Tag Archives: Medieval

Around the Table Podcast: Teaching Manuscripts with Sara Charles

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

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 Cure for Cardiacle: Making and Tasting a Medieval Remedy for Heart Ache

By Caleb Prus

Grief often feels as physical as it does emotional—like a weight on the chest, a flutter of the heart, or a tightening in the throat. The distinction between these physical and emotional symptoms is largely a product of modern medicine; in the premodern world, those boundaries were far blurrier. In The Canterbury Tales (c.1390), Chaucer’s Physician tells a story so tragic that the Host cries out, “I almost have caught a cardiacle”—a heart pain brought on by pity and sorrow—and begs for a drink of ale before he collapses from grief. But what exactly was a “cardiacle,” and how might a medieval ale have helped? As both a medical student and a scholar of medieval medicine, I set out to answer these questions, by recreating a centuries-old recipe—and tasting for myself how people in the Middle Ages tried to ease heartache.  

The Death of Fébus (d. 1391). Chronicles of Froissart, London, BL, Harley 4379 (c.1470-1475), f. 126. Public Domain.

The cardiacle feared by Chaucer’s Host was a broad diagnosis for heart-related distress. It referred to chest pain, palpitations, and fainting spells—what we might now call angina, arrhythmia, syncope, or even a heart attack. But for medieval people, living centuries before the discovery of circulation, the heart wasn’t a pump. It was the seat of feeling, emotion, and spirit. A sudden wave of grief, or an excess of melancholy (black bile) could literally make the heart sick. This is why the Host panics after the Physician’s Tale: he fears that sorrow itself might give him a cardiacle. And while this diagnosis is rooted in humoral theory, this link between emotion and cardiac dysfunction is supported by modern medicine. Today, we recognize conditions like Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, commonly known as “broken heart syndrome,” in which acute emotional stress can lead to temporary heart failure.

Given its literary and medical prominence, I was intrigued when I came across a remedy for cardiacle in a Middle English medical manuscript. The recipe was simple, direct, and surprisingly easy to recreate:

For the cardiacle

Take gallynggale, gyngeuer and licoris, with fynel; seth and make to poudre, and drynke with stale ale.

The remedy is, essentially, a spiced ale—something Chaucer would have readily recognized. In The Miller’s Tale, he writes that the barber-surgeon Absolon woos his beloved with “spiced ale,” and in the Tale of Sir Thopas, Chaucer lists licorice, zedoary, cloves, and nutmeg as flavorings “to putte in ale / wheither it be moyste or stale.” This recipe for cardiacle is a variation on this familiar tradition, blending licorice, ginger, galangal, and fennel into a warming, aromatic drink.

Ingredients used to recreate the remedy for cardiacle.

The ingredients were surprisingly easy to source. The instruction to “seeth” the herbs likely referred not to boiling but to drying and dehydrating them, preparing them to be ground into powder with a mortar and pestle. At my local spice shop, I found dried fennel seeds, ginger pieces, and licorice root, all ready for grinding. For the galangal, which I bought fresh-frozen from an Asian grocery store, I dehydrated slices at 250°F for several hours until they were brittle enough to crush. 

Finding the right ale proved more challenging. Medieval ale was quite different from today’s beer: unhopped, malty, and slightly sweet, often brewed with a mix of herbs or bittering agents in a style now referred to as gruit. It was also regularly consumed while it was still fermenting or allowed to settle into “stale” ale, as the recipe directs. Without the means to brew my own gruit, I settled on Samual Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, a low-hop British ale with a mellow maltiness and smooth body—about as close to a medieval ale as I could get off the shelf.

On brew day, I laid out my ingredients and began grinding them by hand with a mortar and pestle. Following the proportions implied by the recipe, I used equal parts of each herb, about half a teaspoon per ingredient, mixed into one cup of gently warmed ale. The resulting drink smelled strongly of fennel and licorice. Its taste was intense: sweet, earthy, and medicinal, with a lingering licorice bitterness on the tongue. Hoping to make the potion more palatable, I reduced the quantities to just a pinch of each spice for the second batch. Even then, the licorice dominated, its sweetness overwhelming the other flavors. The drink was also course and gritty. Since the recipe offered no instruction to strain it, I left the powder in the cup, which resulted in heavy sediment that clung to the teeth. 

Warmed ale after the addition of ground spices.

