Oxford English Monographs Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play 1375-1500 (Hardcover)

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play 1375-1500 is the first detailed book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary imaginative social and codicological contexts. Analysing recipe collections in over seventy late medieval manuscripts this book explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to those texts healing purpose but could also confuse impede exceed and redefine that purpose. The study therefore presents a challenge to recipes traditional reputation as mundane unartful texts written and read solely for the sake of directing practical action. Crucially it also relocates these neglected texts and overlooked manuscripts within the complex networks forming medieval textual culture demonstrating that--though marginalized in modern scholarship--medical recipes were actually linguistically formally materially and imaginatively interconnected with many other late medieval discourses including devotional writings romances fabliaux and Chaucerian poetry. The monograph thus models for readers modes of analysis and close reading that might be deployed in relation to recipes in order to understand better their allusive fragmentary and playful qualities as well as their wide-ranging influence on medieval imaginations.