Category Archives: Manuscripts

Around the Table Podcast: Teaching Manuscripts with Sara Charles

By Sarah Peters Kernan

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Sarah Kernan speaks with Sara Charles, a medieval book historian at the University of London. Sara recently published The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion Books, 2024). She incorporates “historical remaking” into her research practices and she shares her knowledge with broader audiences through workshops, social media, and her website, teachingmanuscripts.com. Follow Sara on Bluesky and Instagram for updates.

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

Patricia Lovett, professional calligrapher

Christopher de Hamel, medieval manuscript expert

Oak gall ink

Theophilus, On divers arts

Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook

L. Cornelissen & Son

Sara Making Parchment

www.teachingmanuscripts.com

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

I am thrilled to speak with Sara Charles today. Sara is a medieval book historian at the University of London. In addition to serving as the editor of the academic journal, Historical Research, at the Institute of Historical Research, and journals manager for the University of London Press, she also recently completed her PhD at the Institute of English Studies, researching medieval martyrologies. Sara incorporates historical remaking into her research practices, and she generously shares her knowledge with broader audiences through workshops, social media, and her website, teachingmanuscripts.com. Last year, Sara published to wonderful reviews The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages with Reaktion Books. I am excited to speak to Sara today about her many experiences recreating inks and materials for making medieval manuscripts. Sara, thank you so much for joining me today.

Sara Charles 01:59

Thank you for having me. It’s pleasure to be here.

Sarah Kernan 02:01

Could we start by speaking about your interests in medieval manuscripts and how you go about examining and researching your interests? You really seem to have such skill for combining traditional research in special collections and archives with historical remaking. And I would love to hear more from you about these two methodologies.

Sara Charles 02:26

Thank you. That’s very kind of you to say. I think I have a background in working in museums and art galleries, as well as libraries. So, I think that kind of experience of public environments and communicating with a general audience has helped me a lot. Also, I trained as a librarian, which I think I really learned the importance of doing good research through that, understanding how knowledge is organized, the importance of cataloguing, and knowing how to use catalogues for research.

And I think that kind of all combined together with my research in book history. I also still work at the British Library on Saturdays in the manuscripts reading room, so I still have that kind of like, hands-on experience that every week of dealing with requests and talking about manuscripts and just being in that kind of the same physical space as them, which I do love. And I think for me, when I sort of first started coming into book history, there’s a, some of it is kind of, there’s a bit of an old fashioned air to it. And I thought, sometimes I felt quite intimidated by it. And I thought, if I do, then other people do. And I don’t want other people to, because it’s such a joyous world to experience. And so I guess I just wanted to share my enthusiasm and just to tell people, you know, it’s not scary. It’s for you. It’s for everyone. You know, it’s not just for academics.

Sarah Kernan 03:53

How did you become interested in the making side of things, making the inks and the other products, like the quills, for making medieval manuscripts? And where do you find the recipes and the instructions and actually source all the materials you use?

Sara Charles 04:10

I’ll try and work through all of those. So I first became interested in manuscripts when I was doing the library course, the Library and Information Studies Masters, and there were modules on manuscripts, and also rare books. But I just found manuscripts just so much more interesting because they were so, you know, everything was handmade. And there’s just something about that that is just so interesting and amazing.

And I think a large part of it was that I was really scared of touching manuscripts. When I went into a reading room, I was so scared because like the parchment wasn’t familiar to me. I didn’t know how to handle them. And I wanted to understand those materials to really get to grips with them, so that I so that I would be able to go into a reading room and feel confident handling a manuscript.

And so that was part of it. I wanted to kind of really deconstruct how they were made just so I could understand them. Patricia Lovett, who’s a really amazing calligrapher and illuminator, she does courses. So, I went to one of her illumination classes.

And that again, then opened up a whole new world of possibilities of like, wow, we can we can actually do this now. And that kind of like set me on my journey. And then I just started researching, you know, other people’s blog posts, books by Christopher de Hamel, and things like that. I started small. The first thing I did after the illumination class was I thought about making my own inks using oak galls, which are found on oak trees, the small round growths that found on oak trees. And I just happened to go to a small woodland that’s behind my house. And literally the first tree I looked at had them. And I was so thrilled.