In the end, the potion was challenging to drink—a sensory shock to a modern palate more accustomed to hoppy beers than to bitter, spiced tonics. Its flavor was unmistakably medicinal and sweet, dominated by the taste of fennel and licorice. Yet I suspect the experience would have been quite different for a medieval drinker. The unhopped, malty base of a traditional ale would likely have complemented the sharper notes of the spices. And while modern drinkers tend to associate black licorice with cough syrup or candy, that connotation may not have existed in the medieval period. To medieval tastes, this kind of spiced ale may have been not only palatable but genuinely comforting.  

As The Canterbury Tales continues, the pilgrims stop at an alehouse, allowing the Host to finally get the draught of ale he so desperately craves. The Physician and his potions are nowhere to be found in this scene—but perhaps that’s the point. The physical and emotional dimensions of cardiacle were deeply intertwined, and so too was its cure: a warming drink, shared among fellow travelers, to soothe the heart in both body and spirit. In the end, Chaucer’s Host wasn’t simply asking for ale; he was reaching for spice, for solace, and for the ritual comfort of drinking in good company.


Caleb Prus is a 4th-year MD candidate at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. He holds a MSt in English (650-1550) from the University of Oxford and a BA in English Literature and Chemistry from the University of Rochester. His Master’s dissertation studied the use of Middle English bloodletting texts by John Tyryngham, a fifteenth-century Londoner. He has presented his research at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, the Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies, the American Association for the History of Medicine Annual Meeting, and the Corner Society for the History of Medicine.

 

On Medical Manuscripts in Reynolds’ Reading Practice

By: Caleb Prus

Euricius Cordus (1486-1535), Fur die newe, hievor vnerhorte und erschrocklich todtliche Kranckheyt und schnellen todt, die English schweyee-sucht geant (Strassbourg: 1529). Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
Euricius Cordus (1486-1535), Fur die newe, hievor vnerhorte und erschrocklich todtliche Kranckheyt und schnellen todt, die English schweyee-sucht geant (Strassbourg: 1529). Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

In 1485, during London’s first epidemic of the sweating sickness, the physician Thomas Forestier complained to Henry VII about certain “false leeches” healers deceiving the public through “writing of the kind[s] of powders and of medicines.” These “unexpert men” were not university-educated physicians like Forestier but ordinary tradespeople “carpenters and mill keepers”who boldly posted their medical writings on the city’s gates and church doors. How did people like carpenters and mill keepers, once excluded from specialized knowledge, come to participate in the exchange of written medical information alongside elite physicians? And why was Forestier so alarmed that the writings of common tradespeople had become more persuasive to some Londoners than those endorsed by esteemed medical authorities?

Melissa Reynolds’ Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print answers these questions by tracing the cultural and historical development of what she calls the “practical manuscript.” Of the impressive 182 medieval manuscripts surveyed in her study, most contain some form of medical recipe, treatise, or charm that would have been available to the literate public. Their broad appeal is evident in the diverse array of manuscript ownersfrom priests like Peter Cantele, to prominent families such as the Pastons and Tyrynghams, to amateur surgeons like Nicholas Neesbett. These books were prized not only for the knowledge they contained but also for their material, social, and intellectual value. As Reynold notes, “acquiring and possessing knowledge was often more important than organizing or analyzing that knowledge” (34). In a time of crisis, simply owning a practical manuscript, regardless of whether it was authored by a carpenter, a mill keeper, or a learned physician, might have provided Londoners with a sense of security.

Reynolds ultimately uncovers the significant role of practical manuscripts in shaping premodern medicine. One of the most compelling aspects of Reading Practice is her exploration of the shift from reliance on established textual authority to a culture of experimentation. In the fifteenth century, compilers of practical manuscripts showed great deference to authority, often without much concern for verifying authenticity. However, as the century progressed, readers like Nicholas Neesbett began to claim their own authority by incorporating experiential knowledge. They were willing to experiment—adding a word to a charm or modifying an ingredient in a recipe—in order to better meet their practical needs. This transition not only reflects a pragmatic approach to medicine but also marks an important step towards the empirical methods that would later define early modern science and medicine. It was this everyday medical writing of the “non elite,” that helped to make “the hard-won but fleeting knowledge of experience durable.” (95).

Medical recipes and charms for horses, First quarter of the 15th century, MS Dd.4.44, Cambridge University Library.
Medical recipes and charms for horses, First quarter of the 15th century, MS Dd.4.44, Cambridge University Library. You can link through to the whole source by clicking here.

