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oapen-20.500.12657-533882022-03-17T02:52:23Z Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 Bower, Hannah recipes, remedies, medicine, Middle English, poetry, networks, imagination, close reading, play, fragments bic Book Industry Communication::D Literature & literary studies::DS Literature: history & criticism::DSB Literary studies: general::DSBB Literary studies: classical, early & medieval bic Book Industry Communication::M Medicine::MB Medicine: general issues::MBX History of medicine bic Book Industry Communication::3 Time periods qualifiers::3H c 1000 CE to c 1500 This volume 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. 2022-03-16T10:15:38Z 2022-03-16T10:15:38Z 2022 book https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/53388 eng application/pdf Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 9780192849496.pdf https://global.oup.com/academic/product/middle-english-medical-recipes-and-literary-play-1375-1500-9780192849496 Oxford University Press 10.1093/oso/9780192849496.001.0001 10.1093/oso/9780192849496.001.0001 b9501915-cdee-4f2a-8030-9c0b187854b2 ef01d703-cec9-4aa8-bd01-a0e3b7c2f1ee 272 Oxford University of Cambridge open access
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This volume 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.
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