And I’m not sure, perhaps if it hadn’t have been such a serendipitous moment, I don’t know if I’d have been so enthusiastic. But it was so exciting. It was this whole new world that was opening up to me. And so then I came home and I made the ink and it works. And it was just like, wow.

Sara Charles 06:13

And that encouraged me to want to do more and more. Now, I tend to go to the primary sources first to look for recipes and things. So, there’s things like Theophilus’ On divers arts. He was a twelfth-century German monk who wrote down a load of recipes. And he was a practitioner as well. So, you know that he’s writing these things down from his own experience.

Also, Cennino Cennini, in his Craftsman’s Handbook, that’s from the fifteenth century. And he was an Italian craftsperson. Again, he’s writing down what he knows, which just gives that air of authenticity, which is really great. So, I tend to start with the primary sources now, if I want to do something, and then kind of work from there now that I have that experience of, you know, maybe filling in the gaps between what is missing or converting what they’re saying when they’re using strange terminology and things like that.

And where do I source my ingredients and materials? I can make it myself, I do. And there’s things like for plant pigments. So, for woad, which is an indigo, dark blue. Madder, which is a reddish color. Also weld, which is a yellow color. You can grow those quite easily, certainly where I am here in in London. Grow those quite easily in the garden and harvest those. It sometimes takes a few years, but if I can do that, I will. Things like the black ink, so the iron gall, as I say, was luckily easy to source those. Carbon black as well, that’s a very easy one because you’re just collecting soot from an open flame. Also verdigris, the kind of them the green turquoise pigment, that’s a very easy one to do at home as well. You just need some copper strips and some vinegar. So things like that. If I can do it myself, I will.

But there’s also very dangerous pigments like orpiment, which is arsenic-based, or vermillion which is mercury sulfide, so I’m happy to use specialist art shops like Cornelissen for things like that. And then I’ve also prepared parchment and made hand-tooled leather and things like that, and paintbrushes and fox tooth burnishers, so yeah, if it’s possible I will do it myself, but I’m happy to, you know, if it’s dangerous, I’m happy to let the experts do that for me.

Sarah Kernan 08:37

Absolutely. I would too. You’ve had an experience with recreating and remaking a lot of these different materials. How does this making process help you understand better the training and the labor and the output of medieval scribes or any other craftspeople that were involved in the making process? Have you gained any surprising or unexpected insights because of your own experiences?

Sara Charles 09:09

Yeah, I mean, the thing that always stands out to me is just the amount of work you have to do before you even start putting anything on the manuscript. You know, you have to plan everything out in advance, what you need to buy. But also, you need to make sure things like trade networks are in place. So, you would need to import lapis lazuli from Afghanistan.

You’re also relying on the weather and the environment. Like I say, a lot of the pigments are plant-based, so you need a good crop. You’d need such a vast array of sources from many different places. They come from the ground, from the workshop, manufactured in a workshop, or from the merchants importing stuff. So, you’d need to be able to access all these. You’d have to work out how much parchment was needed before you started.

Then you’d have to think about how much decoration to include, what pigments you were going to use, how much gold. It just would have been such an immense task. So, you’d need to access the resources. You’d need to know if you could afford the resources.

And also if you had the skilled artists and scribes to carry those out. So, I think the thing that always really stands out to me is just how much work would have needed to be done before you even started writing anything on the parchment. You would have needed such a lot of planning for the process and it blows my mind.

Sarah Kernan 10:25

Can you talk a little bit more about your work with remaking and specifically how it has impacted or informed your research? And I’m thinking here, if you could at least touch upon this, your recent book, The Medieval Scriptorium, every chapter begins with this wonderful narrative of a medieval scribe in a different place and time. And to me, it feels like those narratives are so richly informed by your experiences and talking not only about the weather and the room and the space that they worked in and the amount of light, but also the process of writing or what they were doing with their hands or their bodies at that time. And that just seems so informed by personal experience. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that?

Sara Charles 11:18

Yeah, yeah. And thank you for picking up on that, because that’s something that I really try to get into my writing. And I think actually the process that I enjoyed and learned from the most was making parchment. It was a really quite sobering experience because I had to go to the abattoir in the morning to collect the skins, and they were still warm.

