Recipes are not just instructions. They also embody culture, class, belief, linguistic and literary form, and even include celebrity endorsement. Medieval and early modern recipes can be short and simple but sometimes are not – sometimes they work, and sometimes they do not. They can also be remarkably performative, imaginative, and playful. These essays explore recipes 1350-1600 from a range of perspectives and are unified by an interest in the complexity and richness of these texts.

This volume presents new critical perspectives on medieval and early modern recipes, moving beyond concerns with utility to reframe recipes as part of a dynamic textual and intellectual culture. Contributors build on the sustained scholarly interest in recipes and bring fresh approaches to them. The thirteen essays explore topics including medical, culinary and domestic recipes and charms, as well as how they relate more generally to, for instance, book history, art, astrology and social practices. Collectively, the essays reveal a distinctive book culture by exploring the material forms, literary and scribal practices of recipe books.

Contents

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

Source: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781802074635