Sometime after February 1580, when Catherine Tollemache moved into Helmingham Hall as the new lady of the manor, she opened the vellum cover of her family's handwritten recipe book. Perhaps she was searching for directions to make a silk trim, a pattern for planting her new herb garden, or the dimensions of fabric necessary to make a man's shirt.Footnote 1 The Tollemache Book of Secrets, the title that modern scholars have given to the fifteenth-century miscellany consulted by Catherine Tollemache and preserved by her descendants, contains directions for all of these tasks. Although one is forced to speculate as to which of these recipes Catherine found most useful, her inscription on the inside of the limp vellum cover of the manuscript—“Catheren Tallemache oneth this boocke”—indicates that she once thumbed its pages.Footnote 2 By the time she inscribed her name in this manuscript, however, it was already a century old, having been compiled in the last quarter of the fifteenth century.Footnote 3 Catherine Tollemache, a literate, well-to-do late sixteenth-century woman with access to any number of printed books or contemporary recipe collections, valued this medieval manuscript enough to mark it as her own.
Over the past two decades, a vibrant field of research has grown up around the study of women like Catherine Tollemache and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century recipe books they created or consulted. Historians of English medicine and material culture have surveyed these collections to reveal the important role that women played as healers, makers, and knowledge-brokers within their households and communities.Footnote 4 Literary scholars have looked to these same recipe collections as evidence of female literary activity within the domestic sphere.Footnote 5 Most recently, broad and interdisciplinary interest in recipes has spilled over into online communities like the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective and collaborative research initiatives like the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University or Before “Farm to Table”: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures at the Folger Shakespeare Library.Footnote 6
As it turns out, Catherine Tollemache would be a fitting subject for any of these studies: she was both an author and compiler of her own recipe collection and a recognized expert healer. Her late sixteenth-century collection of confectionary recipes, Receipts of pastery, confectionary, &c, is included within the modern facsimile edition of The Tollemache Book, and her memorial plaque in the church at Helmingham Hall reads, “While she liv'd, for her pietie toward God, pity toward þe poore, and charity in releeving (through her skill and singular experience in chirurgerie) þe sick & sore wounded, she was belov'd and honour'd by all.”Footnote 7 Catherine was knowledgeable in all the ways scholars have come to expect of a woman of her era and of her social status, in medicine, cookery, surgery, confectionary, and the myriad other household activities necessary for running a country manor. To accrue all this knowledge, she had access to printed medical books, recipe collections, and pamphlets, as well as a communal network of experiential knowledge exchanged via letters between friends, neighbors, and family members.Footnote 8 But not to be overlooked among these various sources was her access to the recipes and treatises recorded in the late medieval manuscript The Tollemache Book of Secrets, held in her family's library.
Vernacular collections of useful knowledge like The Tollemache Book emerged as a genre around the beginning of the fifteenth century. In England prior to that time, most practical knowledge circulated in Latin, though a few extant medical and artisanal recipe collections in Anglo-Norman French suggest an early interest in translating useful knowledge into the vernacular.Footnote 9 Beginning in the last quarter of the fourteenth century and continuing throughout the fifteenth, however, as Middle English grew in stature as a literary language, works on topics ranging from husbandry to surgery to pharmacopeia were translated into the spoken language of the English people.Footnote 10 These newly translated instructional works, along with recipes and other useful bits of knowledge pertaining to astrology, agriculture, viticulture, hunting, medicine, cooking, ink-making, weaving, painting, and, sometimes, magic were compiled within practical miscellanies.
The exponential increase in these collections over the course of the fifteenth century was no doubt spurred on by the increasing availability of practical texts in the vernacular, but equally important were a series of dramatic changes to manuscript production over the same period. By the fifteenth century, the expanded use of much faster cursive scripts made books less costly to hire out for copying,Footnote 11 and over the course of the century, paper came down in price so that by 1450 a quire of paper cost only half that of a skin of parchment; by 1500, the price had reduced by half again.Footnote 12 These changes to the methods and materials of manuscript production, coupled with rising literacy rates, resulted in an increase in amateur book production, a phenomenon famously dubbed the “everyman his own scribe” movement.Footnote 13 All of these developments encouraged readers to collect and record useful knowledge in their personal manuscript compilations, which range from professionally copied works to hastily scribbled notebooks and everything in between.Footnote 14
These late medieval sources of useful knowledge have captured the attention of medievalists, particularly literary scholars and manuscript specialists, for several decades.Footnote 15 Thanks to the development and publication of databases like A Manual of the Writings in Middle English and the index of Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English, scholars can now easily track the circulation of various instructional texts among hundreds of extant late medieval practical miscellanies.Footnote 16 In addition, some of these scholars of Middle English have looked forward into the early modern era, identifying the manuscript sources used by early printers as they brought practical works into print for the first time.Footnote 17 But while literary scholars have been successful in linking the medieval to the early modern, historians of early modern England have shied away from these sources altogether. This neglect is especially troubling because, as literary scholars have demonstrated, the treatises and recipes compiled within medieval practical manuscripts are the same texts that fill the pages of sixteenth-century practical books.Footnote 18 Moreover, late medieval practical manuscripts are filled with reader marks and other annotations left behind by late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers like Catherine Tollemache, evidence that should spur historians to evaluate these sources as more than a simple “origin story” in a history of popular print.Footnote 19
This article represents a first attempt to present a comprehensive study of the circulation of useful knowledge in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England that weighs manuscript and printed practical books equally, seeking to understand the circumstances, attitudes, and perceptions that influenced the composition of practical manuscripts in the medieval era as well as the specific pressures and shifting attitudes generated by the commercial print market. The first section compares the contents and composition of four late medieval practical miscellanies with a corpus of eighty-eight practical manuscripts identified in significant collections in the United States and United Kingdom to explore how late medieval readers and compilers conceived of the purpose of a practical book. A second section traces the movement of practical texts from manuscript into early printed books to reveal how the pressures of a commercial book market gradually transformed the ways that practical texts were presented to readers, thus conditioning them to expect to discover “new” knowledge in the pages of printed books. The article concludes with the introduction of the “book of secrets” to England in 1558. By the mid-sixteenth century, readers had begun to hunt for the “secrets of nature” in unpublished medieval manuscripts, thus ensuring that these century-old sources would remain important sites for useful knowledge well into the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When Catherine Tollemache and other early modern readers encountered medieval manuscripts in the later sixteenth century, however, they did so within a very different cultural context than the fifteenth-century compilers who originally set pen to paper or parchment. Thus, while this story is one of continuity from script to print, medieval to early modern, it is also an exploration of the complex ways that readers’ attitudes toward practical knowledge were transformed by new media, new methods of circulation, and competition within the commercial book market. In seeking to understand readers’ changing attitudes, this article proposes to contribute not just to a history of English recipes but to broader conversations about reading, writing, making, and knowing in the early modern world.