Importantly, these manuscripts did not vanish with the rise of the printing press. Reading Practice tracks the afterlife of these texts well into the sixteenth and early-seventeenth century, highlighting their continued circulation among a variety of owners. Collectors like Henry Dyngley and Thomas Dib—whose surviving libraries are only now being reconstructed—demonstrate that these manuscripts retained their value long after their original production. They were cherished by royal astrologers like John Dee and Simon Foreman, by royal surgeons like Sir John Ayliff and John Gerard, by barber-surgeons like John Smerthwaite and William Gale, and by tradesmen like William Thorowgood and John Young. This remarkable survival mirrors the journey of many medical texts themselves as they transitioned from manuscript to print. As Reynolds argues, the medical content of practical books changed very little between 1400-1600. It wasn’t until the 1550s, when printers began to publish new works that evoked experiential authority, that the landscape of medical knowledge began to trend toward newer methods of empiricism.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Reading Practice could not be more relevant to modern readers. Reynolds reminds us that in the premodern era “English people were largely on their own to work out what they believed, what they valued” (201). The explosion of written medical knowledge in practical manuscripts, accelerated by the advent of print culture, made navigating this flood of information more daunting. Today, as we sift through health advice in increasingly unmoderated online spaces, we find ourselves in a similar predicament. Just as early Londoners turned to church doors in search of medical wisdom, we now rely on our screens to guide us through the sprawling digital marketplace of information. And just as Thomas Forestier once felt powerlessness in a “free-for-all” market of medical texts, today’s physicians struggle to maintain an authoritative voice in the deluge of online data. 

Caleb Prus is a 3rd-year MD candidate at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. He holds a MSt in English (650-1550) from the University of Oxford and a BA in English Literature and Chemistry from the University of Rochester. His Master’s dissertation, supervised by Dan Wakelin, studied the use of Middle English bloodletting texts by John Tyryngham, a fifteenth-century Londoner. He has presented his research at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, the Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies, the American Association for the History of Medicine Annual Meeting, and the Corner Society for the History of Medicine.

Around the Table Podcast: Talking Curious Cures with James Freeman

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks to the principal investigator of Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries, Dr. James Freeman. Curious Cures is an impressive project to digitize, catalogue, and conserve over 180 medieval manuscripts that contain unedited medical recipes in the University of Cambridge Libraries. Dr. Freeman talks about manuscripts, recipes, digitization, the Curious Cures team, and some of the challenges and rewards of working on such a large projects. To stay up-to-date with the project’s progress, follow #CuriousCures on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and the University Library on Twitter.

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

Medieval Medical Recipes in the Cambridge Digital Library

Curious Cures Project and Team

Cambridge Library Digital Content Unit

Cambridge Library Conservation and Collection Care

Wellcome

The Polonsky Foundation Greek Manuscripts Project

Index of Middle English Prose

eTK/eVK2 Project

Peter Jones

Text Encoding Initiative

Culinary Recipes of the Middle Ages (CoReMa)

Transkribus

This Podcast Will Kill You (Episode 108 Gout: Toetally fascinating)

Hannah Bower

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a new 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. Today I’m speaking to Dr James Freeman, principal investigator of Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries, an impressive project to digitize, catalogue, and conserve over one hundred and eighty medieval manuscripts that contain unedited medical recipes in the University of Cambridge Libraries. James, thank you so much for joining me today.

James Freeman 00:48

My pleasure. Thank you very much for the invitation.

Sarah Kernan 00:51

Well, let’s start off with some basics. Could you tell everyone about Curious Cures, what exactly does the project encompass, and what manuscripts are part of this project?

James Freeman 01:01

Well, you summarized it very well in your introduction. So, as you say there’s over one hundred and eighty, I think it’s one hundred and eighty-six in total, medieval manuscripts, so handwritten books. They are predominantly late medieval manuscripts…fourteenth, fifteenth century, some into the early sixteenth century, though there are a few earlier. I think the earliest is eleventh century that we’ll be covering. And the one thing that they have in common is that they contain unedited, or uneditable even, medical recipes. So, these are recipes that have never been published in print before, or for the most part haven’t been published in print. They’re mostly English in origin and particularly the later medieval ones. Many of them contain recipes written in Middle English, but there’s a big mix of Middle English, Latin, there’s some in Anglo-Norman French, and there’s some, a few, in Old English. But it’s a fairly miscellaneous kind of corpus because, of course, the one thing it has in common is the unedited nature of the medical recipes that these books contain. So there were also manuscripts from Italy, in particular, but also France, I think there’s some from Germany, too, that are being covered by the project. But most of them are English and that’s a reflection also of the way in which the collections at Cambridge University Library and the Colleges and Fitzwilliam Museum that are collaborating with us have developed and what our collection strengths are.

