Tag Archives: marginalia

Print and Continuity in Reading Practice

By Grace Murray

As the market for printed practical books in England expanded in the first half of the sixteenth century, a host of titles promised their readers something new. From herbals to husbandry manuals, these books advertised their novelty, promising not only ‘new matters’ but also new translations, additions, and corrections to previous editions. But as Melissa Reynolds shows in Reading Practice, with meticulous attention to multiple editions of long-running titles, these claims of novelty were initially much more about how old knowledge was organised for eager readers. In fact, many of these early titles were hardly new at all, and derived their content from the fifteenth-century manuscripts that occupy the first half of Reading Practice, which were themselves ‘read and reread well into the era of print’ (p. 175). In the 1520s, even as books like Richard Banckes’ herbal indexed and organised medieval medical recipes for ease of consultation, they hardly touched the recipes themselves.

The title page of the 1552 edition of Banckes’ herbal. Courtesy of the U. S. National Library of Medicine.
The title page of the 1552 edition of Banckes’ herbal. Courtesy of the U. S. National Library of Medicine.

Spanning over two centuries from 1375 to 1601, Reading Practice returns printed practical books to the ‘textual tradition’ (p. 199) of natural knowledge to which they belonged, making it possible to see continuity as well as change.

The tradition from which English practical books developed was at once local and transnational in scope, borrowing as readily from Middle English manuscripts as from continental sources. Reynolds’ database of 475 editions of printed practical books published in England between 1475 and 1600, which accompanies Reading Practice as an open-access digital appendix, will be of enormous value to anyone looking for trends and patterns in this sprawling genre. Chief among these is perhaps the change effected by the Stationers’ Company’s establishment of a system of licensure in 1557, which granted members of the guild rights to the printing of a text. The new system ‘made space for new and exciting knowledge to gain a foothold in a market no longer glutted with reprints of the same old material’ (p. 120), and yet it also pushed English printers to disavow older repositories of natural knowledge in favour of texts that promised that their advice had been ‘proved’ for modern readers.

The Copernican universe, in a later edition of Thomas Digges’ version of his father’s Prognostication Everlasting (1605). Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
The Copernican universe, in a later edition of Thomas Digges’ version of his father’s Prognostication Everlasting (1605). Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

At the same time, older genres continued to offer a safe veneer to test more radical ideas, as in the case of Thomas Digges’ 1576 edition of his father’s prognostication, in which diagrams of the Copernican and geocentric models of the universe sat side-by-side. As Reynolds argues, ‘English readers would make the final judgement about what to believe’ (p. 148).

Nowhere is this readerly responsibility more apparent than in the genre of ‘books of secrets’, which owed its popularity to Master Alexis of Piedmont’s Secreti, printed in Venice in 1555 and quickly translated for English readers in 1558. In England as in Italy, these books were often implied to draw from the unwritten oral traditions of poorer, illiterate women, tantalising their male readers with the danger of forbidden feminine secrets while at the same time sanitising that knowledge by drawing it into an orderly printed book. Reynolds reveals that ‘neither secrecy nor women’s knowledge were particularly stable categories’ (p. 162); it was up to readers to distinguish between them. Here, too, Reynolds observes a distinction between secrets in print and manuscript, as the latter became increasingly suspect post-Reformation in the context of witchcraft allegations and a distaste for superstition. And yet, all along, readers continued to engage with the centuries-old manuscripts that had once been the first port of call for understanding the world – even if it was only to obscure or obliterate recipes related to reproduction and fertility, as attested by several older manuscripts Reynolds examined that contain the marks of early modern readers.

