Tag Archives: seasonal recipes

‘Thus it prevails against its time’: distillation and cycles of nature in early modern pharmacy

By Tillmann Taape

In past centuries, devoid of freezers and heated greenhouses, the seasons affected medicines as well as foodstuffs. In addition to pickled vegetables and stored grain, early modern people worried about their provisions of healing plants and animal substances. These, too, had their season: many herbs were considered most powerful when picked in May, and ‘May dew’ collected from fragrant meadows at this time of year was said to have many healing properties. In his Destillierbücher (distillation manuals), published in the early sixteenth century, the Strasbourg surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig addresses the challenges which arise in pharmacy from nature’s cyclical changes. He explains that most preparations of fresh medicinal herbs are ‘unkeepable’. For example, ‘if you pound herbs, roots or other substances and squeeze the juice from it, then it becomes unpleasant, does not last, […] and soon putrid corruption ensues’.[1] Even with dried materia medica and compound drugs, their medicinal virtues faded over time.

Brunschwig knew this all too well from personal experience. As an apothecary running his own shop near the fish market, maintaining a stock of efficacious remedies was his chief responsibility and expertise. The issue of pharmaceutical provisioning was taken very seriously by Strasbourg’s magistrates. Twice a year, they would send round a committee of medical experts to all apothecary shops, to ensure that no perished goods were stocked, and to throw away any that had gone off.

An apothecary pounding medicines. Brunschwig, Liber de arte distillandi de compositis (Strasbourg, 1512), fol. 6v. © Wellcome Library, London

Brunschwig’s understanding of the material world was shaped by his experience as a pharmacist and shopkeeper, but also by the cosmology and medical theory of his day. While the heavenly spheres were characterised by material perfection and changelessness, all matter on earth was made up of the four elements (air, water,fire, earth) and subject to their constant permutations. They were doomed to endless cycles of generation, change, and decay. Material stability was only possible where the elements were in perfect balance, ‘as you can see in May when it is neither too dry nor too humid, neither too warm nor too cold’.[2]

Brunschwig’s seasonal simile is revealing: a perfect balance of elements is just as rare and fleeting as those precious few balmy weeks in May. As well as pointing to the instability of all earthly matter, the language of seasons and their cold, hot, dry or moist qualities was associated with early modern ideas about the stages of human life. Youth, health, reproduction, decline and death were analogous with the annual cycle of flourishing and decay in nature – a relationship which is richly illustrated in a set of anonymous seventeenth-century engravings (see here for an interactive digital reproduction). The idea of changing seasons was emblematic of an early modern view of the material world which was characterised by instability. Human bodies fluctuated with the shifting balance of their humours, and the very substances which could be used to cure the resulting ailments were themselves fleeting and, in Brunschwig’s words, ‘unkeepable’.

Faced with such difficulties, Brunschwig and others turned to a branch of knowledge with a longstanding commitment to imitating and manipulating natural processes underlying the transformations of matter: alchemy. In particular, Brunschwig describes distillation as a powerful artisanal technique to ‘keep the unkeepable’.[3] Distillation was the art of separation, and in the case of medicinal simples, Brunschwig claimed, their ‘soul’ or healing virtue could be separated from their ‘body’, that is to say the material dross made up of the problematic four elements. Thus liberated, the healing ‘spirit’ of a plant in the form of a distilled water could be bottled and neatly stored on Brunschwig’s alphabetically ordered shelf, where they would keep well beyond their harvest season, for up to three years. Later Destillierbücher echo the idea that one can ‘keep these waters over the year’ as a major selling point of distilled remedies.[4]

While distillation in theory had the power to produce pure and incorruptible ‘quintessences’, this was far too laborious for everyday pharmaceutical practice. Brunschwig wrote for an audience of ‘common men’ as well as artisan colleagues, and most of the distilled remedies he discusses are much more pedestrian. They still have some of the elemental qualities of the original herb, and are ultimately perishable. Compared to ‘unkeepable’ plant juice, however, their decay is slower and more predictable. Brunschwig confidently charts the decline and change in a water’s healing powers over the years, and even gives instructions for ‘recharging’ them. A water can be saved by infusing it with fresh herbs and distilling it once more – thus, Brunschwig reassures his readers, a distilled remedy can ‘prevail against its time’ for another year.[5]

In the early modern world of matter, the seasons symbolised cycles of change and decay which spelled trouble for healers and makers of medicines. In some of the earliest vernacular works on pharmacy, Brunschwig describes distillation as a powerful tool for defying the material corruption of seasonal changes.