Sarah Kernan 02:42

What kind of conservation and cataloging and digitization is actually taking place with these?

James Freeman 02:49

So, the conservation is, for the most part, focused on the conservation for digitization. So, this is the sort of routine stabilization work, repairing tears, that sort of thing, and where items are particularly fragile, providing the photographers in the University Library’s Digital Content Unit with sort of help in setting up, supporting, and handling the manuscripts. There’s a certain number within the project that will be able to do more intensive treatments which might involve in some cases doing a bit of rebinding or kind of more time consuming work that will ensure that these materials are accessible, not only digitally, but also in in the flesh, so to speak, to researchers for decades to come. All of the manuscripts that are being covered will be re-boxed or boxed, the ones at the University Library. So that’s the conservation sort of side of things.

James Freeman 04:03

Digitization, so it’s a bit of a mixed picture. Because we’re collaborating with twelve Cambridge Colleges, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and doing some of our own manuscripts at the University Library, as well, the picture is quite, is a bit mixed. So, for instance, Trinity College, they’ve digitized all or almost all of the manuscripts that we’ll be covering there and they have their own set up. Some, but most of the colleges, don’t. Corpus is another one that has had all of its manuscripts already digitized, but most of them don’t, so they will be coming to the UL for conservation treatment and for digitization by my colleagues in the Digital Content Unit. That digitization is going to be cover to cover. So, all of the, you know, the bindings, spines, four edges, all of the end leaves, all of the pages, and I mean I couldn’t go into the technical specifications about photography. But if there are some photography enthusiasts among your listeners, they’re welcome to get in touch and I can put them in touch with Raffa Losito, who is the project photographer, and she could give them all the details about the lenses, and the photography cradle, the rig that they’ve got set up, because I know some people get really interested in this. So yes, so that’s the conservation and the digitization.

James Freeman 05:26

The cataloging, again, it’s kind of the usual sort of thing that you would expect with a digitization project. So, I’ve got a team of three catalogers, Clarck Drieshen, Sarah Gilbert, and Tuija Ainonen, who will be describing the manuscripts textual contents. So, what the texts are and the intellectual contents of the manuscripts, their material characteristics, so what they’re made of, the collation, the structure of the gatherings of leaves, the dimensions, the layout of the text, what the decoration is, style of handwriting, etc., etc., etc. And also the history of those manuscripts as objects, so what their date and place of their origin, to the degree that we’re able to know this either from explicit evidence like scribal colophons, which are quite rare in English manuscripts, or more generally paleographical or art historical evidence, and also their provenance. You know, their ownership. And then the point at which they’ve come to the UL, you know, and there’s a number of common ways in which they’ve been acquired or donated to us over the centuries.

Sarah Kernan 06:43

How have you determined, or how has your team determined, which manuscripts would actually be conserved and digitized in these collections, as well as what kind of transcription or contextualization work was actually necessary?

James Freeman 06:58

So, it’s a tricky one for conservation because, you know, we don’t have the capacity outside of a project, outside of an externally-funded project, to do the sorts of detailed condition survey work that is the step one, if you will, of the Curious Cures project. So we have to make a kind of guess and an informed estimate of what is likely to be required on the basis of our experience with previous digitization projects. So, we’ve just come to the end of a major project to digitize, catalogue, and conserve all of the manuscripts in Cambridge Libraries that contain texts in Greek, which was funded by the Polonsky Foundation. So, we’ve got a bit of experience there, so we can. My colleagues in Conservation Shaun Thompson, who’s the lead conservator, and his colleagues Marina Pelissari and Rachel Sawicki, can come up with a sort of per manuscript estimate of what materials they’re likely to need, you know, materials to make a box and you know, wheat starch paste, Japanese tissue paper, that kind of thing, for doing the repairs. But then can also make an estimate of what might be required for more intensive work, both materials and their time, for a subset of maybe a dozen, or a few more, that will require a bit more, a bit more TLC, let’s say. Though obviously they’re much better informed than I am, and they could again provide the kind of detail that me as a non-expert can’t. So, if there’s any, again, if there’s any of your listeners who are interested in what they’re doing, there will be blog posts, I can promise you that, but we could also give you further information if you’re interested.