These marks are a window into the personal relationship between reader and text. The final chapter of Reading Practice turns to several early modern readers of earlier manuscripts, among them Henry Dyngley, a Worcestershire gentleman of the mid-sixteenth century. A copious annotator of both printed books and manuscripts, Dyngley’s collection included British Library Royal MS 17 A.xxxii, a fifteenth-century medical text into which he copied some verses from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments for his children, ending with the couplet, ‘I leave you here a little book to look upon / to see your fathers face when he is dead and gone’ (p. 185). What Reynolds does so well is to place Dyngley into a history of reading practical texts in manuscript and print that bridges generations, looking back to the distant past as well as anticipating the rhetoric of ownership and control of nature that characterised England’s nascent imperialism. As he prepared to bequeath his collection to his children, and with it the textual bedrock of English natural knowledge, Dyngley registered that the long tradition of writing and reading practical books had come to shape how the English understood, interpreted, and sought to cultivate the world around them.

Grace Murray is a Lecturer in English Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, specialising in the history of reading in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is working on a monograph adapted from her PhD research at the University of York, which examines how early modern printed ‘how-to’ books anticipated and mitigated misreading. Following a doctoral fellowship on marginalia in the horticultural collections at the British Library and National Trust, she has also consulted on garden history for the Trust, and continues to research the relationship between reading and gardening in the early modern period.

Making Sense of Recipes for Amulets and Natural Magic, Kabbalistic Style (Marginalia Included)

By Agata Paluch

Among Jewish recipe books, both in manuscript and in print, a prominent place take manuals produced by the members of the educated rabbinic elite. For instance, one of the most famous rabbinic authorities and kabbalists of the seventeenth century, Moses Zacuto (1610—1697, active in North Italy) was an avid compiler of all sorts of recipes.[i] A compilation of his recipes survived in an autograph notebook, now in the Russian State Library in Moscow, Günzburg Collection Ms. 1448. It is inscribed as the Book of secrets which I received from my masters on the title page. In its first folios, the kabbalist collected a set of recipes gathered during his stay in Greater Poland. It begins with a six-folio piece marked as These are those [secrets] which I found in Poland:

Fig. 1: Ms Günzberg 1448, folio 2r, top. Courtesy of the Russian State Library.

 

It then proceeds with a two-page compilation introduced as These are the secrets called ‘properties’ which I also brought from Poland:

Fig. 2: folio 7r, top. Courtesy of the Russian State Library.

 

The secrets gathered by Zacuto in Poland belong thus to two separate subcategories, sodot and segulot [i.e., secretsand qualities]. The first category, in Zacuto’s parlance, refers to the applications of divine names in either recited adjurations or written amulets. These types of applications would be useful, for instance, to fend off evil by means of summoning and controlling guardian angels, to shield oneself from being harmed by weaponry, to reduce fevers, to bring good fortune, to save from badmouthing, to receive answers to questions posed in dreams, to open doors without keys, to urge love, to win when gambling, or to support women during difficult childbirth. This relevance of divine names is seemingly random—although some of the names require the combining of amulets and adjurations with uses of elements of the ‘material’ world, such as frogs, cat heads, or human and animal blood, the desired effect is ultimately produced by the very power of the divine names.

The second subcategory of Zacuto’s secrets comprises ‘properties’ [segulot], that is, those qualities of things which belong to the physical world and can be manipulated without resorting to the influence of divine names, and which reveal their hidden power in the process of elemental inter-reactions and transformations. Among those ‘properties’ learned by Zacuto in Poland, one can find recipes for domesticating pigeons, on confirming pregnancy, on preparing ink visible only under water, on healing toothaches, on concocting wondrous candles, or instructions for tricks and dice games. 

Fig. 3. Folio 7r: “9. To remove a stain of oil from clothes, take those dirty clothes and smear them with a moist soap with honey, and put aside for the night, afterwards wash it [i.e., the stain] off with urine. End.”

 

Among those instances in which the recipes of Zacuto could be useful, there are a number that could equally be changed by the employment of either natural qualities or amulets inscribed with divine names. In order to make sense of the ways in which various names and forces operate in the physical world, Zacuto explains their meanings according to kabbalistic theories on the margin of his notebook.[ii] And so, his extensive marginal comments provide an interpretive framework to help the reader in the process of making sense of the mechanisms of actions described in the main body of text. 

