Category Archives: Religion

Exploring CPP 10a214: The Layfield Hand

By Rebecca Laroche with Hillary Nunn

Since March 2013, Hillary Nunn 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. So far, we’ve closely examined recipes from the first part of the book (pages 1 through 72), which were written in a clear humanist italic and reportedly compiled by a “Cal. Downing” (06/08/13).Hillary Nunn’s last post pointed to the other dominant hand in the collection, which I will describe further.

We first see the hand in the title of the document, “Medicinae Liber” (“Book of Medicines”) which appears on the front page of the Downing portion. Reading through that section, this handwriting does not appear again until page 74.

The Downing and title-writing hand (hereafter Hand 2) exchange a few pages, then at 79, Hand 2 takes over.It is at this point we catch a glimpse of how this hand connects with the manuscript owner Anne Layfield.On page 79, the recipe is titled “An admirable receite to make a water that /will cure any old sore, giuen to my deare wife /by the Lady Ashborneham as a great treasure/ tryed by her Ladyships sister who got both great /creditt, & rewards for cures done with it”

2012-10-15 DearWifeCpp[1] and another “The rare water to cure all soares made /by my Deare wife” (82).  The attribution of the next recipe for a balsam does not appear in its title, as it is long (6 lines of script), but rather at the end of the directions as “Probatum by Mistress / Anne Layfielde”: [2]

Probatum Anne LayfieldNow the surmise that Anne Layfield is the owner of the recipe book and the same “dear wife” of the previous recipes comes through a close analysis of another part of the collection (pages 207 to 241), almost all of which exists in Hand 2 and is upside down (because of a do-si-do compilation) relative to the Downing portion.

In this section, the compiler, the doting husband of the recipe from page 79, indicates his social network and his medical concerns. As with Calybute Downing, this compiler also ascribes recipes to himself with a “probatum per me” (223), but only with the calligraphic initials ESL:

ESLThe elongated descender of the L, similar to that in “Anne Layfielde,” shows the connection between the attributions, and suggests that Anne Layfield and the “deare wife” may be one and the same. A London marriage recorded between an Edmond Layfield and an Ann King in October of 1640 (the year of the manuscript) affirms this theory. [1]

Other evidence that the “ESL” in question is named Edmund Layfield lies latent in Hillary Nunn’s post in which she reported that the death of George Wilmer (possible husband of the Mistress Wilmer of Bowe in the attribution) was witnessed by Edmund Layfield of St. Leonard-of-Bromley.

This preacher was also the author of two sermons printed in the 1630s, the first of which had as a dedicatee another widow Wilmer of Bowe [2], and the second named an Elizabeth Toppesfield, daughter of Susan Ferrers and wife of William Toppesfield, Esquire. [3]  Testimony to this same social connection can be found in the section compiled by Hand 2, as it contains “Mistris Toppisfields Diett drinke” (231).  Remembering Calybute Downing’s Hackney appointment, we begin to uncover the circulation of recipes within a network of Protestants inhabiting the London area in the 1630s and 1640s. That this network, in the previous generation, may have included Catholics and, in the next decade, may have held both Parliamentarians and Royalists is the subject of our further analysis and research.

All images appear courtesy of The Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

[1] familysearch.org. (Accessed 01/02/2104).
[2] Edmund Layfielde, The Mappe of Mans Mortality and Vanity (London, 1630).
[3] Edmund Layfielde, The Sovles Solace (London, 1633).

A New Year’s Recipe from Old Prussia

Handschrift Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg Amb. 279.2°, Folio 11 verso (Landauer I)
The Lebküchner, Handschrift Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg Amb. 279.2°, Folio 11 verso (Landauer I).

By Molly Taylor-Polesky

In the winter of 1397, the effects of plague were finally beginning to lift in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). The citizens, grateful that the Lord’s wrath had been appeased through their suffering and prayer, made honey cakes. They formed the cakes into deer, rabbits and people and laid them on warm oven tiles to harden. In the afternoon of New Year’s Day they carried the cakes to their neighbors with the wish that God would bless them with long life and health.

This story is recounted by Lucas David in his Prussian Chronicle (Preußische Chronik) of 1575 (p. 25–7).  David, a Protestant convert, was employed by the Duke of Prussia to revise Prussian history without the Catholic slant. He used this story about local customs to jump into a diatribe against the 1564 ordinance by the Catholic French king Charles IX that the year begin on January 1, not on Christmas. (January 1 was later also confirmed as the first day of the year by Pope Gregory’s calendar of 1582.)