Sarah Kernan 08:47

Well, you’ve mentioned a couple other individuals who are part of the team who are helping out with this project. How large is the team, is it is it all staff, are there faculty or students or members of the public, or who all is involved in this project?

James Freeman 09:04

So, it’s a combination of existing members of staff whose time the project has essentially bought out. So, part of my time has been bought out while I run the project so we’ve recruited somebody as backfill for my role. Although coincidentally, he is actually also working as a cataloger the rest of the time. So, for instance, the cataloging team, they’ve all been hired from outside and they’re on fixed-term contracts for the project. But members of Conservation and Digital Content Unit, for instance, they already worked at the UL, so the Digital Content Unit, for instance, has to be sort of self-financing. So, the wages of the photographers that are paid, that work there, are paid by digitization projects, commercial orders, that kind of thing, so it’s a little bit of a mix. So, I mean the team is pretty large. I think there’s, and a rough guess I think, there’s about a dozen or maybe fifteen people involved in one way or another. It’s larger if we also count all of the librarians in the college libraries who are liaising with my colleagues in Conservation about the transfer of manuscripts from their library to ours and so on. So, it’s a fairly big enterprise, you could say, so we have regular team meetings and there’s a steering group that meets quarterly just to kind of keep a handle on progress.

James Freeman 10:39

There aren’t members of the public involved at this stage in what we’re doing, simply because the focus of the project. So, we’re funded by Wellcome by one of their research resources awards, and the focus, or what Wellcome’s kind of priority, are in their formulation health researchers in the humanities and social sciences. So, you know historians of medicine, historians of science, that kind of thing. So this is a sort of scholarly endeavor aimed at providing those researchers with better access to the collections that we have at the UL and other libraries in Cambridge. That said, there’s clearly great scope for public engagement and the response to the project so far to the initial publicity and the announcement of the launch has been kind of a bit mind-blowing, to be honest. Like I knew people would be interested, but I didn’t, I wasn’t quite prepared for how interested and what level of attention the project has received so far. I mean, it’s really encouraging and a lot of that, you know, that’s testament to the kind of skill of my colleague Stuart Roberts and his team in the Library’s communications office in getting the press release prepared and sent to the right places. So myself and other members of the team have been trying to keep the momentum going from that by doing podcast recordings like this. But also we’ve got blog posts that are forthcoming, and it’s in the very, very early stages, but after the project there is potentially the possibility that we might do a physical exhibition at the UL that can communicate some of the outputs of the project to a broader popular audience.

Sarah Kernan 12:37

Well, given all the excitement about the project, how long do people have to wait to see any of these digitized manuscripts? Will we start seeing any soon, or will we have to wait a couple years for anything to be posted?

James Freeman 12:51

No, no. For the sake of my sanity, we’re going to release them in batches rather than leave it all to the end. So, the first group of manuscripts, which I think might be sort of maybe around twenty or so, are going to, hopefully, all being well, unless there’s some major technical hiccup, will be appearing on the Cambridge Digital Library at the end of this month. It’s tricky, big digitization projects. There’s a lot of moving parts and eventually, obviously at the end everything comes together. But at the moment, we have a bunch of manuscripts that the catalogers have catalogued, a bunch of manuscripts that the photographers have photographed, but the two groups aren’t necessarily the same manuscripts, so where those two groups do overlap we’ll be putting those online as soon as we can. And so the plan is to do the first release at the end of this month and then to do quarterly ones thereafter; so end of March, end of June, end of September, and end of December.

Sarah Kernan 13:55

Digitizing these manuscripts obviously has great value for anyone studying medieval medicine, but what else is included in these manuscripts that other scholars might find useful? Are there culinary recipes, or literature, or poetry, or interesting household or scientific texts?

