP 10a214: A Map of the Neighborhood

By Hillary Nunn with Rebecca Laroche

Since last March, Rebecca Laroche and I have been using this forum to test out our various theories about one mid-seventeenth-century manuscript held at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia owned by Anne Layfield and dated 1640. Last month, Rebecca continued to explore religious and social networks that could have connected Anne’s presumed husband Edmund Layfield to the Wilmer family – connections that my posting on 8/10/2013 began to trace.

Church affiliations – specifically to Stratford-le-Bow and St. Leonard-of-Bromley – underlie many of our assertions about social networks. I posited that the “Mrs. Wilmer” mentioned in the CPP manuscript could be connected to George Wilmer of Stratford-le-Bowe, whose will, dated 1626, includes an E. “Layfield” of St. Leonard-of-Bromley as witness. Rebecca’s research revealed that one of Layfield’s published sermons is dedicated to a widow Wilmer of Bowe.

In the CPP manuscript, a number of recipes crystalize around the location Stratford-le-Bowe. Of the five recipes filling pages 61 and 62, three feature attributions to women associated with Bowe. Mistress Egglesfield of Bowe contributes a cure “For a weake backe or consumption,” while Mistress Wilmer of Bowe’s name appears after recipes formulated “To cause to avoyde grauell” and “To driue away small pocks or measles.” Interestingly, only a recipe featuring a probatum per “Eliza: Downing” separates the two recipes identified with Mistress Wilmer’s name.

This cluster within the manuscript raises tempting questions about the compiler’s relationship with the environs of Bowe. As the map indicates, Stratford le Bowe directly borders on Bromley, suggesting that the recipe manuscript mirrors the relationship between the Layfields at St. Leonard-of-Bromley and the Wilmers of Bowe indicated by George Wilmer’s will.

1805 Ordnance Survey First Series

While this map – a section of the 1805 Ordnance Survey, First Series – post-dates the CPP manuscript by more than a century, it provides a clear sense of a neighborhood that influences the recipe book’s compiler. We know, for example, that a Mrs. Twayne of Hackney, a town just to the northwest, provided a cough syrup recipe recorded on page 54. The proximity of the two towns also reinforces the likelihood of a connection between Calybute Downing’s family in Hackney and the Layfields in Bromley.

But why the clustering of the Stratford-le-Bowe recipes? Tempting as it is to see this concentration of recipes from the same place as evidence of a travel pattern – whether it be a visit or an outright relocation – such conclusions remain speculative. Yet the possibility remains that further research, whether in church documents or other domestic texts, might yield more concrete notations of date and location that run parallel to this cluster, allowing us to come to forge more solid conclusions of the communication patterns reflected in the CPP manuscript.

This continues an ongoing blog conversation about the College of Physicians of Philadelphia Manuscript 10a214.