Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500

Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500
Title Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 PDF eBook
Author Hannah Bower
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 336
Release 2022-03-21
Genre Literary Collections
ISBN 0192666126

Download Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

English Renaissance Manuscript Culture

English Renaissance Manuscript Culture
Title English Renaissance Manuscript Culture PDF eBook
Author Steven W. May
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 289
Release 2023-08-14
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 0198878001

Download English Renaissance Manuscript Culture Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

English Renaissance Manuscript Culture: The Paper Revolution traces the development of a new type of scribal culture in England that emerged early in the fourteenth century. The main medieval writing surfaces of parchment and wax tablets were augmented by a writing medium that was both lasting and cheap enough to be expendable. Writing was transformed from a near monopoly of professional scribes employed by the upper class to a practice ordinary citizens could afford. Personal correspondence, business records, notebooks on all sorts of subjects, creative writing, and much more flourished at social levels where they had previously been excluded by the high cost of parchment. Steven W. May places literary manuscripts and in particular poetic anthologies in this larger scribal context, showing how its innovative features affected both authorship and readership. As this amateur scribal culture developed, the medieval professional culture expanded as well. Classes of documents formerly restricted to parchment often shifted over to paper, while entirely new classes of documents were added to the records of church and state as these institutions took advantage of relatively inexpensive paper. Paper stimulated original composition by making it possible to draft, revise, and rewrite works in this new, affordable medium. Amateur scribes were soon producing an enormous volume of manuscript works of all kinds--works they could afford to circulate in multiple copies. England's ever-increasing literate population developed an informal network that transmitted all kinds of texts from single sheets to book-length documents efficiently throughout the kingdom. The operation of restrictive coteries had little if any role in the mass circulation of manuscripts through this network. However, paper was cheap enough that manuscripts could also be readily disposed of (unlike expensive parchment). More than 90% of the output from this scribal tradition has been lost, a fact that tends to distort our understanding and interpretation of what has survived. May illustrates these conclusions with close analysis of representative manuscripts.

Literature and Medicine

Literature and Medicine
Title Literature and Medicine PDF eBook
Author Anna M. Elsner
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Pages 713
Release 2024-01-18
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1009300083

Download Literature and Medicine Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The experiences of health and illness, death and dying, the normal and the pathological have always been an integral part of literary texts. This volume considers how the two dynamic fields of medicine and literature have crossed over, and how they have developed alongside one another. It asks how medicine, as both science and practice, shapes the representation of illness and transforms literary form. It considers how literary texts across genres and languages of disease have put forward specific conceptions of medicine and impacted its practice. Taking into account the global, multilingual and multicultural contexts, this volume systematically outlines and addresses this double-sidedness of the literature-medicine connection. Literature and Medicine covers a broad spectrum of conceptual, thematic, theoretical, and methodological approaches that provide a solid foundation for understanding a vibrant interdisciplinary field.

The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer

The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer
Title The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer PDF eBook
Author Craig E. Bertolet
Publisher Taylor & Francis
Pages 678
Release 2024-10-02
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1040120644

Download The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer offers 40 chapters by leading scholars working with contemporary, theoretical, and textual approaches to the poetry and prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) in a global context. This volume is an ideal starting point for beginners, offering contemporary perspectives to Chaucer both geographically and intellectually, including: • Exploration of major and lesser-known works, translations, and lyrics, such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde • Spatial intersections and external forms of communication • Discussion of identities, cognitions, and patterns of thought, including gender, race, disability, science, and nature. The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer also includes a section addressing ways of incorporating its material in the classroom to integrate global questions in the teaching of Chaucer’s works. This guide provides post-pandemic, twenty-first century readers a way to teach, learn, and write about Chaucer’s works complete with awareness of their reach, their limitations, and occlusions on a global field of culture.