 

Fig. 4. Folio 5r: “22. [Amulet] For love. Write with your left hand on your right hand these names: Anakta”m, Shem Yah, Shaday, Y”V. End.” In the margin: “Anaktam. From the name that is called ‘the name of the 22 letters,’ as I already explained. Shaday is [the name of] Yesod […].” [In kabbalistic theosophy, Yesod constitutes the 9th (penultimate) emanation in the decadic structure of the godhead.]

 

The divine names specified in many of the recipes are therefore incorporated in the broader theoretical scheme of the structure of divine emanations—a cornerstone of kabbalistic cosmology and theosophy. The letters of names function as a form of divine embodiment, a physical extension into the material world in which both the human and the divine meet. Such kabbalistic logic is applied all along the marginal text, wherein Zacuto attempts to translate acutely non-discursive terms into the explicative framework of kabbalistic theosophy, which for him provides the ultimate explanation of the mechanism of actions and transformations taking place on the physical level of reality. The autograph volume thus provides an example of self-reflection—on the part of the compiler of practical esoteric traditions—of a cognitive need to provide an epistemic structure to frame the recommended practices according to the established and authoritative kabbalistic knowledge, as expressed in the margins of the notebook.

Fig. 5. Folio 1r. Courtesy of the Russian State Library.

 


[i] On Moses Zacuto’s biography see I Raise My Heart: Poems by Moses Zacuto, a Scientific Edition, ed. Dvorah Bregman (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2009), 5–24 [Hebrew]; Eliezer Baumgarten and Uri Safrai, “Moses Zacuto’s Kabbalah of Names,” Studia Rosenthaliana 46 (2020): 29–49. On Zacuto’s interests in practical knowledge see J. H. Chajes, “Rabbi Moses Zacuto as Exorcist—Kabbalah, Magic and Medicine in the Early Modern Period,” Pe’amim 96 (2003): 129–130 [Hebrew].

[ii] Kabbalah (lit. tradition) denotes a particular variety of Jewish esoteric knowledge that was concerned with the inner structure and processes taking place within the divine realms, on whose dynamics the practitioners intended to exert influences.

 


Three Croatian Glagolitic Recipes Against Toothache

By Marija-Ana Dürrigl and Stella Fatović-Ferenčić,

Historians working on recipes often use sources that, from the outside, do not look like recipe books. One of the most common places for recipes to be found in pre-modern manuscripts is in liturgical books, and other works for priests. A recipe from a sixteenth-century Croatian liturgical manuscript reads:

Help for the teeth: On Holy Saturday when the church bells sound Gloria in Excelsis Deo … say three Pater Nosters and three Ave Marias in honor of God and Mary and Saint Apolonia.

Za zubi pomoć: na Velu sobotu kada se počne zvoniti k Slava va višnih Bogu on trat… rci 3 Očenaši i tri Zdrave Marie v čast Bogu i svetoi Marie i v čast sveti Polonii

This recipe is in the Croatian redaction of Church Slavonic language. Church Slavonic was the common language of liturgy and learning among Slavs in the Middle Ages. It is written in the Glagolitic alphabet; its angular variant was used primarily in the Croatian context. This particular recipe is then readable only by a select few. But its topic – toothache – and its location – in a religious (moral-didactic) book – is much more familiar. Marginal recipes are extremely widespread, as previously discussed on The Recipes Project. This post will take us into the world of marginal recipes by and for Catholic Slavs.

Kingdom of Croatia from Wiki Commons
Kingdom of Croatia
from Wiki Commons

In rural parts of medieval Croatia, a kingdom hugging the Adriatic sea, and a meeting point between the Mediterranean and Central Europe, priests also acted as medical practitioners. Recipes and therapeutic instructions are valuable sources, shedding light on outbreaks of epidemics, on ways of treating diseases, as well as on old terminology. The term “medical” has to be taken in its broadest sense, i.e. it pertains to the basic knowledge the priests possessed.

