Tag Archives: Reading Practice

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.

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.