Tag Archives: Melissa Reynolds

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.

Reading Practice: Continuing the Conversation

By Melissa Reynolds

As is so often the case with first academic books, the research and writing that became Reading Practice began many years ago when I was a graduate student. And, as is so often the case with projects of this duration, the research questions that animated my work changed over time. The book I imagined in 2013 is not the book that was published this past August. Yet somehow, the posts in this New Work Forum by Nikiana Dinenis, Grace Murray, and Caleb Prus each draw out a theme from the book that reflects a significant waypoint along the path to what would become Reading Practice. I am immensely grateful to each of them, and to Amanda Herbert, for the opportunity to respond to their posts and to reflect on the ideas that have shaped my work.

An image of the cover of the book Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print by Melissa Reynolds. The image features a woodcut illustration of a man at an early modern writing desk, composing a manuscript.
The cover of Reading Practice, available in paperback or ebook from the University of Chicago Press.

In Nikiana Dinenis’s thoughtful response to my book, she notes parallels between Eamon Duffy’s work on the reception of medieval religious texts in post-Reformation England and my own work on early modern revisions to medical manuscripts. She could not be more on the nose. My interest in “practical manuscripts”—vernacular collections of utilitarian knowledge collected by non-elite people in later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England—was inspired by Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars. In that monumental work, Duffy had shown how important books were in directing the lives of the English faithful, while also modeling how a historian might fruitfully cross the divide that has tended to separate manuscript and print and pre- and post-Reformation culture.

My focus on practical manuscripts (the majority of them recipe collections) reflected my hunch that these sources would extend Duffy’s argument in new directions. Of course, that “hunch” was only possible thanks to the work of scholars like Carrie Griffin, Sarah Kernan, Laura Mitchell, Elaine Leong, and Catherine Rider—much of it here on The Recipes Project—that demonstrated the potential in studying English manuscript recipe collections.

An early fifteenth-century copy of a popular lunar prognostication, conveyed here in images with brief captions. Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 8. Digital Bodleian. Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC 4.0

In trips to libraries and archives over summers in graduate school, I began to see that practical manuscripts taught ordinary English readers that a book was a tool to be used in their lives, one that could direct their actions just as it might also reflect their reactions to the world around them. Back home in the U.S., as I traced the persistence of medieval recipes and instructions into print, I realized that though the reading of practical texts did span centuries, each successive reader brought his or her own set of expectations to bear on their engagement with those texts, whether in commercialized print or decades-old handwritten collections. Grace Murray so elegantly captures this framing when she generously suggests that Reading Practice maps a “history of reading practical texts in manuscript and print that bridges generations.”

The dissertation I completed in 2019 was very much a “history of reading practical texts,” but whether or not Caleb Prus realized as much, when he thoughtfully suggested parallels between the information economy described in Reading Practice and our own post-COVID-19 world of misinformation, his post was a reminder of how much the global pandemic shaped my experience of revising that dissertation into a book.

Folio 13v of Wellcome MS 406, a fifteenth-century collection of medical recipes. This leaf features a prognostication to know “whether a sick body shall live or no.” Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.

As the world shut down in 2020—just six months after I’d begun my first academic job—I couldn’t help but rethink the purpose of a practical book. Though I still believed that many were useful resources whereby ordinary people grew more confident in their abilities to assess natural knowledge, I also realized that these books might be a means by which English people managed a feeling with which I was then all too familiar: helplessness in the face of uncertainty and illness.

My work on Reading Practice has now ended, and yet the avenues for further research on practical manuscripts and books are many. Caleb Prus has pointed out how practical books and manuscripts may inspire us to think more critically about the messiness of misinformation in the past and present. Nikianna Dinenis has reminded us that the effects of censorship—even something so simple as blacking out a recipe in a practical manuscript—are rarely contained to the page. And finally, Grace Murray has left us with a hopeful vision of readers continuing to engage with old texts to make new ideas. That’s certainly what every scholar dreams of, and everything I hope for the future of Reading Practice.


Melissa Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses on early modern Europe, the history of science, and digital humanities. Her work has been recognized by the Renaissance Society of America, American Association for the History of Medicine, Medieval Academy of America, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rare Book School. She is a longtime member of the editorial team for The Recipes Project and is currently at work on a study of environmental medicine avant la lettre.