Reading Practice

Reading Practice
Title Reading Practice PDF eBook
Author Melissa Reynolds
Publisher University of Chicago Press
Pages 319
Release 2024-08-19
Genre Science
ISBN 0226823636

Download Reading Practice Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Through portraits of readers and their responses to texts, Reading Practice reconstructs the contours of the knowledge economy that shaped medicine and science in early modern England. Reading Practice tells the story of how ordinary people grew comfortable learning from commonplace manuscripts and printed books, such as almanacs, medical recipe collections, and herbals. From the turn of the fifteenth century to the close of the sixteenth century, these were the books English people read when they wanted to attend to their health or understand their place in the universe. Before then, these works had largely been the purview of those who could read Latin. Around 1400, however, medical and scientific texts became available in Middle English while manuscripts became less expensive. These vernacular manuscripts invited their readers into a very old and learned conversation: Hippocrates and Galen weren’t distant authorities whose word was law, they were trusted guides, whose advice could be excerpted, rearranged, recombined, and even altered to suit a manuscript compiler’s needs. This conversation continued even after the printing press arrived in England in 1476. Printers mined manuscripts for medical and scientific texts that they would publish throughout the sixteenth century, though the pressures of a commercial printing market encouraged printers to package these old texts in new ways. Without the weight of authority conditioning their reactions and responses to very old knowledge, and with so many editions of practical books to choose from, English readers grew into confident critics and purveyors of natural knowledge in their own right. Melissa Reynolds reconstructs shifting attitudes toward medicine and science over two centuries of seismic change within English culture, attending especially to the effects of the Reformation on attitudes toward nature and the human body. Her study shows how readers learned to be discerning and selective consumers of knowledge gradually, through everyday interactions with utilitarian books.

Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
Title Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature PDF eBook
Author Daniel G Donoghue
Publisher Boydell & Brewer
Pages 378
Release 2024
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 1843847116

Download Form and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

New and exciting scholarship on medieval and early modern English culture in all its diversity. This book honours James Simpson, an enormously influential figure in English literary studies. Known for championing once-neglected writers such as Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, Simpson has also pioneered the field of Trans-Reformation studies, dismantling the barrier between the medieval and early modern periods. He has written powerfully about the history of freedoms, the relationship between literary and intellectual history, and about the category of the literary itself in all its urgency. Inspired by Simpson's interventions, the essays collected here deal with texts and topics from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Physician's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde rub shoulders with Old English riddles, Saint Erkenwald, The Digby Lyrics, Lydgate's Dietary, and Lodge's Robert the Devil. Revisionist studies of two much-debated genres - allegory and romance - join forces with chapters on neglected physical features of early books, line-fillers and catchwords, as well as studies of iconoclasm and the histories of enemy love. The volume begins with a piece by the honorand himself, on recognition in literary texts.th chapters on neglected physical features of early books, line-fillers and catchwords, as well as studies of iconoclasm and the histories of enemy love. The volume begins with a piece by the honorand himself, on recognition in literary texts.th chapters on neglected physical features of early books, line-fillers and catchwords, as well as studies of iconoclasm and the histories of enemy love. The volume begins with a piece by the honorand himself, on recognition in literary texts.th chapters on neglected physical features of early books, line-fillers and catchwords, as well as studies of iconoclasm and the histories of enemy love. The volume begins with a piece by the honorand himself, on recognition in literary texts.

Conrad and History

Conrad and History
Title Conrad and History PDF eBook
Author Richard Niland
Publisher OUP Oxford
Pages 240
Release 2010-02-25
Genre Literary Criticism
ISBN 0191573809

Download Conrad and History Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book examines the philosophy of history and the subject of the nation in the literature of Joseph Conrad. It explores the importance of nineteenth-century Polish Romantic philosophy in Conrad's literary development, arguing that the Polish response to Hegelian traditions of historiography in nineteenth-century Europe influenced Conrad's interpretation of history. After investigating Conrad's early career in the context of the philosophy of history, the book analyses Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911) in light of Conrad's writing about Poland and his sustained interest in the subject of national identity. Conrad juxtaposes his belief in an inherited Polish national identity, derived from Herder and Rousseau, with a sceptical questioning of modern nationalism in European and Latin American contexts. Nostromo presents the creation of the modern nation state of Sulaco; The Secret Agent explores the subject of 'foreigners' and nationality in England; while Under Western Eyes constitutes a systematic attempt to undermine Russian national identity. Conrad emerges as an author who examines critically the forces of nationalism and national identity that troubled Europe throughout the nineteenth century and in the period before the First World War. This leads to a consideration of Conrad's work during the Great War. In his fiction and newspaper articles during the war, Conrad found a way of dealing with a conflict that made him acutely aware of being sidelined at a turning point in both modern Polish and modern European history. Finally, this book re-evaluates Conrad's late novels The Rover (1923) and Suspense (1925), a long-neglected part of his career, investigating Conrad's sustained treatment of French history in his last years alongside his life-long fascination with the cult of Napoleon Bonaparte.