Practical Knowledge and the Making of the Miscellany
Over the course of the fifteenth century, English people created scores of manuscripts filled with useful knowledge. The eighty-eight surveyed for this article, from collections in the British, Bodleian, Cambridge University, Trinity College Cambridge, Glasgow University, Wellcome, and Beinecke libraries, were chosen because they contain only instructional texts and little else, and because each is in the vernacular, with only the occasional charm, recipe, or list of ingredients in Latin.Footnote 20 Selected on the basis of these criteria, the resulting sample is remarkably cohesive.
First, as a group, practical vernacular manuscripts look a great deal alike. All but four are quarto-sized or smaller, and those eighty-four range from 294 x 218 mm to a very tiny 87 x 60 mm. Their size suggests that recipe collections were not the sort of book that called for a great deal of expenditure and that readers may have designed these books to be useful, portable, and readily accessible. Forty-eight are wholly made of paper, and seven are constructed from paper and parchment, leaving thirty-three miscellanies on parchment alone. Second, these manuscripts are alike in terms of content. As might be expected, a great many entries pertain to healing and medical preparation: eighty of eighty-eight books contain medical recipes and thirty-eight contain an herbal. While medical texts frequently form the backbone of these practical collections, other categories of useful knowledge also crop up regularly: thirty-nine feature magic or charms of some kind; eighteen contain directions for inks, colors, or book making; nineteen contain a cookery or dietary; fifteen contain treatises relating to agriculture or animal husbandry; fifteen contain prognostications of some kind; five contain instructions for hawking, hunting, or fishing; and eight contain recipes for textile work.Footnote 21 The coherency of these manuscripts taken together—their similarity in form and content—suggests that readers and compilers had expectations for what a practical book should look like and how it should work within their lives. But what were these expectations, exactly?
For the late fifteenth-century compiler of The Tollemache Book of Secrets, the practical manuscript was a place to set down useful information for the household. On the manuscript's sixty-four unruled paper leaves, this compiler has drawn diagrams for a decorative herb garden (fols. 1r, 2v–4v, 25v, 56v–57v, 63v–64v); recorded information on falconry (fol. 14v) and the appropriate methods for fishing at certain times of year (fols. 20–25v); given instructions for how to “restour a dofecote” (fol. 31r) and how to measure the appropriate lengths of cloth for a man's shirt (fol. 31v); copied directions for braiding silk threads into trims and ribbons (fols. 32r–41r); and noted appropriate methods for the planting and grafting of vines and fruit trees (fols. 46–52v).Footnote 22 Besides these Middle English instructions that readily call to mind the business of running a late medieval country manor house, the compiler has also recorded two groupings of charms and magical recipes (fols. 5r–7r, 26v). Some of these recipes instruct on remarkable feats, such as how to become invisible (fol. 5r), how to learn a woman's secrets while she sleeps (fol. 5v), how to escape from a shark (fol. 6r), and how to catch a snake bare-handed (fol. 5v), while others pertain to more mundane matters such as how to stop bleeding (fol. 6r), how to remove warts (fol. 5v), and how to grow parsley in two hours (fol. 6v). Though many of these charms and magical recipes are recorded in Latin, the language used is very simple and the syntax is occasionally wonky.Footnote 23 There are no lengthy Latinate treatises in The Tollemache Book.
The wide-ranging combination of various entries pertaining to the running of a late medieval estate, coupled with the consistent use of East Anglian spelling and informal cursive hand, suggests that The Tollemache Book was created by a member of the household for the family's use.Footnote 24 This amateur scribe hypothesis is further supported by numerous recipes within the manuscript for book-making techniques: a recipe for book glue, which may have been used as a component of another set of instructions to glue torn leaves (fol. 2r); a recipe to make red wax (fol. 7v); several recipes for black and colored inks (fols. 8r–v); and a list of colors used for limning with corresponding prices for those colors (fols. 15v–16v). The contents of the book would have appealed to both men and women within the Tollemache household. The young men of the house may have referenced the instructions related to falconry and fishing, while the matron of the estate may have turned to the instructions for braiding or hand-weaving silk threads into ribbons.Footnote 25
The Tollemache Book’s directions for silk braiding link it with another practical miscellany, British Library (hereafter BL) MS Harley 2320. However, while the materiality of The Tollemache Book—the unruled leaves, the heterogeneous content, the neat but not necessarily professional hand—invites us to imagine the organic compilation of useful information by a member of the Tollemache household, the Harley miscellany exemplifies more formal traditions of manuscript production. Instead of paper, the Harley miscellany is made up of seventy-four parchment leaves (157 x 123 mm), all of them neatly ruled with wide margins. It predates The Tollemache Book by about fifty years, originating sometime in the first or second quarter of the fifteenth-century.Footnote 26 Following a typical calendar of feast days (fols. 1–4), the manuscript contains a book of “nativities,” predicting the disposition, health, and wealth of men and women born under each zodiac sign (fols. 5–30);Footnote 27 a verse prognostication, or storia lunae that instructs on “what tyme hyt ys good seson all thynges for to do” based on the “sygnes of the moone” (fols. 31–52r); and finally, a shorter version of the same directions for silk braiding found in The Tollemache Book (fols. 52r–70v). Except for the opening calendar, each of these entries is copied in the same professional Gothic book hand.Footnote 28 In addition to the continuity of the scribal hand, catchwords between quires, similarities in pen work decoration throughout the manuscript, and three historiated initials of the same style (fols. 5r, 31r, 52r) all confirm that these instructional treatises were meant to function as a cohesive whole.Footnote 29
Here, then, is an entirely different sort of practical book, one that appears to have been created by a professional stationer for a wealthy patron, who—on account of the silk braiding recipes—was likely a woman. And yet, while the circumstances of its creation may have been different from the more informal style of The Tollemache Book, reader marks and additions throughout the Harley manuscript suggest that it was used in similar ways. The neat and professional layout of the Harley miscellany did not prevent later readers from adding recipes and notes on the blank but ruled leaves at the end of the manuscript: a short set of annual prognostications by dominical letter in a late medieval book hand (fol. 73r);Footnote 30 two recipes, one for an herbal tincture to “destrye corrypcyon” and another, a “medecyn for the moder,” in a fifteenth-century cursive script (fols. 71r, 74r); and a short table of contents and another two recipes in seventeenth-century scripts (fol. 73v). In addition, midway through the manuscript, under the prognostication for men born in the sign of Virgo, a sixteenth-century hand has written “Born the 5 of September 1552 in the morn Richerd Havell Richerd Hooper Maud Derrye” (fol. 19v).
