Description:
This volume is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. It explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to late medieval manuscripts' healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose.
Review Quotes: "In addition to offering a new and welcome look at an understudied corpus of texts, the critical approaches used in this book will be valuable to a more general audience of scholars and students seeking new and challenging ways to evaluate and examine the textual history of the medieval and early modern periods." -- Emily Kesling, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Modern Philology
"The scope of the study is truly impressive, encompassing over ninety manuscripts and early printed books consulted and a larger number accessed through medical databases. Instead of choosing to focus on a handful of texts, Bower's study aims to consider vernacular medical remedies as a corpus, albeit one intimately connected to other areas of knowledge and linguistic traditions. The book is written in clear and beautiful prose, approachable both to scholar and student." -- Emily Kesling, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Modern Philology"Bowers urges us to look beyond medical recipes' practical, conventional nature, insisting that we be open to their purposeful aesthetics, imaginary value, and, most importantly, their emotional and physical effects on people's minds and bodies...her work could influence the way we reread historical recipes for wounds, apostemes, broken bones, worms, aches, and fevers" -- Lori Jones, Renaissance Quarterly