[1] Brunschwig, Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus… (Strasbourg, 1500), sig. C1v.

[2] Brunschwig, Liber der arte distulandi simplicia… (Strasbourg, 1509), fol. 36v.

[3] Brunschwig, Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus… (Strasbourg, 1500), sig. C1v.

[4] Eucharius Röslin, Kreutterbuoch von allem Erdtgewaechs… (Frankfurt, 1533), title page verso.

[5] Brunschwig, Liber der arte distulandi simplicia… (Strasbourg, 1509), fol. 18v.

 

Exploring CPP 10a214: Elizabeth Downing’s Busy Month of May

By Hillary Nunn with Rebecca Laroche

Elizabeth Downing was busy in the month of May. Several of her recipes in the opening section of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia manuscript 10a214 specify that they should be made only during that month, and other recipes in the collection call for “May butter” – unsalted butter made in spring – as a key ingredient. The array of herbal ingredients used in these recipes make it easy to picture them being concocted in a rural location, one with ready access to fields blooming with new Spring growth.

In the manuscript as a whole, only April, May, and June are explicitly designated as months when certain recipes should be prepared, presumably because that is when plant-based ingredients would be freshest. May is by far the busiest, with five recipes specifically designated for preparation that month. The recipe for an ointment for “aches, anguishe or swelling of wounds,” attributed to Hellen Jones and endorsed at its end by Elizabeth Downing, requires that it be “made in may and no time else.”

The Historical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Manuscript 10a214, fol. 10
The Historical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Manuscript 10a214, fol. 221.

April and June, moreover, are only named once each, and their mention seems designed to even out the workflow during May’s busier days. Downing, for example, offers her probatum to an “excellent Oyntment for the spleene,” which calls for fresh millelot that “groweth a mongst corne, and is to be gotten the latter end of May or Iune.” A cure for an old sore in the manuscript’s second part, meanwhile, suggests making the herb water on which it is based “in the moneth of Aprill or May, for it cannot be made all the year after.”

This recipe for an old sore, however, is the only one in the manuscript’s second section that explicitly associates a recipe with a production date. While the section includes recipes that demand may butter, it conjures few images of the practitioner gathering ingredients, yet alone collecting them from surrounding countryside. Reading the manuscript’s first section, however, we not only can imagine a housewife picking millelot from amongst the corn; we can also picture her in the fields before dawn assembling ingredients to treat a “blasting by lightning or otherwise”:

Take a faire linnen cloth, and in the
month of may in a morning before sunrise
wipe of the dew of the green wheat with
the cloth & wring it out into a basen
and keep it in a glass close stopped …

The first section’s recipes assume that the recipe maker will be near a wheat field, as well as fresh millelot. As Rebecca Laroche pointed out to me earlier, the ointment for “aches, anguishe or swelling of wounds” demands that it maker collect its ingredients – “the youngest bay leaues & wormwood of each halfe a pound” – during “the heate of the day,” suggesting the plants are readily available, growing nearby.

The manuscript’s second section, however, rarely offers such glimpses of the recipe maker outside the house, collecting her raw materials. This only compounds the mystery that Rebecca outlined in her last entry about the manuscript’s area of circulation. Does the collection, she asked, reflect a Middlesex or Essex location? Whether the first and second sections’ different images of the recipe makers at work hint at changes in the owner’s residence or social network remains unclear, but it is yet another aspect to consider in our attempts to place the manuscript.

This is the thirteenth post in a series on this topic.