Though the Harley miscellany and The Tollemache Book are the only two medieval English manuscripts to contain instructions on silk braiding, the rest of the practical material found in these two miscellanies circulated widely in late medieval England. British Library MS Sloane 1315 has numerous categories of “practical knowledge” in common with both the Harley miscellany and The Tollemache Book. In its modern binding, the Sloane manuscript contains what were originally two separate fifteenth-century codices of paper,Footnote 31 the second of which, a manuscript of 132 leaves (220 x 148 mm), can rightly be called a practical miscellany.Footnote 32 Like the Harley miscellany, the Sloane manuscript begins with a calendar containing information on feast days and a table to help the reader calculate dates pre- and post-Ides (fols. 16v–22v).Footnote 33 Unlike the Harley manuscript, however, the Sloane calendar indicates auspicious days for bloodletting. Following the calendar is a treatise on the “Thirty-Two Perilous Days” on which one should not let blood, contract an illness, or begin a journey (fols. 29v–30v); a dietary, or regimen of food and drink ordered by month (fols. 30v–32r); and then a series of prognostications, first, by day of birth from Sunday to Saturday (fols. 33–36) and then by zodiac sign (fols. 36v–48v). Folios 49–64 contain a storia lunae, or verse prognostication based on the lunar cycle. While the wording of this lunar prognostication is different from that in the storia lunae of the Harley miscellany, the daily prognostications and corresponding biblical framework are remarkably similar.Footnote 34 Finally, closing this section of prognostications, folios 65–67 contain an annual verse prognostication based on the day of Christmas.
The remainder of the Sloane manuscript shifts to recipe-like practical texts: a short series of directions on when best to take certain medicines (fols. 68–69v) and an herbal—an alphabetical list of useful medical herbs with descriptions of their “virtues” and brief instructions on how they should be used (fols. 70–87v)—followed by a lengthy collection of medical recipes and charms (fols. 88v–149r). Like The Tollemache Book, the Sloane manuscript is overwhelmingly copied in Middle English, save for a few charms and magical recipes in Latin, and again as in The Tollemache Book, the syntax within the Latin passages does not suggest a learned user.Footnote 35 Many of the magical recipes in the Sloane miscellany are also found in The Tollemache Book: recipes “To make a woman to tell her cowncell in her slepe,” (fols. 93r–v, 94r, and 116r), to “handell a serpant” (fol. 97r), and to “make parsely sede to growe Wyche in an owre to be kutt” (fol. 115r). And again echoing The Tollemache Book, the Sloane manuscript features codicological and color-making recipes, including one to make red wax (fol. 92v), one to make “glewe for wreters” (fol. 96r), and several more to make gold, silver, white, and blue colors for cutlers or painters (fols. 95v–96r). Finally, like both manuscripts discussed above, marginalia and later additions to the Sloane manuscript illustrate how this repository of useful knowledge was referenced well into the early modern era. A discerning late sixteenth- or seventeenth-century reader has written, “This is very good” alongside the entry for “mylfoyle” in the manuscript's herbal (fol. 82r), but that same reader was far less approving of an “experiment … callyd the Abraham ys eye,” under which is written “evill this” (fol. 98r). The final four folios are filled with recipes added in a later early modern hand, including a section on “Six precious waters made by Ypocaras and sent to a queen sometime in England” (fols. 149–150r).
The Sloane miscellany falls somewhere between The Tollemache Book and Harley miscellany in terms of its production. The entirety of the manuscript (fols. 16–149) is copied in a neat fifteenth-century cursive hand, but very minor changes to the hand throughout the manuscript suggest either that it was compiled over time or that more than one hand was at work.Footnote 36 Even though the margins of the paper leaves have been cordoned off with neat lines, in several places the lines of script become increasingly cramped as the scribe moves down the page. Recipes and treatises do feature rubricated headings and some rather unsophisticated pen work, but folio 112v waits for a “vein man” illustration that was never completed. Thus, the Sloane manuscript is neither the obvious work of a stationer's workshop nor the obvious compilation of an amateur. It is not a manuscript intended for display, but neither does it contain much evidence that it was used in a stillroom. Like many other late medieval practical manuscripts that inhabit this middle ground between formal production and informal composition, the manuscript contains few clues about the person for whom it was created.
Occasionally, however, as in case of the final manuscript under consideration here, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1389, the book reveals a bit about its compiler. The Ashmole miscellany, a manuscript of 123 paper leaves (165 x 120 mm), is the first of two codices now bound together in a seventeenth-century binding.Footnote 37 It begins with a short passage on apothecaries’ weights (fol. 1r) and then continues with an unfinished table of contents (fols.1v, 2r–8v blank) to the collection of medical recipes that follows (fols. 9–18r). Folios 18 and 19 may originally have been left blank for later additions, like the recipes “to make a triacoll fyn” (fol. 18r) and “to make a dowblet of fensce” (fol. 18v), which now partially fill those pages. As in both the Sloane miscellany and The Tollemache Book, charms and magical recipes are copied in English or unsophisticated Latin (fols. 20–21r). There is a recipe to make men or women take off their clothes (“Ad faciendum homines & mulieres deponere pannos suos”), another “For to make men to dawnce,” and another “For to seme þat a mans hed ys of[f].” But these magical recipes share the same page with more obviously practical directions, like one for cleaning “stenyd clothe” and another for a “glu þat wyll not losse for fyre or water” (fol. 21v). Folios 22 through 24r feature still more useful and hands-on knowledge: a treatise on fishing, a recipe to “take wylde geese,” another to “take fyshe,” and finally, a lengthy treatise on how to write on a “swerd” or “any other thynge þat ys maade of yrron or stelle.” These directions are followed by still more medical recipes (fols. 24v–26r) and then a series of astrological entries on the humoral qualities of the planets (fols. 27v–28r), an explanation on how “to know what planet reyneth every owere” of the seven days of the week (fol. 28r–31r), a prognostication on when best to “take a jorne” in every sign (fols. 33r–34r), and notes and tables on the movement of the astrological signs (fol. 34v). The remainder of the Ashmole manuscript (fols. 36v–123) is nearly entirely filled with medical recipes, from unguents to salves to plasters to remedies for toothache, broken bones, or festered wounds.
