Tag Archives: Reformation

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.

The Reformation and a Recipe Book

By Lara Artemis

Oak panels of manuscript showing stitching binding. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

It is rare to find a manuscript from the early 15th century that combines folk remedies with religious iconography and a royal heritage to boot – even more rare is to find one that has been heavily defaced.

Such a manuscript exists in the Archives and Manuscripts collection at the Wellcome Library – MS.5262. Lara Artemis, former conservator here at the library, uncovered the manuscript as part of her MA in Medieval History. In the process, she unpeeled the layers of what turned out to be a fascinating and possibly unique insight, not only into medieval medicine, but of religious symbolism at a time of particular spiritual turmoil – the Reformation.

Inscription of Andrewe Wylkynson. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Although the dating remains speculative, it is believed to be from around the early 15th century partly because of the dedications within. There is proof of its 16th century ownership in the form of ‘Andrewe Wylkynson Surgeon’.

More intriguing is the fact that it belonged to Henry Dyngley of Worcestershire who died in 1589 and came from a line of staunch Catholics and rural famers working as doctors. Dyngley married Mary Neville, the daughter of Knight Sir Edward Neville who not only held a long list of prestigious roles within the court of Henry VIII, but who descended from Edward II and Queen Isabel of England in the 13th century. Isabel was a keen patron of medicine and was famously paranoid about her health. It is no suprise then to find the health regimen, a sweet wine tonic, is dedicated to her at the end of the manuscript.

Equally fascinating is the manuscript’s association with oak. Not only is it bound in oak but the religious images feature oak trees and acorns in all but one. Traditionally a pagan symbol, the oak was re-interpreted by Christians to represent Christ, a symbol of endurance and strength in the face of adversity. Given the possible date of the manuscript, and the significant damage to the religious images only, suggests this manuscript is a rare survivor of Henry VIII’s iconoclastic reformation when vast quantities of religious materials were destroyed in a Protestant bid to rid the country of any visible signs of Catholicism.

Why did the iconoclast stop at the religious images only? The explanation seems to be clear: this was too useful a manuscript full of day to day ‘quick health fixes’ that would have been invaluable to a well-to-do family like the Dyngley’s. This was an era where university educated medical practitioners were in short supply, particularly in rural areas and folk remedies proved invaluable.

The practical recipes include how to reduce the swelling of the scrotum: “Who so hap ache or swellynge In his balloke” – the solution, a poultice from pounded barley and cumin mixed with honey applied to the offensive area. Another common but potentially harmful ailment was a skin disorder which is described ‘Who so hap pe wilde fire…”, in other words, ergotism, also known as St Anthony’s fire. This was a reaction to ergot fungus in barley meal, a common source of food in the medieval period, which famously caused bewitchment. The suggested cure involved applying cooked and strained leeks to the face in addition to white wine, rye meal, and eysel. Ergot contained a chemical that made sufferers go beserk, largely because it caused gangrene and eventual loss of hands, feet and fingers. If not treated, and it rarely was in the Middle Ages, the poisoning led to the sensation of being burned at the stake. St Anthony’s association with the ailment comes from the monks of the Order of St Anthony who achieved relative success at treating victims. To fund their charitable work, the same monks reared swine which partly explains the presence of the pigs in the image of St Anthony within the manuscript.

Saint Anthony. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Saint Anthony is the first to appear in the front of the manuscript. While the oak trees, acorns (traditional fodder for pigs and many other birds and animals), and a deer (another sign of conception, growth and thereby health) are clearly visible, the rest of the saint is clearly scrubbed out. If it were not for the red liturgical colour (for martyrdom) of his robe and the presence of the pig (a common attribute), his identity would remain a mystery. Although further investigation is necessary to establish any underlying drawing that may have been obscured, as well as dating evidence, it is clear that this, and the other religious images, have been destroyed quite deliberately.

Saint James. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

He is followed by St James who chops down an oak tree with his bare hand (presumably to reveal the medicinal properties of the bark), St John the Baptist, also with an oak tree and, this time, rabbits (possibly to suggest the Christians and the persecuted church, or at least Christians fleeing temptation), and lastly, a Bishop.

While St John is left off lightly by the iconoclast, mysteriously, the Bishop gets the worst treatment leaving only the 2 candles either side visible, symbols of Christ’s divine and human natures.

Saint John the Baptist. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Bishop. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

The manuscript also includes catchword illustrations, possibly charms that were copied and cut into a piece of bark (no doubt oak) of apple peel and placed on the wound as a health-inducing charm.

A cockerill illustrating a recipe for staunching blood. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

The manuscript offers a fascinating glimpse of medieval medical practice in English history. From ailment to treatment, it provides a practical medical resource to the practitioner, through both its scholastic and its ‘folk’ medical content. Further research is clearly needed to establish just how unique this manuscript is, more evidence of why it was partially destroyed and, if others exist like it.

This was originally posted by Helen Wakely for Lara Artemis on the wonderful Wellcome Library Blog as “Item of the Month, February 2010: A rare surviving devotional recipe manuscript from the early 15th century”. Thank you to Helen Wakely and the Wellcome Library for agreeing to cross-post this! Lara Artemis who carried out this research is now Collection Care Manager for the Houses of Parliament.