 

 

Medical texts in the Žgombić Miscellany (Croatian Glagolitic manuscripts, early 16th c.) by Marija-Ana Duerigl
Medical texts in the Žgombić Miscellany (Croatian Glagolitic manuscripts, early 16th c.)
by Marija-Ana Dürrigl

Texts in Croatian Glagolitic recipe collections do not follow a strict order (which organs are afflicted; which complaints are present; which kind of procedure is to be applied; which quantity of ingredient is to be used), but seem to have been copied randomly from various sources.

Extant recipes against diseases can be grouped into two broad categories. Concrete texts are instructions for curing ailments that invlolve administering various medications (based on experience and on older written sources). Such “concrete” recipes are applied to treat renal stones, sick eyes, gastrointestinal disorders, and other ailments. Prescribed medications are based primarily on local, Mediterranean, medicinal plants. In Glagolitic sources concrete healing instructions are interwoven with what we term abstract texts, i.e. incantations, prayers and amulets, for example against headaches, insomnia, and sore throats. Religious approaches to disease and healing share space on the pages of Croatian medieval recipe collections with empirical instructions, and both co-existed throughout many centuries. One did not exclude the other, and this kind of promiscuitas may seem a curiosity to the modern reader. However, a strict delineation between the different spheres of knowledge and belief did not happen for another few centuries.

A page from Žgombić Miscellany (Croatian Glagolitic manuscript, early 16th c.) by Marija-Ana Dürrigl
A page from Žgombić Miscellany (Croatian Glagolitic manuscript, early 16th c.)
by Marija-Ana Dürrigl

Here we present three small medical texts from a “marginal” source. The book called the Žgombić Miscellany (today in the Archive of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb) contains moral-didactic texts and religious prose (legends, visions, contrasts). On the last folios there are three recipes for treatment of toothache, one of which is quoted above.

The second reads:

Za zubi pomoć: kuša v belom vini kuhai tere zvanu stavi ča naiteple moreš ako bude Bog otil oćeš imat pomoć

Help for the teeth: Cook sage /Salvia officinalis/ in white wine and use it as a very warm compress – God willing you will have help

Recipe in the Glagolitic Alphabet by Marija-Ana Dürrigl
Recipe in the Glagolitic Alphabet
by Marija-Ana Dürrigl

 

 

 

 

Sage is often mentioned in Croatian Glagolitic recipe collections; one is reminded of the Latin saying „Cur morietur homo quia salvia crescit in horto?“ ‒ Why should man die, when salvation lies in the Garden? The use of sage in this case can be rationally explained, for it contains aetheric oils and can have antibacterial effect. It is still used modern stomatology for disinfection of the mouth.

The third recipe reads:

Za zubi pomoć: ružmarina i smažera od smreki … i beloga vina skup kuhai ako li pol zvre onem maži zubi imaš lek z Božiju volu

Help for the teeth: prepare an ointment by cooking rosemary /Rosmarinus officinalis/ and resin of the juniper tree /Picea albis/ in white wine and smear on the teeth – you will have help with God’s will.

This instruction, as well as the ingredients, suggests that it was more likely used to those suffering with gingivitis or similar problems, rather than against toothache. The resin of the juniper is rich in vitamin C which is important in healing of the gums. Both empirical recipes suggest white wine, which may have been of help in alleviating pain. Both also end with a smilar phrase reflecting a religious view of healing – if it is God’s will, you will be helped.

This sketch from the Croatian Glagolitic heritage shows the significance of “marginal” sources in tracing medical texts. Although not large in number, Croatian Glagolitic medical texts reflect the intersection of (medieval) Christianity and empirical healing. They should be included into a study of the wide framework of healing practices in medieval Europe.