James Freeman 14:16

It’s a real mix, because the selection criteria, if you will, is that a manuscript contains an unedited medical recipe. We have got receptaria manuscripts, you know, compilations of dozens or even hundreds of medical recipes. We’ve got medical recipes that contain, medical manuscripts that contain recipes dotted in their, you know, texts or in their peripheries, but also non-medical manuscripts that have had recipes scribbled onto end leaves, or fly leaves, or margins, or blank space, or whatever. So, it’s a real mix. One thing I haven’t said so far is that in addition to the cataloging, digitization, and conservation, you know as if we’ve not got enough to do, I’ve also set us the challenge that we’ll be transcribing all of the recipes in full. I can say a bit more about that in due course. So, the idea is that what the cataloging will do is give researchers a sense or an insight into the intellectual contexts in which recipe medical recipe knowledge was being recorded and disseminated. And the digitization, kind of complementary to that, will show how that knowledge is being arranged and organized on the page.

James Freeman 14:51

We know where the recipes are because of the great work that contributors to the Index of Middle English Prose or Thorndike and Kibre’s index of incipits or Linda Voigts and Patricia Kurtz’s work on Middle English medical texts which are now in the kind of eTK and eVK online resource, the fantastic work that they’ve done. We know where this stuff is, but we don’t necessarily know what the, you know, the kind of granular detail. You know, where can we find recipes that concern toothache, or headache, or difficult pregnancies. Or where do we find instances of, I don’t know, herbs like rosemary, or sage, or rue being used. And in combination with what other sorts of ingredients. It’s much harder to get at the at the nitty gritty. So, the idea behind the transcriptions is that we can give researchers that sort of access. So yes, so the other contents can be very, very varied. They’ll be the kinds of medical texts that you would expect to see, texts by, I don’t know, Matthaeus Platearius and others, or Johannes de Sancto Paulo, but also nonmedical texts. You know, so we have bibles, books of hours, liturgical books. I think we have literary texts as well. Legal manuscripts.

James Freeman 17:08

I have to say I was when we were thinking, when I was thinking about the project and putting things together and considering the scope for the project, I thought, you know, can we really justify all the energy and effort and expense that digitizing a non-medical manuscript that might just contain a few recipes on its end leaves when we could focus on more medical, more medically-focused, or you know, medical-specific manuscripts. Now, my rationale was that, well, manuscripts that contain more stable medical texts are, if they haven’t already been edited, are more likely, or have a greater chance than tiny little recipe texts which are anonymous and very mutable and often have very small variations between them. They have the more stable medical texts have a much greater chance of being edited in a more traditional sort of scholarly edition whether it’s printed or online. And, I was looking at some of the manuscripts, as well, just thinking about the non-medical contexts in which you find these recipes, and there’s a legal manuscript at the at the UL that I was looking at as part of the project. I think it’s called Additional Manuscript 2994. And it contains copies of statutes, legal formularies, that kind of thing. Interesting if you’re into that kind of thing. And I looked at the recipes which are on the end leaves, and they are, you would expect, they’re going to be miscellaneous, they’ve been scribbled in by a number of different hands, they don’t have any kind of rationale. It was just, you know, convenience, or there’s the most easily to hand bit of spare parchment. What I found here, was that there’s a couple of dozen or more recipes, all for the same complaint, that have been deliberately gathered by one person. They’re all copied by the same hand or thereabouts. Most of them have been copied by one hand, there might be a couple of others that have been added on by different hands. So, there’s a sort of deliberate organizing, you know, intention behind this. I mean they’re all for gout, so insert obvious joke about medieval lawyers and their rich diets here. So yes, so the contents of the manuscripts is going to be very varied. Now that fulfills sort of our own institutional objective, which is to get as many of our manuscripts digitized and cataloged and available to people virtually as possible, but it also fulfills Wellcome’s requirements and the needs of these historians of medicine, health researchers in the humanities and social sciences, in being able to access this kind of stuff.

Sarah Kernan 20:07

Well, going back to when you were coming up with the idea for this project, what was your intention? What makes now the right time to do such a large project like this?

James Freeman 20:21

Well, we were, I mean it’s been long in gestation, I have to say. I think that our first kind of conversations about it, and I have to acknowledge the help of Peter Jones who’s a fellow at King’s College here in Cambridge and he was very helpful in these sort of early stages, thinking about medical manuscripts at the at the UL. It was not a part of the collection, I have to confess, I knew very well at that time. But I think we were, I think we were first talking about it in certainly pre-pandemic times. So I think maybe 2018. And we were at that stage just at the start of the Polonsky Greek Manuscripts project. But of course, you know how it is. You’re already thinking about what the next thing might be, and we knew that Wellcome offered this research resources award to enable libraries like us to make our collections more accessible to researchers. And we also knew that and we’ve got a kind of proven track record of cross-collection collaborative digitization projects. So, we thought well, how could we best leverage, if you will, what we’re doing with the Polonsky Project to the kind of next thing.