So that was like really kind of like brings it home. Just what a visceral process it is. And then just going through that process. You soak it in lime to remove the hair. You stretch it on a wooden frame and then and then you scrape it with a lunellum.

It just gave me such a profound connection to the material. And it’s really amazing to be able to understand how the skin fit around the animal and you can still see the spine and the veins. that You can see imperfections where the animal had been bitten by insects. So, you’ve just got all those traces still on the parchment.

And you can feel how the different thicknesses as well. The skin’s much thicker around the sort of the shoulders and the neck area, and it’s much thinner around the tummy area. And you can feel that as you’re working around the parchment. And I found it really funny, and I did actually put this in my book. But when I went to bed that night after working on the skin all day, I could still feel it on my fingertips, I could still feel the texture of it.

And that really stayed with me. And I thought, well, that must have been, you know, how they felt as well. And it’s such a tactile process by necessity. But I think in turn that lends to a greater understanding, not just of what it would have been like to be a parchment maker, but also that relationship between humans and animals, and working with the natural materials to create these things of beauty. And as you say, it’s also interesting to see what parts of the body come under stress while you’re doing these things. Parchment’s very physical, making parchment, because you’re lifting and you’re scraping and you’re doing all of this with your arms. But the thing that I struggled with the most was my fingers not being dexterous enough when you’re tying it to the frame. And I didn’t expect that, you know, that was unexpected.

And then that leads me to wonder whether parchment makers would have suffered from arthritis in their later years, you know having to be so dexterous. Which, of course, is pure speculation, but it’s interesting how these practices can kind of like open your mind to pathways like that.

Sarah Kernan 13:41

Absolutely. That’s a really interesting observation. I’ve certainly thought about when I’ve sat and written things for a long time. I’ve thought, oh, I’m glad I’m not doing this for a living, writing out by hand. You know, I would have arthritis very early, but if you’re using your hands in the same way as a parchment maker… What inspired you to start posting all of these experiences on social media and on your website? Was it mainly for yourself or to inform other scholars? Or were you were you trying to reach out to a broader public, as you had kind of mentioned before?

Sara Charles 14:20

Yeah, I think what it was is, I was just so delighted when these things worked, that I just wanted to share it with people, you know, just want to say, wow, look at this, this is amazing. I was so thrilled when something actually worked. So, and I think as well, I’m doing it at home in my kitchen or whatever. So, it can be a bit lonely sometimes. So, you know, when something works, worked, I just wanted to, to share that. I don’t think I quite expected it to have the traction that it did. I didn’t expect people to be so, kind of, to come along with me as well. But it’s been really fantastic.

I think, maybe my cats, the inclusion of my cats might have had something to do with it, which I had no control over. They just invited themselves into these things. But you know that makes for a much more natural experience. It’s in a domestic setting.

And there would have been cats wandering around medieval workshops. So, you know, I think it just adds to the experience of what it would have been really like rather than something done in in a lab, you know, where everything’s very sterilized and things like that. I think it’s much more fun to do it and in a domestic environment.

Sarah Kernan 15:28

Has your cat made any paw prints, like we have evidence of?

Sara Charles 15:32

Yeah, I have had incidents of that. And also, as well, there was another time when I was copying something and the doorbell rang and the ink was still wet. And as I went to answer the door, one of my cats, she’s a rag doll cat, so she has this huge fluffy tail, and her tail just swept through the wet ink and smeared all over the lines above. So yeah, you have to watch them. It’s all part of the experience, I think. And medieval scribes have documented, yeah, the nuisance that cats and other animals can do to manuscripts.

I would say it’s the general audience that I have, which is, you know, always what I was aiming for. But I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by how many academics have been supportive of what I do, as well. And I think there’s much more of an appetite now to bring these processes into the classroom. Certainly, you know, I did a summer school recently and I do a lot of workshops. And so, I think, yeah, there is definitely at the moment more interest in bringing that type of learning into the classroom. And I think also as well, everything now is kind of so artificial and overproduced and everything is digital. So, it’s just a real human instinct, I think, to want to connect with these natural produced items. Yeah, I think that’s why it appeals to people.