Though medical recipes are common in late medieval practical miscellanies, those in the Ashmole manuscript are unusual: the scribe has recorded precise measurements for ingredients used in various cures, and, rarer still, these measurements are frequently written in a shorthand of symbols used by apothecaries to stand for certain weights, like a scruple or a drachm. None of the medical recipes in either the Harley or Sloane miscellanies use apothecaries’ symbols for denoting units of measurement, instead relying on general terms like a “handful” or “spoonful,” if they give any measurement at all. The specificity of the recipes in the Ashmole miscellany makes sense, however, in light of a simple note added at the bottom of a detailed list of ingredients for a recipe for “Pellet of Antioch”: “This I have moche used and lovyd, for with it I helyd þe scheryff of Brystowe” (fol. 61r). The note, coupled with a signature and endorsement written under a recipe for the pox—“probatum est per me W Aderston” (fol. 14v)—makes clear that this miscellany was compiled by a practicing physician.
This individual may very well have been the “William Aderston, of London, surgeon” listed as the plaintiff in a trespassing case against the Sheriffs of London registered sometime between 1490 and 1510.Footnote 38 A recipe for a “goode remedy for þe new dyse yese [disease] of þe hede & stomake & swete with payne in þe bake”—probably a remedy for the sweating sickness—corroborates a composition date of later than 1485, around the time when this William Aderston would have been practicing his trade in London.Footnote 39 But while the compiler behind the Ashmole miscellany was likely a professional healer, he was certainly an amateur scribe. The unruled paper leaves of the manuscript are filled to the edges with a late fifteenth-century cursive script that occasionally verges on sloppy, and there is no rubrication or decoration anywhere within the miscellany. Partially filled leaves and blank spaces throughout illustrate how this compiler intended to leave room for the addition of more useful information which he knew he would accumulate in his comings and goings in the bustling environs of London.
These four late medieval practical miscellanies were chosen for close comparison because they represent a wide range of the sort of useful knowledge that might be found within a late medieval recipe book, reflecting the categories of knowledge most common to fifteenth-century miscellanies.Footnote 40 In addition, they reflect a wide range of manuscript production, from the commissioned and professionally produced Harley miscellany, to the semi-professional but hardly ornate Sloane miscellany, to the amateur compilations in The Tollemache Book and Ashmole manuscript. Despite their wide-ranging content and various methods of production, close comparison of these four miscellanies reveals that often the same recipes and treatises—or very similar riffs on the same subjects—appear over and over again. Though there are substantive differences between individual practical texts across these collections, there is a consistency in the themes and concerns they address, suggesting that these collections were compiled because late medieval readers wished to reference specific categories of useful information. In an era of epidemic disease and sudden mortality, readers had an obvious need for medical recipes that promised cures for common ailments, not to mention prognostications that reassured them about their health and well-being for the coming year. It is not hard to imagine why readers needed recipes for ink or book glue, or why country gentlemen appreciated advice on the proper techniques for fishing or equine care. But what is less obvious is how these readers used all of this practical knowledge once it was compiled. While the collections were undoubtedly useful, how were they actually used?
Unfortunately, these manuscripts contain very little evidence that they were consulted in stillrooms, kitchens, or workshops, and in fact their very composition militates against reading them as straightforward “how-to” books. First, the tremendous repetition of recipes and treatises within the collections goes unremarked upon by late medieval readers. For example, folios 111v–112r of BL MS Sloane 1315 contain three recipes “To do away here [hair]” copied one right after the other. Likewise, despite William Aderston's concern for specificity in the quantities of ingredients to be used within his recipes, he copied three recipes “For swellyng of þe membryt [member]” one after the other onto a single leaf of his miscellany (fol. 44r). Neither manuscript offers any interpretive guidance as to why a reader might choose one recipe over the other. The titles for subsequent recipes are simply “Alia modo” (another way), or, “For the same.” This repetition is not confined to recipes: these miscellanies often contain several different versions of competing prognostications.Footnote 41 If the prognostications were supposed to guide a reader's actions, then conflicting predictions for when to let blood or begin a journey would pose a problem. Yet there is little evidence that readers were bothered by what frequently amounted to contradictory advice, or that they were particularly concerned about determining which recipe yielded the best result.Footnote 42
Second, although much of the information in these manuscripts is undeniably useful, it is not readily apparent that the recipes recorded in these manuscripts always met a specific need, or even that they were always intended for actual use. Did the late medieval compiler of the Sloane miscellany really intend to use three nearly identical versions of the recipe to get a woman to tell her secrets in her sleep? What about the compiler of Bodleian MS Ashmole 1378, who likewise copied three nearly identical versions of the charm?Footnote 43 No doubt the compilers found the charm interesting, but it is unlikely that the manuscripts solely represent tools for action. Indeed, most of these manuscripts contain little evidence that any of their recipes were systematically employed; medieval readers did not often record their thoughts or responses. When recipes are marked with notes, like those in the Sloane miscellany (“This is good” or “Evill this”), the notations tend to come from much later, sixteenth- or seventeenth-century hands.
Finally, most medieval recipes and instructional treatises are not described as the product of hands-on experience, and in fact are only rarely attributed to an identifiable figure. When they are attributed to an authority, that expert is most likely to be an ancient figure like Galen or Hippocrates, whose wisdom was drawn from books, not garnered by experience. The prologue to one collection of medical recipes explains that it has been “drawen oute of þe bookes of Galyen and Ypocras and Socrates and Ascopus, the whiche weren þe best leches in her tyme þat weren in alle þis worlde.”Footnote 44 Even if a practical treatise could not claim a direct lineage from a recognized ancient source, a vaguely ancient provenance would sometimes do, as in the “Wise Book of Astronomy and Philosophy,” which describes its author as “an Englyshman full wise and well yvnderstonde of Philosophie and astronomy, the whiche made and compiled this boke out of Grewe [Greek] into Englisshe graciously.”Footnote 45 There are exceptions to this general premise, of course, as in William Aderston's medical miscellany,Footnote 46 but most recipe collections present themselves as compendia of received wisdom.