James Freeman 21:34

One of our collection strengths as well as medical manuscripts, are manuscripts containing text in Middle English, you know, and literary texts, you know, Canterbury Tales, works by, you know, William Langland, John Gower, and so on, are very frequently used for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, as well as being sort of internationally significant for research. The medical ones are as well, but I have to say I hardly ever get those out for teaching. And I thought students would really take to this because, of course, you know, well, they would take to them for the reasons that they take to Chaucer, because it’s full of kind of bodily functions and you know very kind of visceral descriptions of human life and death. So, I thought these will have a great role to play in student teaching in the future. So, then I sort of started to look at what kind of resources existed and think, well, how could we improve on all the brilliant work that the IMEP or eTK and eVK have done.

James Freeman 22:43

And in September 2019, I went to a conference in Austria in Graz about TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative. So, this is about the kind of marking up of text with custom tags to essentially make it machine readable, categorizing what the content of the text is. And I met a researcher called Helmet Klug who is working on the Culinary Recipes of the Middle Ages project, CoReMA, which I’m sure your listeners will be familiar with, and his team were transcribing and marking up these cooking recipes using TEI tags, so marking up what words described ingredients, preparatory techniques, measurements of weight or quantity or time, equipment, that kind of thing, and I thought, well, this would map brilliantly onto medical recipes. I don’t feel embarrassed about saying that I thought, well, I’ll just nick this methodology, it’s brilliant! Why change it? You know, and in keeping some consistency with what CoReMA were doing, then of course you could bring the corpus of culinary and medical recipes together potentially, which would be really valuable for research so to see what kind of crossover there is in in these two texts. Now, first of all, you need the transcriptions, so we’re not going to be able to do what CoReMA are doing at this stage. We may actually have to leave that to health researchers in the humanities and social sciences to do that more involved kind of compact marking up and then comparative analysis. But, the development of handwritten text recognition technologies as well, means that we stand a good chance of being able to generate the full text, the quantity of full- text transcriptions, that previous initiatives, cataloging and indexing projects, haven’t been able to do.

James Freeman 24:51

So, we’ll be using Transkribus as a platform to do the, you know, line division and transcribe the text. We’ve got some developers here at the UL, Mary Chester-Kadwell is one of them, and she is going to help us kind of get up and running with Transkribus and improve on the TEI export that Transkribus generates. Because it’s a TEI description that will be produced, that the catalogers are producing, so we can bring that data together and put it onto the digital library. So yes, so that’s, those sorts of all of those sorts of things came together in terms of the timing of the project. We’ll have to see, there’s going to be a bit of, you know, trial and error and testing with Transkribus now, because of course. So, I went to the latest conference in Innsbruck last September and it’s clear that the machine, if you could call it that, requires much less manual training than it used to, say, five, six, seven years ago, in order to produce a model that comes up with an acceptable or a workable character error rate. And some people who were presenting their research were getting you know, really quite incredible resources. You know, character error rates of not just less than ten percent, less than five percent. So, and I was assured by people who are more familiar with this than I am, which was basically everybody else at that conference, that it’s much quicker to run things through Transkribus and then correct, than it is to do it manually. But, we’re not dealing with beautifully organized, neatly laid out texts with most medical recipe manuscripts. We’re dealing with scruffy layouts, multiple hands, writing in in different directions, you know, texts on the margins and the peripheries. So, we’re going to have to just sort of see how things go. Some manuscripts undoubtedly will respond better to the to the Transkribus treatment than others, but I think it might be quite interesting and push the boundaries a little to see what the capabilities of this software is with this somewhat un-standard, un-standardized style of manuscripts.

Sarah Kernan 27:28

The digitized images that come out of this project, those will obviously be able to be freely viewed by anyone. Will researchers be able to use those images freely?

