DOMESTIC MEDICINE IN AN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MANUSCRIPT, GUL (original) (raw)
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"New ‘Medicine’ for Old? Recipes, remedies and treatments in vernacular manuscripts".
Introduction This paper investigates why the Anglo-Normans were so keen to have vernacular copies of works of medicine particularly, those that addressed women’s health. One possible approach is to quantify what it was these works offered readers that was not already available in the vernacular in England or Northern France. Was this really new medicine for old or was it merely old medicine masquerading in a new guise? Beginning with the use of medicinal recipes and remedies in Anglo-Saxon England for women, the paper focuses on later vernacular understandings of women’s medicine after the Conquest. The texts include a vernacular rhymed version of the "Trotula" (Cambridge, MS Trinity College 0.1.20) together with a collection of recipes which in this manuscript has become known as the "Physique Rimee". The third work is a fifteenth-century adaptation of a regimen of health which includes additional material (Paris, MS Biblothèque Nationale fonds français. 2046), which represents another genre of popular medicine, the "Regimen".
Linguistica Silesiana 38: 112-124, 2017
In late medieval England learned medicine leapt the walls of universities and became available to people with no formal medical training (cf. also Jones 1999, Jones 2004). This widespread interest in medicine was partly triggered by the vernacularisation of medical writings. This process involved, among other things, (1) gradual evolution of conventions and norms for, e.g. recipe writing (cf. Carroll 2004) and/or (2) employment of various strategies to adapt the texts to the new audience. The study will attempt to explain what strategies were employed to adapt medical texts, in particular recipes, to the intended audience, i.e., "who speaks [writes] what language to whom and when" (Fishman 1979: 15). For instance, some recipes contain foreign (mostly French and Latin) or sophisticated terminology whereas other recipe collections make use of vernacular resources. This implies that the language of medieval recipes might be the indicator of a social distinction between the readers. The data for the paper come from the Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), a computerised collection of medical treatises written between 1330 and 1500.
Gyf hyr his medycyn: analysing the middle-english recipe medical discourse
Lfe Revista De Lenguas Para Fines Especificos, 1998
Within the historical studies of the English language, only the literary genre has been traditionally under the spotlight. However, there is a numher of texts which still remain virtually unstudied, at least, as far as their internal structure is concerned. Nevertheless, studies on this particular matter by Manfred Górlach, and Paivi Pahta have enjoyed some attention. In this paper, I present the analysis of the recipes contained in Yale MS 47 (ff 60r-71v) pointing out the structure of the texts, and the different linguistic devices used in the different parts of the medical recipe. ' I would like to express my gratitude lo Dr Mercedes Cabrera for the painstaking work of reading earlier drafts of this paper. ^ A comprehensiva discussion of gynaecological and obstetrical manuscripts in Middle English is given by Monica Green (1992). This American scholar classifies the manuscripts ' Abbreviations have been silently expanded in all examples of this paper. Word for word translation offered. Translation mine.
Early Modern English recipes as a mirror of the time period
Neophilological Studies, 2020
This article explores several Early Modern English recipe compilations extant in medical manuscripts through a purposely-built corpus in order to investigate the recipe genre as a mirror of that time period. Probably no other genre is so permeable to the changes in the cultural and social spheres, given that recipes are reflection of the contemporary society where they are written. This fact is especially noticeable in the abundance of remedies for some ailments of particular concern in the early modern period. Diseases were mainly treated with plants known from Antiquity, but Early Modern English recipes also incorporated new substances from the Continent and, specially, from America.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, three Middle English manuals were crafted to aid women in the treatment of the painful and deadly reproductive problems that they regularly faced. Two of these manuals, The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing and The Sickness of Women II, contain prologues in which the author explicitly states that these texts were intended for women’s use. The third handbook, Book Made by a Woman Named Rota, lacks such opening remarks; however, scholars assert that it too was intended for a female audience. ‘A female audience’—what exactly is meant by this generic categorization is not always clear. This phrase suggests a homogenous group of readers linked by biology. This study suggests, however, that the intended female audience was comprised of several types of women. Foremost among them were lay women with medical interests whom the authors address directly in the second-person; these lay women were not licensed and did not practice medicine on a professional level. Another audience includes women suffering from gynecological ailments, parturient women, and new mothers. To these readers both advice and instructions on self-treatment are provided in the second- and third-person. A third female audience is midwives, to whom instructions—almost entirely found in the manuals’ obstetrical chapters—are given in the third-person. These healthcare manuals were not directed to all women but, rather, to ones with some cultural and economic privilege. Making proper use of these handbooks required some Middle English and Latin literacy, medical knowledge, and practical medical skills. Hence, access to the knowledge in the manuals and the ability to perform the treatments they contained was restricted to audiences who belonged to the middling and upper ranks in late-medieval England. As is evinced by the creation and later copying of the three manuals, there were women—exceptional as they may have been—who were capable of mediating between book culture and medical activities. These manuals allowed one woman “to help another in her sickness”. And in the process of helping one another, such women participated in the emergent vernacular medical culture of late-medieval England.
Middle and Early Modern English Medical Recipes: Some Notes on Specialised Terminology
Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies, 2018
One of the text-type features of a recipe is a certain degree of technical lexicon (cf. Görlach 2004). The aim of the present study is to compare the use and distribution of selected group of terms, here references to medical preparations, in Middle and Early Modern English recipe collections. Particular attention will be given to the factors responsible for the choice of terms. Also, we will concentrate on the rivalry between native and foreign lexical units.
História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 2023
This article describes a seventeenth-century English woman writer's interests in medical care and the reasons that led her to publish texts on this topic. Hannah Woolley offered guidance on a wide variety of topics in the domestic sphere, including recipes for health and beauty. Here we investigate the principles that governed the preparation of these recipes, Woolley's intentions in writing on this topic, and the way in which academic medicine was translated and practiced by women routinely during this period. Defining these issues will help shed light on the scenario in which literate female healers worked and the nature of their relationships with learned physicians.