The traditional New Year’s cake survived dynastic changes at the court in Prussia and was still being made there in the seventeenth century, when the Hohenzollern were Dukes of Prussia. Palace kitchen accounts from the years 1631, 1646, 1651-2, and 1655 record as much as 24 quarts of honey being used specifically for “the New Year’s dough.”[1] The court was not in residence at the palace in Königsberg over New Years in all of these years, which suggests that the cakes were not for the court itself but rather were gifts either for remaining palace servants or citizens of the town.

Even when the old Julian calendar was abandoned in the Protestant lands of the Holy Roman Empire, the honey cake remained a New Year’s tradition in Prussia-it simply migrated to the new calendar date. The 18th-century lexicographer Johann Georg Krünitz described a “Leib=kuchen (a variant name of the aforementioned honey cake) that “in some regions, for example, Prussia, was a round bread of fine wheat flour that was baked for New Year’s and either sold or given as a gift.” Krünitz continued by relating a superstition associated with the bread in which the name of the intended recipient would be written on a slip of paper and placed atop the loaf before baking. If the loaf cracked, it was an omen that the named person would die in the coming year, which eerily harks back to the role of the cake during the uncertain time of the plague.

In Königsberg in the medieval and early modern period, the honey cake took on religious and communal meanings, which changed in conjunction with other historical shifts. Ultimately, it was not the date, or the religious conflict, or cake’s role in the thanksgiving ritual that mattered. The traditions varied, but the honey cake remained.

Today, the Nuremberg recipe for Lebkuchen is the most famous of this type of spice cake and it is undoubtedly associated with the Christmas holiday in Germany. The East Prussian honey cake is all but forgotten, but recipes can still found online–and perhaps among descendants of displaced Prussians.


[1] Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Preußische Kulturbesitz, XX. H.A. Ostpreuss. Folianten. Current-day measurements estimated for “24 Stof” of honey based on Wolfgang Heidecke. “Alte Maße Altpreußens.” Altpreußische Geschlechterkunde 13 (1939): 22–23, 53–54, and 92.

Exploring CPP 10a214: The Elusive Compiler

By Rebecca Laroche with Hillary Nunn

Up until now, Hillary Nunn and I have been conducting our explorations (20/06/2013, 21/05/2013, 09/04/2013, 12/03/2013, 20/02/2013) under the working hypothesis that one of the compilers of the College of Physicians manuscript 10a214 was a mid-17th century divine named Calybute Downing (1606–1644).  This hypothesis mainly grew from a simple phrase “probatum per me Cal. Downing” (24) at the end of one of the early recipes in the collection and the inclusion of many recipes attributed to one Elizabeth Downing, the name of Calybute’s mother. There was also a reference to Hackney (20/06/2013), where Downing was once minister.  A recent all-too-brief research trip to London has complicated this hypothesis and raised several questions…

With our working hypothesis in mind, I conducted a preliminary search in the online catalogs for autograph evidence of Calybute Downing and was excited to find that the British Library did indeed hold a letter from the minister to a Mrs Barkley.[1] With only two days for library research, I immediately called up the collection in which it was held–and was thankful to find it available.

Imagine my anticipation of its arrival from the vault.  Imagine my disappointment when neither hand (the signature being different than the body) in the letter, which was an extended assurance of grace from a minister to one of the faithful in doubt, matched the hand of the Downing recipes in the manuscript.

A few scholars of recipes may recognize this disappointment.  Many a mention of historically significant figures are confounded by the presence of secretaries and the accommodation of one collection of recipes into another through copying and gifting.[2]  I have come up with two possibilities (and would welcome other suggestions) that explain these non-matching hands:

  1. The Calybute Downing of the recipes is not the divine, but instead his father of the same name, who would have been married to Elizabeth and who was alive in 1640, the one date in the manuscript.  This hypothesis could mean an earlier compilation, but would face some difficulties in explaining the Hackney reference.
  2. The recipe book and the letter could have been compiled by two different secretaries. The Downing signature in the letter is markedly different than the body, which is a very difficult secretary hand, whereas the recipe book is in an incredibly clear italic.If the Downing recipes were copied out in anticipation of making them a gift for use, their relative legibility would be essential. As a correspondence to be considered closely and slowly, the letter’s cramped hand would not be as much of an issue.

Clearly, as I write this, I am becoming more convinced of the second hypothesis, but:

  • if Calybute Downing was prone to hiring secretaries, in whose hand were the original recipes that the secretary then copied out?
  • was the original manuscript made by Elizabeth herself, or by yet another member of the household?