Considering the repetitive nature of these collections and their frequent reference to ancient expertise over concrete experience, it is safe to conclude that the purpose of these manuscripts was not to foster the production of new knowledge. Instead, they were imagined as tools of collection, places to gather all the bits of useful knowledge that fit within a shared understanding of the “practical manuscript” as a particular kind of book. The useful knowledge contained within those pages could be wide-ranging—from textile recipes to cookery to hunting to medicine—and yet the same wide-ranging categories appear side by side again and again. Indeed, what these miscellanies illustrate is not a brand-new vernacular tradition of practical knowledge but rather a brand new genre of manuscript.Footnote 47 The similarities among these manuscripts—their size, the materials used, their content, the presentation of this content—demonstrate that late medieval compilers had clear ideas about which categories of knowledge “fit” within a particular kind of manuscript that looked a particular kind of way: the practical vernacular miscellany.
Thanks to rising literacy rates and cheaper book-making materials, popular practical texts were copied over and over again throughout the fifteenth century in growing numbers of practical miscellanies, and every new manuscript containing similar texts that addressed the same themes further reinforced the notion that there was such a thing as a defined and finite “corpus” of “practical knowledge.” Compilers determined which texts to include in their manuscripts based on what was available for copying, and what was most often available for copying were those texts most often chosen by compilers. The mutually reinforcing cycle perpetuated itself so that the copying and recopying of various texts reinforced the conventions of the new genre. Thus the development of the vernacular miscellany helped readers to see recipes for medicine, agriculture, animal husbandry, cooking, sewing, hawking, hunting, and book-making as parts of a whole, a complete body of knowledge handed down over generations, which might be theirs too if collected in the leaves of their own personal practical book.
The Press and the Practical Book
In 1476, William Caxton brought the printing press to England, and with it, a new means of circulating various established texts from within this corpus of practical knowledge. In 1485, William Machlinia published the first printed “practical book” in English, the Litill boke necessarye & behouefull a[g]enst the pestilence.Footnote 48 The following year, the Saint Albans printer published a treatise on hawking and hunting, and in 1490 William Caxton printed a Gouernayle of helthe, a dietary and health regimen.Footnote 49 It was not until after 1491, however, when Wynkyn de Worde took over the operation of Caxton's press, that practical books became regular publications.Footnote 50 In 1496, de Worde printed an expanded version of The manere of hawkynge & huntynge, followed by Proprytees & medicynes of hors in 1497.Footnote 51 By 1500, de Worde had a bit of competition from his rival, Richard Pynson, who published an edition of The boke of cokery in that year.Footnote 52 For the most part, however, de Worde's shop at the “sygne of the Sunne” controlled the market for practical books throughout the first and second decades of the sixteenth century. In addition to issuing his own editions of already popular works like The boke of cokery (1510), the Gouernall of helthe (1506), and Treatyse agaynst pestele[n]ce (1509 and 1511), de Worde also published new practical works: Boke of husbandry (1508), The boke of keruynge (1508 and 1513), and The crafte of graffynge & plantynge of trees (1518).Footnote 53
All of these practical books were simply printed versions of texts widely available in medieval manuscripts. De Worde was looking for guaranteed sellers, so why not turn to an already popular corpus of practical texts? It is thus no surprise that de Worde's early printed practical books look a great deal like those in manuscript collections. All of his editions listed in the previous paragraph, with the exception of his book on hawking and hunting, were printed in quarto as pamphlets of twelve to eighteen pages. De Worde seems to have recognized that he would do well to make these texts available to a wide readership at a low cost; his success would hinge on the quantity of his sales rather than the quality of his editions. And indeed, what little evidence survives of early sixteenth-century book sales confirms that these works were sold cheaply. Though practical works only make up about 5 percent of the sales recorded for the year 1520 by John Dorne, an Oxford bookseller, his records confirm that buyers paid between one and two pence for unbound copies of The boke of cokery, The boke of keruynge, Proprytees & medicynes of hors, and Boke of husbandry.Footnote 54 This puts practical books at the same price point as two printed ballads, or somewhere between a quarter and a fifth of a day's wages for a laborer in Oxford or London.Footnote 55 These figures suggest that printed practical texts really were accessible to a wide readership but that each sale resulted in a very little profit.
To stay afloat in the market for practical books, publishers needed to attract readers to come back for more. Almost from the moment that practical books were printed in England, publishers worked to find ways to draw readers’ attention to their particular edition. One of the first practical books printed in England was also the very first book printed with a title page. William Machlinia's publication of the Litill boke necessarye & behouefull a[g]enst the pestilence was likely a response to the first outbreak of sweating sickness in 1485, and over the course of that single year, he issued three editions of what must have been an immensely popular book.Footnote 56 With every reissue, he tweaked the treatise's presentation, gradually moving from a sentence-long title within the text block of the first page to a short title on the first page of text to, finally, a stand-alone title page.Footnote 57 Shortly thereafter, Wynkyn de Worde began to experiment with using woodcuts on title pages, images that served to entice passers-by with visual representation of the subject matter of his various works.Footnote 58 For example, of the practical books issued by de Worde listed above, the 1497 edition of Proprytees & medicynes of hors features an image of a horse and its master,Footnote 59 the 1508 edition of the Boke of husbandry shows two men tending an orchard,Footnote 60 and the 1508 edition of The boke of kervyng depicts a group of well-to-do men and women at a banquet table.Footnote 61
Unlike practical manuscripts, which featured a variety of recipes, treatises, and directions within a single codex, these printed treatises on husbandry, cooking, or medicine were separated into individual imprints. Readers chose from categories of practical knowledge that were separated in ways that make sense now—medical recipes alongside plague treatises, animal husbandry alongside hunting, cooking alongside rules of etiquette for the table—but which mark a substantial shift from the presentation of practical knowledge in manuscript. The combination of a short title with an image that served as an emblem of the book's contents helped readers to easily identify these separate categories of practical knowledge and distinguish one practical work from another. Because practical books were usually sold unbound, these titles and images were readily visible to consumers strolling through the booksellers’ neighborhood around St. Paul's.Footnote 62 It should be noted, however, that despite these early innovations in title pages and the marketing of practical books, the titles of these works are not “catchy” but simply informative: Here begynneth the boke of kervynge or Here begynneth the proprytees and medycynes for hors. In addition, neither Machlinia, Caxton, de Worde, nor Pynson presented any of these early printed practical works as theirs, in the sense that the texts were their compositions or that they were unique to their press. In the first three decades of English print, when there was still relatively little competition in the book trade, and when manuscripts were still the dominant media among English readers, no such claim was necessary or even conceivable.