Sarah Kernan 16:55

Do people ever reach out to you with special requests of things to work on or things to post about?

Sara Charles 17:03

Sometimes, yeah. Yeah. And I’ve had a few people that have sort of come across strange recipes or strange recipes for things and they’ve wanted me to recreate them. So yeah, that’s always good fun.

Sarah Kernan 17:13

That is. What advice would you give anyone, particularly these students and teachers and researchers who are interested in incorporating craft and historical making into their research and teaching?

Sara Charles 17:27

I would say start small. Start with something that’s easy that you can do at home. You don’t need specialist equipment, or you don’t need, you know, dangerous equipment or materials for that matter. And do your research. Try to get as close to the original things as possible. When I’m making iron gall ink, I always go and source the gall nuts myself. I know that’s not possible for everyone, but I’ve only ever bought galls off of the internet once. And that’s the only time my ink didn’t work. So, you know, that was a lesson for me. Just do what you can within your means, but try and keep it as sort of authentic as possible.

Enjoy the process. You know, don’t focus on the end result on making like a perfect batch of ink or a perfect pigment, but just enjoy the process. Take time to think about how your senses are engaged, you know. What parts of your body are you using? How does your body adapt to different tasks? It’s amazing how often you will use your mouth as a third hand without even realizing it when you’re doing other things. And I just think that’s so interesting, the way your body just automatically puts itself in the right position for you to be able to do what you need to do.

Also say, don’t worry if it doesn’t work. You know, that it’s all part of the process. Then you can kind of have your own troubleshooting guide and you learn from that. The other thing I would say is document the process. Make notes, take videos, take photos, everything, because it’s amazing how much you forget when you step away from it. But if you’ve got that, photos and videos, I think work best for me. And then that just allows me to go back and look closer at what I was doing. Sometimes quite unconsciously, I was doing these things. And so, you want to look back and think, oh, right. So yeah, that’s how I added it. I added it gradually rather than quickly and things like that.

But yeah, it’s just a tremendous amount of fun. And it really just gives you so much greater insight into how things were made that I think it’s a great thing to do. I would encourage anyone when to do it according to their means and what they could do in their environment.

Sarah Kernan 19:34

Well, I have one final question for you. Are there any upcoming projects or collaborations you’re particularly excited about and want to talk about?

Sara Charles 19:45

So, I’ve just finished my PhD, so I’ll probably get a few things out from that. The Medieval Scriptorium book comes out in paperback in September. So, if anyone wants to get hold of a paperback copy, they can.

I am thinking about my next book, very much thinking about, rather than doing anything about. But what I’m really interested in is certainly after the manuscript making moved away from the monasteries and out into the workshops, the urban workshops. And there’s a street in Oxford called Catte Street.

And that’s where all the illuminators and scribes and bookbinders, they all lived in this one street. And I just think it’s a wonderful microcosm of everything that was going on. And we have surviving records of the people that live there. We have the tenement records. So, I just think it would be wonderful to just explore all those lives and all the people that were living there and how they interacted with each other.

I just think it must have been such a wonderful hub of creativity, especially at that time in the thirteenth century, I’d like to look at. When it was moving away from the monasteries and new ways of doing things was opening up. So, I’d really like to do some research and write a book about Catte Street in Oxford in the thirteenth century. But it’s still early days.

Sarah Kernan 21:08

That would be so interesting to read. I hope that you do work on that. I just kind of wonder what evidence there is of their own interactions or what you can glean.

Sara Charles 21:22

Yeah, they often, you know, they married each other. There’s brothers, sisters, parents, you know, all living in there. You know, they would be witness to documents and things like that. And they’d be like, you know, Thomas the Scribe or Roger the Bookbinder, so you know who they are or by their trade. And it would just be wonderful to kind of weave all those stories together.

Sarah Kernan 21:41

Absolutely. Sara, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Sara Charles 21:47

Thank you. It’s been very enjoyable.