Marija-Ana Dürrigl, Ph.D., is a senior research associate at the Old Church Slavonic Institute, Scientific Centre of Excellence for Croatian Glagolitism Zagreb, Croatia.

Stella Fatović-Ferenčić, Ph.D, is a Professor at the Department for the History of Medicine, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Zagreb, Croatia.

References:

1 Dürrigl MA, Fatović-Ferenčić S, „Marginalia miscellanea medica“ in Croatian Glagolitic monuments – a model for interdisciplinary investigations, Viator 30, 1999: 383-396

2 Fatović-Ferenčić S, Dürrigl MA, Za zubi pomoć ‒ odontološki tekstovi u hrvatskoglagoljskim rukopisima, Acta Stomatologica Croatica 1997, 31: 229-236 (Help for teeth – odontological texts in Croatian Glagolitic manuscripts)

First Monday Library Chat: The Huntington Library

The Recipes Project heads to San Marino, California this month, to learn about the recipe collections of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.  We spoke with Alan Jutzi, Curator of Rare Books, and Shelley Kresan, rare book cataloguer for the Huntington’s new Anne Cranston American Regional and Charitable Cookbook Collection, about the many recipe sources – both early modern and modern – held at the Huntington.

The Huntington Library, San Marino CA.  Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The Huntington Library, San Marino CA. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Huntington is known for the breadth of its collections, which have particular strengths in British and American history as well as the history of the American West. Tell us a bit about the early modern and modern recipes materials held at your institution.

During Henry E. Huntington’s buying splurge between 1910 and 1927, he acquired large English and American libraries and archives that included printed herbals, cookbooks, and works on domestic management as well as manuscripts dealing with medical and food recipes.  Examples of some of our major English holdings include the Bridgewater House Library (16th-19th centuries), which incorporate the Ellesmere papers, and the Stowe House manuscripts (mostly 16th-18th centuries) which entail the Temple, Brydges, and Grenville family papers.  The Robert A. Brock Collection (17th-19th centuries) on Virginia is an example of a large American collection of published works and family and regional archives.

Identifying early modern and modern printed recipes is much easier than locating those in large archival manuscript collections. The Huntington’s holdings in pre-1801 imprints from the British Isles and North America appear in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). All of the catalogued cookery publications appear in the Huntington’s online catalogue. The library has continued to concentrate on English and American cooking and culture by adding new materials, primarily through gifts to the library. In 1983 we acquired the 500-volume California cookbook collection of Helen Evans Brown and Philip S. Brown. A related collection that the Library has recently received is the Jay T. Last Collection of Lithographic and Social History. It includes a huge section of ephemeral printing dealing with American food and beverage promotion.

For information and access to manuscript materials and the Last Collection, researchers should contact the curator – they can find out how to do this via the library staff directory on the Huntington website.

I was especially excited to learn about the Huntington’s Cranston Collection, which includes 4,400 British and American cookbooks from the 19th and 20th centuries. What’s the history behind the Cranston Collection, and how did it come to be a part of the Huntington Library?

The Anne M. Cranston Collection on American Cookery was donated in 2000 by her daughter Elanne Callahan, of San Marino CA. It includes several thousand “trade” cookbooks, printed by major publishers over the last 150 years, and an equal number of “charitable” cookbooks from the same period.

The Cranston Collection consists of four main categories of cookbooks: 1) those written by the forerunners of the home economic movement and the heads of culinary schools in the late 19th century to promote the education of women; 2) 20th-century cookbooks that took cooking to a higher precision, which includes many foreign recipe books published in English; 3) 20th-century ephemeral cookbooks and pamphlets (e.g. Campbell’s Soup and Corn Products Refining Company promotional cookbooks,) 4) charity and fund-raising cookbooks created by churches, schools, hospitals, clubs, philanthropic organizations, etc.