As competition among printers grew, however, the financial realities of a speculative book market forced a change in the way printers thought about the texts they printed. In 1518, Richard Pynson, by that time official printer to King Henry VIII, became the first to receive a royal privilege for the exclusive right to print specific titles for a period of two years.Footnote 63 The first two practical books printed “cum privilegio a rege indulto” were a prognostication for 1520 from Jasper Laet, an astrologer from Antwerp whose annual prognostications were popular on the English market, and a new book of husbandry, titled Here begynneth a newe tracte or treatyse moost profitable for all husbande men: and very frutefull for all other persons to rede, printed in 1523.Footnote 64 Neither was drawn directly from medieval manuscript sources. Pynson's 1523 treatise on husbandry was, in fact, an original work by John Fitzherbert and not a reprint of the 1508 de Worde edition of the Boke of husbandry. This point is worth making because, up until that time, with the exception of annual almanacs or prognostications, none of the practical books printed in English were compositions made expressly for print.
Did the royal privilege encourage printers to seek “new” texts to print, or did an increase in the number of “new” texts created just for print encourage the development of royal privilege? The causal relationship may be impossible to determine, but one thing is certain: following the introduction of royal privilege, novelty is for the first time touted on the title pages of printed practical books. According to the English Short-Title Catalogue, prior to 1518 there were only three books published in English that claimed to be “new,” none of which were practical books.Footnote 65 In the 1520s alone, twenty-four books were published in England with titles or subtitles that advertised novelty, eight times as many as in the entire forty-three-year period from the introduction of the press to the introduction of the royal privilege.Footnote 66 After 1518, even popular and widely circulating works dating from the medieval era, like Chaucer's Canterbury tales, dilygently & truly corrected & newly printed or Troylus and Creseyde newly printed by a trewe copye, were published with subtitles advertising the edition as novel or even superior to copies in scribal circulation.
Table 1 Editions of Practical Books Printed in England Whose Titles Advertise Novelty, 1520–1559 Source: Titles listed in Pollard and Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue (2nd ed.), queried via http://estc.bl.uk.
Yet creating the appearance of novelty in the world of practical knowledge posed a particular problem. Practical books were repositories of information that was durable and diffuse. How could a printer argue that his was a “trewe” copy of a practical work if the sources for these texts were mostly anonymous and varied tremendously from manuscript to manuscript? How could a printer call recipes and instructional works “newe” when they claimed fidelity to principles established by ancient authorities?Footnote 67 Such texts did not lend themselves to reinvention. John Fitzherbert's treatise on husbandry can be called a new work because he vastly expanded on the 1508 edition of the Boke of husbandry, which was based on a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman agricultural treatise by Walter de Henley. Even still, there are echoes of the earlier work throughout Fitzherbert's sixteenth-century treatise. For example, chapter 4 of de Henley's Boke of husbandry (as printed by Wynkyn de Worde) outlines the merits of using a team of oxen over a team of horses to plow a field, and—because neither horses, oxen, nor the expense involved in caring for one animal over the other had changed substantially in three hundred years—John Fitzherbert repeats nearly identical advice.Footnote 68 Likewise, as historians of vernacular English medicine have noted, the first century of popular medical print was deeply conservative, much of it simply repackaged versions of recipes or treatises that had been in circulation for centuries.Footnote 69
As the figures in the table above demonstrate, it took several decades after the development of the royal privilege for printers fully to embrace novelty as a marketing technique for practical books. Only gradually did printers adapt to the development of a commercial market where novelty was a benefit rather than a detriment to the authority of a practical text. Even if most of the recipes and instructions found in printed practical books were simply repackaged versions of knowledge that circulated in script, a “newly corrected and amended” version might still attract new readers.
This “repackaging” of centuries-old practical knowledge became the hallmark of practical print over the next several decades. Following quickly on the heels of Pynson's 1523 publication of Fitzherbert's “Newe tract or treatyse moost profytable for all husbandmen,” Richard Banckes printed the “Newe mater, the whiche sheweth and treateth of ye vertues & proprytes of herbes” (1525) and the “New boke of medecynes intytulyd or callyd the Treasure of pore men” (1526), both with royal privilege.Footnote 70 Though these two volumes were the very first printed books in English to present medical recipes and herbal pharmacopeia, neither was truly “new”; both were printed versions of texts common to fifteenth-century practical miscellanies. The Vertues & proprytes of herbes was a printed version of the Agnus Castus herbal, found in five of the practical vernacular miscellanies analyzed for this article.Footnote 71 The recipes in Banckes's remedy book, the Treasure of pore Men, are the same recipes found over and over in manuscript collections. And, just like in those manuscript remedy books, redundancy is no problem. Banckes lists recipe after recipe for the same ailment under the headings “Another for the same.”
But Banckes's printed versions of medieval practical knowledge do offer something that their manuscript sources do not: comprehensiveness. Not one of the six versions of the Agnus Castus herbal in the manuscripts analyzed for this article is complete. The manuscript versions of this alphabetized herbal all begin with A (agnus castus), but three manuscript versions end with S (solatrum), one with Q (quinque folium), one with P (pulegium rurale), and one with L (lappa).Footnote 72 By contrast, Banckes's Vertues & proprytes of herbes runs all the way from A to W (wormwood). Likewise, Banckes's Treasure of pore men appears “complete,” with a table of contents to the recipes in the book organized from head to foot.Footnote 73 Some of the manuscript recipe collections examined for this article do feature tables of contents or indices, but manuscript compilers like William Aderston (who left room for a table of contents that was never completed) recognized that their collections could grow as more copy texts became available.Footnote 74 As the comparison of manuscript miscellanies in the first section makes clear, fifteenth-century compilers sought to achieve exactly the kind of comprehensiveness advertised in printed books, but this desire was always at odds with attempts at organization. Because manuscript compilers lacked the luxury of knowing which texts would become available for copying at what time, recipes and directions appear in haphazard order in manuscript miscellanies, so that directives for preparing medicaments might appear alongside fabric-dyeing instructions or a treatise on fishing. But a printed book might go through several runs of hundreds of books, so it was worth a printer's time and effort to locate, collate, and organize the wealth of practical knowledge from manuscript sources into what might be a “newly corrected and amended” printed edition. Printed collections of practical knowledge suggested to readers that comprehensiveness had finally been achieved. Print was the medium through which knowledge might be ordered and fully apprehended.
