Recipes and Book Culture in England, 1350–1600

Carrie Griffin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Limerick, Ireland Hannah Ryley is Lecturer in Medieval English at Balliol College, Oxford. She is also Co-Executive Officer of the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature.

'“Ffor to cutte an egge of a feelde”. These adventurous essays are at the cutting edge of their field. They recover the recipes for cooking, craft, astrology, medicine and magic, in English, French and Latin of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They turn in detail to their origins in manuscript ‘material texts’, to learn how recipes were read in late medieval England. At the same time, they challenge ways of reading today, for genres often dismissed as ‘non-literary’. These essays find that recipes not only prompt other acts of creativity—domestic, scientific and artistic; they are themselves full of verbal craft and immaterial imaginings. As well as offering discoveries about the medieval recipes, the chapters themselves are like diverse recipes or models for making practical writing into something serious and delightful. This book joins the current effort to expand and explode the canon of writings from medieval England.' Professor Daniel Wakelin

• Introduction: Ways of Reading Recipes. Carrie Griffin & Hannah Ryley “As the coke and the phisicion wyll agre & deuyse”: Language Cues and Potential Users of Medieval English Medical and Culinary Recipes. Francisco Alonso-Almeida Astrological Questions as Recipes for Knowledge. Mari-Liisa Varila Feasts, Menus and Provisioning in the Fifteenth-century: Evidence from the Porter Manuscript, Yale Center for British Art SK25 .T85 1450. Julia Boffey John Shirley’s Recipes and Fifteenth-Century Celebrity Endorsement. Margaret Connolly The Brickmaker, the Tavern Keeper, and the Knight: The Role of Obscurity and Imagination in Medieval Medical Recipes. Hannah Bower The Luminescence of Medieval Media. Tom White Late Medieval Book-Craft Recipes and Perceptions of the Material Text. Eleanor Baker Domestic Wonder and the Medieval Home. Chelsea Silva Practical Knowledge and Medical Recipes in Sixteenth-century English Travel Writing. Natalya Din-Kariuki Bodies in the Recipe Collection: Interacting with Manuscript Charms in Late Medieval England. Katherine Storm Hindley Latin Recipes in Medical Practitioner Handbooks. Peter Murray Jones “Et melles en semble”: Literariness and a Trilingual Recipe Collection from Late Medieval England. John Colley