James Freeman 27:40

Sure. So, we’ll be making them available as you say on the Digital Library using the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0. So, people can, they’re free to share them and adapt them so long as attribution is given and that the purposes are non-commercial in terms of publication. So, you know, you could use things on your blog or in teaching or in slideshows. Go for it. But for publications, they would have to apply for licenses to reproduce. Now, there might be room for negotiation about terms on that, I’d have to leave that to my colleague Domniki Papadimitriou in the DCU. She could advise, but I hope that seems kind of reasonable. The images will be available in one form or another, I mean, I would say in perpetuity to the degree that, you know, any of us know what’s going to happen in five, or ten, or twenty years’ time, but certainly the descriptions will be uploaded as a data set and individually to the university library’s repository, Apollo. So, it will be possible to access them both there and through the Digital Library. So, the idea is that there’s a kind of stable version. Each catalog entry has its own DOI and the collection as a whole has a DOI, so that there is a record of each of the catalogers’ work that they can point to in their future research and whatever. But also, then we can, we may as the years go by want to enhance and augment and revise and expand those descriptions in the Digital Library.

Sarah Kernan 29:19

Yes. Well, final question. Do you have any favorite recipes yet that you have come across in these manuscripts, or are there any really outstanding features that you are excited for researchers to discover?

James Freeman 29:35

Well, yeah. That’s a hard question to answer because there’s so much good stuff in there, and if people, you know, and your listeners, you know, work on this stuff they’ll be, they’ll know this already. I mean, I like one that’s a cure for headaches which basically involves grinding pepper and boiling it in white wine, and then, “as hot as thou might suffer hold thereof in thy mouth and when it is nigh cold spit it out and take new and so do till the ache be away.” So, basically deal with your headache by getting drunk again. I mean there are some really interesting recipes deal with sort of female health and particularly childbirth. And it’s interesting. You know that the head-to-toe organization of recipes, such as it is, struggles, I think, to know where to place these treatments. You know it does start off with the head and you know works through headaches, and toohaches, and sore eyes, and, you know, coughs, and, you know, aching arms, and then it sort of gets to the gets to the middle regions and then sort of loses its way. But there are charms in amongst these medical recipes, of course. You know, there’s one in Additional Manuscript 9308, which is at the UL, very common, it’s one of the so-called peperit charms and it’s for a woman that travailth of child. So it, and peperit being the, you know, Latin verb give birth to or bear a child, you know, invokes all of these female saints who, you know, gave birth. So, invokes, you know, Saint Mary peperit Christ, Sancta Anna peperit Mariam, Sancta Elizabet peperit Johannem, Sancta Cecilia peperit Remigium. So, it’s invoking all of these important female saints, and you’re supposed to write this on a strip of parchment and bind it around, you know, the arm, or the leg, or the belly of the of the woman who’s in a kind of having a bad labor. And in fact, I think the Wellcome have a surviving example of this.

James Freeman 31:54

So that’s the kind of charm side of it, but then you also see the medical side of it, as well. And there’s a recipe for a woman in a similar predicament and it instructs you to take the juice of vervain, so the kind of common plant verbena, and give this to her to drink in cold water and she shall soon be delivered with the grace of Jesus. So, I mean, I wouldn’t dare to presume how effective or not that might be. I suspect not very effective at all. But I don’t know what the juice of vervain tastes like, maybe it’s utterly disgusting and the idea is that it takes your mind off things. But yes, there’s so many to choose from. There’s, if anybody here listens to the podcast This Podcast Will Kill You, you know they had one on gout recently. And the ones for gout are absolutely brilliant. Ah, you know there’s a very elaborate recipe which I couldn’t resist mentioning in the publicity for the project, about roasting a puppy stuffed with snails and sage, or the one that involves taking an owl, gutting it, salting it, baking it in an earthenware pot and then grinding it up and mixing it with boar’s grease to make a salve that you then rub on the affected area. None of which will have worked. But yeah, the elaborateness of some of these recipes. And there’s a researcher here in Cambridge, Hannah Bower, who works on recipes and magic tricks, as well, and she’s sort of suggested, you know, what’s the kind of value of these, is there a kind of entertainment dimension to them, were some of them not actually intended to be taken seriously, which I think is really interesting. So, hopefully what the project is doing will provide her and other researchers in this area with the material for new discoveries and new insights.

Sarah Kernan 33:47

Yeah, I’ve no doubt that this project is going to yield a lot of incredible research with all the information that researchers will now have access to freely. James, thank you again so much for joining me today to talk about Curious Cures.

James Freeman 34:04

My pleasure. Thanks very much for the invitation, Sarah.

Sarah Kernan 34:07

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.