In theory, the royal privilege should have protected a publisher's efforts to present a “newly amended” edition of practical knowledge drawn from manuscript sources. In practice, however, this was not always the case, especially when it came to practical texts as ubiquitous as medical recipes. Despite gaining royal privilege for the Treasure of pore men and Vertues & proprytes of herbes, Richard Banckes did not profit much from this effort to present herbal lore and medical recipes in print for the first time, though others certainly did. After publication of the Treasure in 1526, Banckes left the printing business and did not return until 1539.Footnote 75 By the time he came back to the trade, his privilege for the two works had surely expired, and rival printers had published their own editions. But these rivals could not secure their rights to the Vertues & proprytes of herbes or the Treasure of pore men any more than Banckes had. From the late 1530s until 1567, nine different printers would issue a total of sixteen editions of Banckes's herbal.Footnote 76 Ten different printers issued a total of thirteen editions of the Treasure of pore men from 1539 to 1601.Footnote 77 By 1550, there were at least twenty-seven printed editions of medical recipes and another fifteen editions of herbals circulating on the English print market, in addition to scores of manuscript miscellanies with nearly identical entries being read and marked up by early modern readers.Footnote 78
With so many competing editions of printed practical texts, how was a discerning reader to make sense of this glut of practical knowledge? By the 1550s, rival printers issuing competing editions of Banckes's Vertues & proprytes of herbes appear to have decided that their edition might sell better if attached to a famous name.Footnote 79 William Powell appended a new almanac by Anthony Askham, a popular English astrologer, to his 1550 edition of Banckes's herbal and made sure that Askham's name appeared prominently on the title page of A lytel herbal of the properties of herbes newly amended and corrected. Footnote 80 Robert Wyer aimed even higher in his edition of 1552. He claimed that his edition was “practysyd by Doctor Lynacro,” by which he meant Thomas Linacre, the renowned English humanist who was translator of Galen's Greek texts, royal tutor to Prince Arthur, and founder of the Royal College of Physicians.Footnote 81 In each case, the herbals attributed to Askham or Linacre were simply repackaged versions of Banckes's 1525 edition. Their contents had been circulating in print among English readers for two decades and in manuscript for more than a century.
The derivative quality of sixteenth-century printed recipe books demonstrates the longevity and durability of the practical knowledge preserved in late medieval manuscripts, even as, paradoxically, early modern printers worked harder and harder to convince their readers that their practical books were something new. Importantly, these marketing techniques did more than simply sell books. Innovations to the presentation of very old practical knowledge initiated a shift in readers’ expectations of what a practical book might contain. In “newly corrected” editions, readers came to recognize a distinction—perhaps more perceived than real—between the stability of a definitive printed text and the contingency of manuscript. Where medieval practical manuscripts reveal readers’ attempts to record a “corpus” of practical texts, many of which claimed to originate in ancient sources, printed books presented practical knowledge as ever-growing and constantly needing updating. But despite claims to novelty and originality, printers were actually quite conservative in what they printed. They turned, time and time again, to texts that had been circulating for centuries.
The growing emphasis on novelty and originality within printed practical books over the first half of the sixteenth century prepared readers to expect that human ingenuity could uncover new knowledge about the world. But again, in early printed practical books as in manuscript miscellanies, there is no indication that this “new” knowledge would come from experimentation or hands-on experience. These printed practical books have the same redundancy, the same repetitiveness, the same vague instruction as do manuscript collections, no doubt because they share so many of the same source texts. Thus, while early printed practical books did bring useful medical, agricultural, culinary, and veterinary knowledge to a wider readership, and while they did condition readers to expect to uncover “new” practical knowledge, their message was not that new knowledge could be found through experience but rather that new knowledge could be gained through the diligent pursuit of truer textual sources.
Medieval Practical Manuscripts in the Age of Print
On 4 May 1556, the Company and Mystery of Stationers received royal incorporation from Queen Mary, and on 1 February 1560, were created a Liveried Company of the City by the Lord Mayor of London.Footnote 82 After three decades of intense competition, English printers for the first time had a means to ensure control over their publications. For a small fee, publishers could now register a text. Once it was registered, they could bring suit not only against anyone who printed a rival edition of that text but also against anyone who printed a text similar to one they had registered.Footnote 83 In 1557, the first year of the Stationer's Register, John Kyng paid for the right to print “the boke of Carvynge” and “the boke of Cokery,” and in 1560 Kyng paid for licenses to print “the lyttle herball” (Banckes's herbal), “the greate herbal,” and “the medysine for horses.”Footnote 84 These fifteenth-century practical texts were still popular enough at the mid-sixteenth century to warrant their registration, which granted Kyng ownership rights over a body of knowledge that had been circulating freely for well over a century, first in manuscript and later in print. Publishers could no longer issue multiple competing editions of these old practical texts. Now more than ever, printers were obligated to demonstrate that their practical book was novel, or at the very least, had never been published before. Almost as if in answer to the predicament posed by the Stationer's Register, in 1558 the English reading public was introduced to a new kind of practical book: the “book of secrets.” That year, William Ward produced the first English translation of The secretes of the reuerende Maister Alexis of Piemount, an immensely popular collection of medical recipes originally published in Italy in 1555, which by 1558 had already been translated into French and Dutch.Footnote 85 Upon its publication, the book was as popular in England as it had been elsewhere in Europe, and within a few years English printers were marketing everything from gardening manuals to cookbooks to treatises on husbandry as “secrets revealed.”Footnote 86
Where earlier printed practical books merely suggested through their titles that new knowledge might be uncovered, books of secrets claimed explicitly to reveal new knowledge gained through a single author figure's “diligence and curiosity.”Footnote 87 In The secretes of the reuerende Maister Alexis, the pseudonymous author, Alexis, describes how his “natural inclination” led him to take a solitary, twenty-seven-year journey across the world in search of practical knowledge.Footnote 88 Manuscript collections, of course, have no dedicatory epistle to the “Gentyll reader” explaining how the compiler came to have access to a particular recipe collection. The very fact of a manuscript collection's existence indicates that a compiler exerted some effort to locate and copy the texts contained therein, but nowhere was this process made explicit. Early printed practical books like Banckes's Vertues & proprytes of herbes and Treasure of pore men include no explanation of their sources or methods of collection. Even single-authored practical books like Thomas Elyot's Castel of helth (first published in 1539) or Andrew Boorde's Dyetary of healthe (first published in 1547) contain no mention of how the author came to have the knowledge he did, or how he selected the recipes within the volume, despite the fact that both books include a dedication.Footnote 89
Books of secrets present for the first time the collection of practical knowledge as a deliberate act. In making explicit this search for practical knowledge, books of secrets encouraged their readers to do something similar, to look wherever they could for knowledge “not before knowen.”Footnote 90 William Eamon first drew attention to this aspect of “books of secrets” in 1994, suggesting that they encouraged readers to go on a “hunt” for the “secrets of nature” via experimentation.Footnote 91 When compared to the printed recipe books described in the previous section, books of secrets are notably different; they may indeed have encouraged readers to seek experiential knowledge in ways that the Treasure of pore men or practical manuscript miscellanies did not. But although books of secrets have become almost synonymous with identifiably “early modern” attitudes toward observation, experimentation, and the natural world, it was gradual changes to the presentation of practical knowledge in print over the first half of the sixteenth century that paved the way for Maister Alexis and his secrets.