Given the proximity of some of the entries to print sources (18/10/2012, 21/05/2013), it seems unlikely that all of these were transmitted orally. However, the inclusion of a “by me” in the recipes implies Calybute’s presence, if not in the immediate transcription, at least in one of the earlier written record of the recipes.

Obviously, further research is needed!

[1] British Library Add MS 28558 A-R

 [2] See Elaine Leong’s essay on “starter” manuscripts, “Collecting Knowledge for the Family:  Recipes, Gender, and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household,” Centaurus 55.2 (May 2013): 81–103.

This is the sixth of a series of monthly posts on this topic.

Drinking Stinking Spa Waters in Early Modern Britain

The "King's Spring" in the Pump Room, Bath UK

Visitors to the Roman Baths Museum in Bath, UK spend most of their trip learning how Roman Britons swam, plunged, and sweated in thermal pools in order to maintain fitness and well-being.  But the museum tour ends at the site of a very different kind of health craze: the Pump Room, where seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women and men gulped down gallons of spa water in the hopes of curing disease.

In early modern Britain, visitors to spas such as Bath swam just like the Romans had, but they also drank the waters, filling glass and ceramic bottles at street-level pumps that purported to offer access to liquid not already paddled in by bathers.  That didn’t mean that people considered the waters to be pleasant.  Bath visitor Celia Fiennes complained in the 1670s that water from the spring was “very hot and tastes like the water that boyles eggs, has such a smell.”[1]

Believing that divine intervention was a necessary component of health and healing, patrons were also encouraged to pray while they drank spa waters.  A spa preacher named Anthony Walker recorded “short meditations and ejaculations to be used whilst the Waters are drinking” in his book on devotion at the spa.[2]  Most of Walker’s recommended spa prayers were quite short, presumably to make them easier to utter while gulping.  One read simply, “Lord, bless these Waters to us” and another modified the well-known Lord’s Prayer by asking “Give us this day our daily Bread; whatever is needful for Health or Strength, whether Food or Physick.”[3]

Despite their distinctly unpleasant smell and taste, spa waters were rarely modified, altered, or included in recipes.  Early modern medical practitioners thought that spa waters were most powerful and efficacious in their pure form, directly out of the ground.  One spa doctor, Dr. William Oliver, even complained that gauche spa visitors who added “milk [or] a variety of medicines into the waters at the pump” were “offensive” and “disturbing,” and that their ill-advised concoctions created “disagreeable sights, and ungrateful smells.”[4]

Sick or incapacitated people who found themselves unable to travel were in luck, because spa waters were available for sale in bottles.  In the late seventeenth century, Mary Parker wrote that although she didn’t “design to drink the waters,” at Bath, she would instead “take some waters hear which the dockter says will doe me as much good.”[5]  Declaring that water from a spring at Rousham had been good for her health, Anne Dormer wrote c. 1690 that “the spaw water…had been sent downe before I went from home.”[6]  And in 1716 Grisell Baillie paid for “12 botles Spa water” to be sent to her home in Scotland.[7]

But how to preserve the warmth, fizz, and mineral taste that made spa waters so unique?  Entrepreneurs at spa cities experimented with many different methods and materials for sealing the water in bottles, including corks, wax seals, and bungs.  In the 1670s Celia Fiennes reported that the waters from Tunbridge Wells were even “filled and corked in the well under the water.”  After submerging the bottles, workers would “seale down the corks which they say preserves it.”[8]

Today you can still “take the waters” at Bath.  For a few pounds, a Pump Room attendant will happily draw you a generous glass of malodorous, lukewarm water directly from Bath’s famous springs, and you can sip it while pondering the early modern history of the spa.  Prayers are optional, but might be necessary to get through the entire glass.

*****

Image courtesy of Alan Pennington [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

[1] The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (London: Cresset Press, 1949), 20.

[2] Anthony Walker, Fire out of Water: Or, An Endeavour to kindle Devotion, from the Consideration of the Fountains God hath made (London, 1685), 141.

[3] Walker, Fire out of Water, 161-162.

[4] William Oliver, A Practical Essay on the Use and Abuse of Warm Bathing in Gouty Cases (Bath, 1751).

[5] Mary Parker, letters to Sarah Churchill, 1677-1689, Blenheim Papers, Add MS 61474, ff 1-5b, 10, British Library.

[6] Anne Dormer, letters to her sister Elizabeth Trumbull, 1685-1691, Add MS 72516, ff 156-243, British Library.

[7] The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie, 1692-1733, ed. Robert Scott-Moncrieff (Edinburgh UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1911), 107.

[8] Morris, Journeys of Celia Fiennes, 133.