The Uses and Abuses of Medieval Manuscripts in Reformation England

By Nikianna Dinenis

A familiar image of the English Reformation is one of destruction, of Henry VIII dissolving nine hundred monasteries, scattering their rich manuscript collections to the four winds, and transforming the English landscape into a graveyard of Catholic belief and practice. 

In her new book Reading Practice, Melissa Reynolds presents us with a different sixteenth-century world, one in which medieval manuscripts, far from lost or obsolete, were part of the fabric of everyday life. From the fifteenth century, the literate gentry and middling classes had started to build collections of devotional texts and works of natural history, helping them to navigate the vicissitudes of the divinely ordered world. These manuscripts had long lives; they were family books, passed down through generations, evolving in the hands of new owners, who over time annotated, amended, augmented and censored the texts they inherited, reflecting the new ages in which they lived. While monastery walls decayed with disuse,  folios of religious and medicinal works were kept alive by new generations of Protestants. 

In his 2006 Marking the Hours, Eamon Duffy followed English Protestants as they scrawled across their fifteenth-century Catholic Books of Hours. Ignoring the myriad decrees enjoining them to destroy their old prayer books or urging them to buy the 1545 official Protestant royal primer, many otherwise devout reformists preferred instead to include Catholic books in their new religious practices. There was no one way in which they did so. Over the course of the 1530s and 40s, one reformist reader, possibly the London clergyman John Brygandyne, amended his fifteenth-century Hours by deleting certain popish prayers. At the same time, he added traditional Catholic prayers to a guardian angel; he also drew illuminated initials to imitate the decoration of his original Hours. In a more conventional case of censorship, another owner deleted prayers to the Virgin and sacrament from a fifteenth-century Marian primer. But even this begs the question of why he or she still used it. Perhaps, as Duffy considers, Catholic manuscripts helped people adjust to change through a comforting consistency of habit. 

The same goes for books of natural history, Reynolds shows, which had as much to do with religion as prayer books; people’s relationships to their bodies and the divinely ordered natural world were fundamentally intertwined with religious belief. And again, Protestants preferred to amend or update their fifteenth-century manuscripts, rather than discard them or seek the same knowledge in printed books. After all, Protestants still believed in prognostications, in reading the heavens for godly signs, building upon the rich fifteenth-century culture of almanacs. 

But Reynold’s work shows us that the arc of continuity is only one part of the story. The medieval past was also mined for raw materials out of which to concoct a new Protestant future and worldview, not all of it savoury. 

Collecting manuscripts of natural history was part of a project of English Protestant national identity formation. Men like Timothy Bright, an aspiring, Cambridge-educated physician, and author of several medical works, wrote a treatise in 1580 which extolled “the sufficiencie of English medicines.” He used old English manuscripts of natural history to present a case against foreign medicines by showcasing that English plants and remedies had been revealed to the English people for centuries by a God who favored them, and their health, on account of their piety. Bright collected medieval knowledge to rewrite English national and natural history as a narrative of the teleological march to Protestant truth. 

And there was a dark side to the Protestant fascination with its medieval past, Reynolds tells us. When sixteenth-century readers went looking for the secrets of nature that their ancestors had known, they discovered a world of charms and amulets, material that had provided much of the contents of medieval lay prayer and practice. Many of these charms and remedies related to female physiological matters like childbirth and menstruation and contained recipes for abortifacients. In the fifteenth century this knowledge had circulated freely, but in the active and persecutory hands of sixteenth-century readers, they became newly associated with popery and shrouded in a language of discovery that accompanied all pursuits of manuscripts in an age of print. Readers imagined having stumbled upon a forbidden “secret” female knowledge, and saw a world that needed to be reformed, not only through the censoring of charms on a page but through the vigilant expunging of its practitioners off the page, leading to the first the woman hanged for witchcraft in England in 1566 who was accused of having killed her unborn child with “a certain herb”. 

A charm blacked out by a later reader, in a manuscript studied by Reynolds. London, Wellcome Library, MS 409, f43v. Public Domain Mark
A charm blacked out by a later reader, in a manuscript studied by Reynolds. London, Wellcome Library, MS 409, f43v. Public Domain Mark

In the sixteenth century, the Catholic past was less a discarded relic than a living, evolving, presence in Protestant homes, where in the hands of readers, it provided material for new imaginative visions of the natural and supernatural world. 

Nikianna Dinenis is a PhD student at Princeton University, where she works on women’s reading practices in Reformation Germany.

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.