Overlooked by Eamon and others, however, is the extent to which the proliferation of books of secrets profoundly affected the way early modern readers in England viewed medieval manuscripts. This change in early modern perspective stemmed directly from a trope trotted out in nearly all books of secrets published in England. In prologues and prefaces, their authors and translators recount the same story: the knowledge they have collected from “poore women artificers, peysantes, and all sortes” is incredibly valuable, so much so that they would have kept it “secret”—that is, unpublished—were it not for the intervention of friends and family.Footnote 92 These books outline a process of “discovery” which looks less like experimentation and more like editorial practice. They describe collecting and organizing already extant knowledge held by those with no access to a press (“poore women artificers, peysantes, and all sortes”). Once published, the “collection of these secretes” becomes accessible, so “that men of all countreys might have the knowledge of that with ease, sitting at home in their studies.”Footnote 93 By drawing such a sharp distinction between the virtues and accessibility of the published book as contrasted with the difficulty and secrecy of scattered, unpublished knowledge, these authors and translators redefined a “secret” as something that had “heatherto not bine published.”Footnote 94 What resulted was an epistemological distinction between unpublished and published knowledge.
Early modern readers’ perception that knowledge might be “secret” or “hidden” because not available “with ease” to men “sitting at home in their studies” may explain why so many of them remained fascinated with medieval practical miscellanies. Of the eighty-eight medieval miscellanies analyzed for this article, fifty-three feature reader marks from late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers. These marks range from added recipes, to indices or tables of contents, to simple marginalia. Sometimes these later readers supplemented medieval collections with knowledge they had garnered from printed practical books, as was the case for the sixteenth-century recipe for “six precious waters” drawn from the Treasure of pore men and added to the final leaves of the Sloane miscellany, discussed above.Footnote 95 But it is not just reader marks that tell a story of continued early modern interest in medieval sources: the organization and archival preservation of dozens of medieval practical manuscripts reflect the habits and attitudes of early modern readers. Numerous practical manuscripts to this day remain bound together according to the whims of their early modern collectors.Footnote 96 Men like the Elizabethan scholar John Dee, whose name and the year 1575 are written atop a leaf in one early fifteenth-century collection of craft recipes, or Catherine Tollemache, who signed her name to her family's medieval recipe collection, seem to have prized medieval manuscripts precisely because they were repositories of hidden knowledge.Footnote 97 After all, the authors of popular printed books of secrets advertised that “secret” knowledge was anything not available in print.
But whereas Dee and Tollemache lived in a world where books of secrets still crowded print shops’ shelves, somehow this early modern definition of secrecy has remained influential, continuing to affect scholars’ interpretations of medieval manuscript miscellanies. Throughout, this article has referred to Catherine Tollemache's miscellany by its modern title, The Tollemache Book of Secrets, despite the fact that the manuscript makes no mention of secrecy. The original fifteenth-century scribe uses neither the English word “secret” nor the Latin “secretum” to describe any of the recipes in the book—not even the magical ones. Nor does the scribe utilize any of the techniques of coding or symbolic writing evident in alchemical manuscripts of the same period, which were in fact meant to be secret. Indeed, as this article has demonstrated, The Tollemache Book has so much in common with other medieval practical miscellanies that one would be hard pressed to argue that its fifteenth-century compilers had any notion of it containing secret knowledge. Thirty-nine of the eighty-eight manuscripts surveyed here contain charms or magic, and there is little to indicate that the compilers of these other collections viewed them as secret.Footnote 98
Yet, by the late sixteenth century, a woman like Catherine Tollemache might have thought of her manuscript in these terms, as a collection of “secrets” unavailable to her elsewhere. By 1580, when she married into the Tollemache household, much of the practical material within the manuscript had made its way into print: the culinary recipes, the treatises on planting and grafting and on fishing with an angle, and veterinary recipes for falconry. But none of the charms or magical recipes in The Tollemache Book, Sloane, or Ashmole miscellanies appear in printed books. There is no printed book with a charm to make a woman tell her secrets in her sleep; no printed version of the recipe to make parsley grow in two hours; no published compendia of love magic. Given the church's official stance on this sort of magic, it is easy to understand why early printers might have shied away from printing texts that would bring them face to face with the ecclesiastical courts.Footnote 99 Yet because these texts were not printed, they attained a great deal more ideological weight than they ever had in pre-print culture.
By the time Catherine opened The Tollemache Book, the charms and magical recipes in that collection were “secrets” because they were “hidden” in manuscript. Nothing about the makeup, materials, or content of The Tollemache Book changed from the last quarter of the fifteenth century when it was written, to the last quarter of the sixteenth century when Catherine joined the Tollemache family. The manuscript itself remained the same, yet her perspective on the many recipes contained within the little recipe book must have been different from that of its original compiler. This shift in the way readers understood medieval manuscripts reflects the slow but significant changes wrought by the commercialization of practical knowledge and the demands of the competitive print market over the course of the sixteenth century. In just over eighty years, from the introduction of the press in 1476 to the publication of the Secrets of the reuerande Maister Alexis in 1558, medieval practical miscellanies had gone from repositories for the collection of a corpus of practical vernacular knowledge, to the unremarked-upon sources for early printed practical books, to collectable sources themselves, full of “secrets never before published in English.”
Appendix Vernacular practical miscellanies; contents and formal characteristics