Sarah Kernan 21:49

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

A Digestive for the Voracious Reader:

Digital Humanities Approaches to a Recipe Book Corpus

By Elisa Tersigni


If you’re reading this blog post, you’re probably a voracious reader of recipe books. And, if you’re anything like me, you might even be partial to manuscripts. If so, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s holdings—which include the largest collection of early modern English manuscript recipe books in the world—is truly a feast for the mind. But one could spend years digging into this buffet of books, with its indecipherable early modern hands, challenging orthographies, and pages and pages of intriguing discoveries. How then might one quickly consume such a breadth of material? As one solution, I present to you a metaphor to go with this feast—a digestive, if you will. Digital humanities (DH) tools and methods can help an ambitious reader make sense of a lot of text at once—even when that reader has no programming skills—allowing them to detect patterns or isolate the points of interest.

Lucky for us, the Folger has anticipated the needs of the digital recipe book reader. As part of the three-year, Mellon-funded Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures project (2018–2021) and its legacy, the library has aimed to photograph, transcribe, and encode the entire collection. All its recipe manuscripts (with the exception of the most recent acquisitions) are photographed, and of these, 50 are also fully transcribed and encoded, with more in the queue. The encoding makes the recipe books available for study not only as manuscripts but also as digital objects, in the form of lightly edited PDFs (“reading copies,” made for ease of reading) and plain text files. It is the latter that we’ll use for our DH analysis.

To learn more about the transcribing and encoding processes, see the blog posts “Code Breakers: the Hidden Labour Behind the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Recipe Book Transcriptions” and “Code Makers: the Hidden Labour Behind the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Recipe Book Corpus” on the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective’s (EMROC’s) website.

Using the Recipe Book Corpus

There are many ways one might use or peruse the Folger’s corpus of recipe books, but here I’ll illustrate a couple of the easiest using Voyant, a free, browser-based software with many language and visualisation tools (Figure 1). All one must do is upload the plain text files, and Voyant will immediately present them with an interface displaying the results of the default tools.

Fig 1. Screenshot of Folger Recipe Corpus in Voyant Tools

From these default tools, one can dig deeper. Let’s use the “Contexts” tool (bottom right hand) as an example of what kind of analysis is possible. In the search bar, typing a word, such as “digestive” will search across all the uploaded documents for that spelling, listing all the instances and contexts of that term. If one then selects the term, the “Reader” tool (top middle) will display the document in which that spelling appears. Essentially, using these two tools together permits the reader to search across the entire corpus for key terms and immediately read the recipes in which those terms appear. (N.B.: these tools only search spellings, and not words, and so users should expand their search options by trialling different spellings or using wildcard searches for more comprehensive results.) For instance, searching “digestive” found three instances of that spelling across the entire corpus: two in manuscript E.a.5 and one in V.a.260. This search took seconds whereas reading all 50 books might have taken weeks.

Another neat tool is “Cirrus” (top left hand), which creates word clouds of commonly used spellings: the bigger the word, the more common the spelling. Hovering over a word will give the user the number of times that spelling appears in the corpus. To view a word cloud for a specific document, rather than the entire corpus, one can use the “scale” function (found just below the word cloud) and select the manuscript of interest. By comparing resultant word clouds, the user can gain an immediate sense of the focuses of each document. For instance, compare these word clouds from two different manuscripts in the corpus:

Fig. 2. Folger manuscript E.a.1

Fig. 3. Folger manuscript V.a.401

The word cloud in Figure 2 —featuring words like “god,” “grace,” and “lord,”—suggests that the manuscript is more likely a commonplace book or miscellany than a receipt book, whereas the word cloud in Figure 3 —featuring words like “butter,” “sugar,” and “salt”—suggests the manuscript is likely a cookery book. Reading word clouds is one way a reader can quickly identify documents that might be of greater interest.

 While Voyant is a surprisingly effective tool, it’s important to note its limitations and the quirks of uploading a corpus to a tool not strictly designed for it. For instance, if using Voyant’s default settings, the most frequent spellings that will appear in the corpus’s word cloud are “folio”, “recto”, “verso”, and “page,” not because these are common words appearing in the manuscripts, but because they are common artefacts (encoding tags) of the digital documents. Still, Voyant is flexible enough that creative problem solving can expand its possibilities. For example, to get around the issue of encoding tags cluttering the cloud, the user can modify the stop words list (i.e., the words that Voyant automatically filters out of its analyses and visualizations, which include function words like “the” and “a”) to include these tags so that the remnants of the digital artefacts do not appear.  

