Middle English Recipes and Literary Play, 1375–1500 by Hannah Bower (review)

This is an excellent book. It will be read and cited by scholars of medieval literature, medicine, and intellectual culture for many years to come.

Medieval medical recipes, as Bower argues, have significance that extends beyond their self-proclaimed practicality. They might provide their readers a tangible treatment. But they also provide a point of connection for different written and oral styles, spaces, and identities. They carry an imaginative and aesthetic power that counts as a form of figurative writing and that often undermines—or exceeds or redefines—their ostensibly curative function.

Their cross cutting significance means, as Bower persuasively suggests, that medical recipes invite a more holistic reading than they sometimes receive: remedies should be studied alongside the texts they travel with in manuscripts, including literary texts. And they repay a form of close attention and close reading more frequently applied to literary and devotional poetry and prose.

Bower demonstrates the value of that form of reading throughout the book, in analyses that span remedies in more than seventy manuscripts. Ranging from Ovid to Arderne, Chauliac to Chaucer, she brings medical recipes to the forefront of medieval textual culture and shows the importance of medical, poetic, and manuscript fragmentation to the wholeness of medieval health. The result demonstrates the intersection of medieval medicine with other medieval discourses and opens new ways of under standing the shared allusiveness, elasticity, and playfulness of medieval imaginative writing. We should read medieval medical remedies not just because they've been overlooked by most scholars, but because they reshape our understanding of medieval textual culture.

As the first extended study of Middle English medical recipes in their poetic, cultural, and manuscript contexts, Bower's book builds on previous research in at least three ways. She connects, first, a substantial corpus of medieval recipes, drawing on a breadth of codicological evidence wider in scope than individual case studies allow. That scope enables Bower to identify formal, stylistic, and bibliographic patterns across a range of texts, such as the "elaborate syntactic structures" that run throughout prose recipes, and to trace the contours of a genre from multiple examples.

She shows, second, that the genre plays with forms and styles that exceed a recipe's utilitarian purpose: to heal. Their artfulness sometimes even confuses or contradicts the recipe's remedy and draws attention instead to the ambiguous possibilities of language, form, and voice.

She highlights those possibilities, third, by developing connections between recipes and poetry at length. Bower directs serious attention to verse recipes as crafted, thoughtful works, demonstrating their aesthetic and thematic connections to poems by Lydgate, Gower, Chaucer, Ovid, Henryson, and more. The comparisons enable her to show the role of remedies in larger conversations about order, fragmentation, wholeness, and aesthetic experience that link the mundane with the imaginative.

Bower develops her argument across five chapters, each of which revolves around careful close readings of form, sound, and structure. Chapter 1 focuses on prose recipes as the site of a sporadic poetics, demonstrating their similarity to literary and devotional works by Chau cer, Petrarch, Julian of Norwich, and others. It cites examples of chias mus, antithesis, parallelism, puns, and simile as evidence of a shared tradition of figurative language that extends beyond any one type of writing and that variously helped and hindered a recipe's practical application.

Chapter 2 analyzes verse remedies as vehicles for creative expression, reading poems by Lydgate and Gilles de Corbeil alongside medieval herbals, bloodletting texts, and dietaries. It focuses on the relationship among rhyme, syntax, and voice to extend a familiar idea about the function of medical verse. Verse may have helped make a remedy's content more memorable and accessible, as has often been suggested. But it also shapes that content's significance, representing a recipe's authority, novelty, and usefulness in the craft of its formal play.

Chapter 3 describes remedy collections as the result of complex, mixed, and changing...