Joseph Campbell Company canned beans advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post, 1921.  Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Joseph Campbell Company canned beans advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post, 1921. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Huntington’s primary reason for accepting the Cranston Collection was the depth of the regional and charitable sections; indeed all of the research done in this collection since its arrival has been in those areas.  And even in Mrs. Cranston’s home, the collection was organized by region, state, and city.  Anne M. Cranston (1906-1993) was a fascinating figure; she came to Southern California with her husband William E. Cranston in the early 1930s, and he founded the Thermador Company (which specialized in electrical, and especially kitchen, appliances) in Los Angeles.  Mrs. Cranston began to collect cookbooks around this time, and it was a pastime she continued throughout her life. It is obvious that she loved the hunt for the books as much as recipes the books contained. She was a bibliophile.

Shelley has been writing some great posts on the Cranston materials for Verso, the Huntington’s blog – and the public’s response to those posts has been terrific. People love to engage with culinary sources from the past! Does the Huntington have any future plans to make these materials widely accessible?

The Huntington Digital Library, representing only a fraction of our holdings, is an online tool to aid in the dissemination of just some of the library’s rich and unique collections. It is designed to support the research needs of Huntington readers and staff, and to share digitized resources with the broader community. The Huntington would certainly like to do much more with its cookery holdings, but we see our first responsibility to make collections available that will be consulted by our researchers. Eventually we anticipate more blogs, exhibits, conferences, and closer interaction with historical culinary organizations. There is nothing specifically planned for the near future.

Modern recipes were often used to circulate ideas about supposedly “exotic” or “foreign” nations and cultures. In the Cranston materials, do you see evidence of 19th and 20th century Americans experimenting with recipes from different cultures, geographic regions, religions, or ethnic groups?

The evidence for the circulation of ethnic recipes and cultural ideas in modern America comes out foremost in the Cranston Collection’s American charity cookbooks, particularly those from the early to mid 20th century. As immigrant groups settled throughout the United States and came into contact with established communities, local charities published cookbooks which reflected the adaption and adoption of cuisines offered by the newcomers.  The variety of ethnic cookbooks in the Cranston Collection is testimony to the impact of widespread regional ethnic population changes.  One of the Cranston books, Agnes Jekyll’s Kitchen Essays (1922), included a recipe for “Malay Curry of Prawns,” which called for western cooks to use seemingly-exotic ingredients such as coconut, turmeric, cloves, and cinnamon.  (Shelley’s post on Jekyll’s book, including the full recipe for the “Malay Curry” can be found here, at Verso.)

Agnes Jekyll.  Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Agnes Jekyll. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But modern American cooks also saw European cuisines as “novel” and “sophisticated.” The large selection of books on European cuisines published in English, as well as souvenir cookbooks that were obtained by Americans traveling to Europe, indicates the willingness of both American chefs and home cooks alike to venture into exotic and foreign territory.

Recipes frequently feature notations and marginalia made over the course of many years by the cooks who used them. Can you tell us a bit about the marginalia in the Huntington’s recipe collections (both early modern and modern)?

The Huntington rare book cataloguing descriptions attempt to provide copy-specific information with notes about manuscript notations and inserts; however, not all early modern or modern books have gotten this full treatment. There is no easy access to annotated recipes in early modern printed books.

The most marginalia to be found is in the American charitable cookbooks. These are corrections to the printed text, recipes mostly on the flyleaves, and recipes transcribed on separate sheets. These marginal, handwritten recipes, as one can imagine, are mostly those of the owner or ones received from a relative or friend. From working through the volumes, it appears that the majority are for breads, cakes, puddings, and desserts, but there are plenty of main dishes, appetizers, and side dishes. Some examples of marginal recipes in the Cranston Collection include scrawled recipes for a Lady Baltimore cake, a date pudding, and even a vegetarian meat substitute loaf made from lima beans.

There is much yet to be found in the Huntington’s extensive cookery collections. The search will lead in many directions, and the culinary rewards will be plentiful and rich.