These examples are but tastes of what is possible with the Folger’s corpus. The simplicity and accessibility of the corpus and DH tools like Voyant make them ideal interdisciplinary teaching resources in addition to effective research tools. There is something for everyone, whether your focus is the big picture or the fine detail. Dig in!


Recipes to Remember: Coriander, Gallyngale, and the Legacies of the Lost

By Lucy Mookerjee

Originally composed for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Beyond Shakespeare blog, this primary source highlight from Lucy Mookerjee, a Research Fellow at the Folger, invites the reader to think beyond the study the recipe as a set of instructions to be performed, and to consider the recipe itself as a generative composition with much to tell us about origin and loss, remembrance and ignorance, revival and rebirth.

A detail of a painting of Ophelia semi-submerged in water with flowers around her.

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies,

that’s for thoughts.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV Scene 5

On learning of her father’s death, Ophelia, the heartbroken heroine of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, falls into a “weeping brook” and quietly allows herself to drown (4.7).  While modern scholarship has tended to construe Ophelia as ‘feminist heroine; critics in the Victorian period perceived Ophelia as a deranged ‘madwoman’; not only has she lost her father and her lover, but she has also lost her mind. In the words of Hamlet’s mother, she is “incapable of her own distress” which is to say: she has forgotten her ‘self’ (4.7). It is curious, then, that the “sweet flowers” – pansies, forget-me-nots, rosemary sprigs –which surround her in the famous Pre-Raphaelite painting, and which are frequently referenced in the play, should have a long history as symbols not of loss, but of memory.

The term pansy comes from the French pensée, meaning “thought” or “remembrance”. Legend has it that forget-me-nots are named after a medieval knight who died while picking the delicate flower for his lover and spent his last breath crying out: “Forget me not!” In Ancient Greece, students wore circlets of rosemary to school to increase their capacity to remember their lessons.

While memory-enhancing herbs have a rich legacy in symbolism, the evidence of herbal consumption – though less studied – is well represented in the historical record. Recipes for memory-boosters surface in early modern manuscripts in the form of charms, spells, and medical treatises. Hundreds of these recipe books — digitized and transcribed into Modern English — can be found here.

The Receipt Book of Margaret Baker (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.619), compiled in 1675, contains a recipe for a memory-potion called “Confect of Coriander Seed” and provides step-by-step instructions for a brew to “helpe the memorie … by comforting of the braine.”

Manuscript receipt book.
The Receipt Book of Margaret Baker. Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.619.
To read more of Lucy’s post about remembrance and recipes, visit the Folger Library’s Shakespeare & Beyond blog.

‘I Have Known’: Copying Personal Accounts in Early Modern Receipt Books

By Margaret Maurer 

Reading British Library Sloane MS 559, a seventeenth-century receipt book, I came upon a recipe with the following efficacy statement: “I have knowne a woman heale many blind people with this medicine following” (MS 559 6v). The sentence was striking, not only because it places powerful healing with Biblical resonance in the hands of an unnamed woman, but because I had already seen it in another early modern receipt book.

The sentence appears word-for-word in British Library Sloane MS 2488; both manuscripts contain this specific and seemingly personal testimony: “I have known…” Confronted with two handwritten accounts, the identity of the first-person pronoun becomes murky. Did either scribe witness this miraculous healer?

 

Two panels show manuscript documents that detail similar recipes.
LEFT: BL Sloane MS 559 6v. RIGHT: BL Sloane MS 2488 8r. © British Library Board BL Sloane MS 559 6v, BL Sloane MS 2488 8r.

 

At a glance, these manuscripts do not seem to have much in common. Sloane MS 2488 is a fair-copy folio in a neat italic hand, with the owner’s mark “Elizabeth Beere: her booke” (fol. 1r). In contrast, Sloane MS 559 is a quarto-sized receipt book in secretary hand, with the owner’s mark “James Manninge” (1v).

However, while these receipt books are not identical, they contain many of the same recipes in the same order. Both feature organizational headers that divide medical recipes by afflicted body parts, beginning with “The Head,” before listing a series of identical recipes for various head ailments.

 

Two panels show manuscript documents that detail similar recipes.
LEFT: BL Sloane MS 559 2r. RIGHT: BL Sloane MS 2488 2r. © British Library Board BL Sloane MS 559 2r, BL Sloane MS 2488 2r.

 

Both manuscripts also share numerous recipes and their organizational structure with Ralph Williams’ printed Physical Rarities containing the most choice receipts […] (first published 1651). Williams’ longer text contains many additional recipes, and this printed book likely served as a source that was copied into manuscript to create a “starter” recipe collection.1

Williams’ printed text is not the only source of overlapping passages between these manuscripts. Both receipt books include a passage about “pluresy” (MS 559 38r; MS 2488 31v-32r) that does not have a clear print analogue, although it has similarities with a description of pleurisy attributed to Galen in Christopher Wirtzung’s The General Practise of Physicke (1617). Additionally, both manuscripts contain a collection of confectionary recipes beginning, “Heere follow notes how to make certaine conserues and other thinges” (MS 2488 84r), including: “To clarify sugar” (MS 559 133r; MS 2488 84r), “To make oil of roses” (MS 559 134r; MS 2488 85r), and “To make snow” (MS 599 137; MS 2488 87r).

 

Two panels show manuscript documents that detail similar recipes.
LEFT: BL Sloane MS 559 133r. RIGHT: BL Sloane MS 2488 84r. © British Library Board BL Sloane MS 559 133r, BL Sloane MS 2488 84r.

 

Each manuscript also contains recipes that do not appear in the other, including Sloane MS 559’s “Weapon Salve” (148r-149r), attributed to Paracelsus, and Sloane MS 2488’s recipes attributed to Thomas Noble (MS 2488 88v-89v). These differences reflect their compilers’ interests and needs; despite their similarities, these manuscripts appear to have been expanded and customized over time.

However, given their notable textual overlap, these manuscripts likely have a shared textual genealogy, even if their precise relationship is unclear. Sloane MS 559 includes “For a copper face” (MS 559 19r) − a recipe from Physical Rarities that does not appear in Sloane MS 2488 − which signals that Sloane MS 2488 is likely not an intermediary text between Sloane MS 559 and Physical Rarities. While it is possible that Sloane MS 559 served as a source for Sloane MS 2488, there could just as easily be another unknown manuscript or manuscripts that served as intermediaries between these receipt books. A preliminary comparison does not yield a definitive answer, but further comparison between and beyond these two receipt books, as well as research into their provenance, may help illuminate their relationship.

 

Two panels show manuscript documents that detail similar recipes.
LEFT: BL Sloane MS 559 19r. RIGHT: BL Sloane MS 2488 19r. © British Library Board BL Sloane MS 559 19r, BL Sloane MS 2488 19r.

 

Despite this uncertain relationship, an intertextual comparison challenges assumptions that conflate first-person accounts with the scribe’s experience. As it turns out, neither scribe witnessed the woman who miraculously healed blind people. Instead, Williams’ Physical Rarities features the attestation in print: “I have knowne a woman heale many blind people with this medicine following.” This first-person efficacy statement was copied and recopied in these extant manuscripts and may have been copied additional times.

Comparing these three receipt books, two manuscript and one print, demonstrates that the use of first-person statements in early modern receipt books is not always indicative of the compiler-practitioner’s own experience. After all, domestic receipt books were created for personal or familial use, and the scribe likely did not consider how these texts might be interpreted by archival researchers.

Furthermore, the transcription of first-person accounts demonstrates the weight that compiler-practitioners gave to experience, whether that was their own experience or the declared experience of a trusted source. The writing and rewriting of first-person accounts do not undermine the importance of experience within early modern recipe culture. Rather, the repeated transcription of first-person accounts demonstrates the weight of personal accounts as evidence and the central role of experience in demonstrating a recipe’s efficacy. 

 

1 For more on “starter” collections, see Elaine Leong’s Recipes and Everyday Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2018), p. 20-23.

 

Margaret Maurer is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Margaret is currently a Dissertation Fellow at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, studying “everyday alchemy” in early modern households, paper mills, printing houses, and beehives.