<p style='text-align: justify;'>Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.6.33 is a fifteenth-century composite manuscript that contains a wealth of medical texts across its codicologically distinct parts. Part 1 is comprised of two leaves which contain medical recipes in French and English, copied by a fifteenth-century hand in different stints and inks; a different fifteenth-century hand has added to these a note in Latin on the medical virtues of the crocus plant. The ink foliation in the middle of the top of the leaves ('xxi' and 'liii') indicate that they have come from a larger (now lost) collection, which may have belonged to a 'Robert Pedwardine', whose name is written on the top of ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(15);return false;'>ii recto–ii verso</a>. Part 2 is a collection of astronomical tables and texts copied out very neatly by a single scribe in black, red and blue ink in a single cursive script with some features of textualis. Part 3, the most extensive, contains medical recipes and charms (mainly in English but occasionally in Latin) interspersed with other medical texts, such as: a treatise on wounds and the plague; instructions on the best times to let blood; an extract from a herbal; and information on the perilous days of the year. Multiple hands (described in more detail below) contribute to this part of the manuscript at different times, demonstrating that large collections of recipes like this could move between many different readers and owners, who would each add to, adapt, and correct the healing information they inherited. Later readers could also impose order upon that information: from f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(93);return false;'>2:29r</a>, numbers appear alongside the recipes in Part 3 of the codex, suggesting that a later reader wished to compile a list of contents, in order to make individual recipes easier to locate. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>This accumulation of knowledge over time by multiple readers and scribes is immediately apparent in the first quire of Part 3 (ff. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(53);return false;'>2:1r-2:10v</a>). Between ff. 2:3r-2:7v, a fifteenth-century hand has copied a collection of medical recipes; on f. 2:7v, the same hand may have added a recipe at a later point in time in a different ink. On ff. 2:1r–2:2v, 2:6v–2:7r, 2:8r–2:10v, as many as six other hands have later added recipes before, after, and amongst those medical recipes. This opening quire seems once to have existed separately from the rest of Part 3 as a booklet, which originally contained blank leaves before and after the main body of recipes; those blank leaves were then filled by the later hands. The thinness and greater discoloration of the parchment in this quire (compared to the parchment comprising the later quires of Part 3) support this. One of the hands that adds recipes into this opening quire (ff. 2:2v, 2:6v–2:7r, 2:8r, 2:8v–2:10v) also adds them into the quires that come after, indicating that, when this scribe was reading the manuscript, the quires comprising Part 3 were all part of one codex. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>In the remaining quires comprising Part 3, the majority of the texts are copied by another fifteenth-century hand in a neat variety of Anglicana Formata. The medical recipes and treatises (on wounds, bloodletting and the plague) copied by this hand seem well-suited to an educated medical practitioner: the recipes normally contain precise quantities; electuaries are referred to through their technical pharmaceutical names such as 'diagalanga' and 'diapenydion' (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(84);return false;'>2:24v</a>) and it is expected that the reader will already have these to hand or know how to prepare them without further instruction. Furthermore, the recipes normally refer to the patient in the third person (indicating that the intended reader is a practitioner who will administer the recipe to that patient's body) and many of the recipe collections display a recurrent interest in surgical matters such as wounds and broken bones. There is, however, a more homely, culinary reference on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(165);return false;'>2:66r</a> where the reader is instructed to 'oyle ϸi handis as ϸou woldist do gyngerbrede'. This instruction may have been copied wholesale from an exemplar but it nevertheless demonstrates how closely entangled culinary processes, spaces and ingredients were with medical preparations. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Whilst copying these medical texts, this scribe occasionally leaves gaps between recipes; he may have intended to return to these and add additional recipes or supply something that was missing in his exemplar from a different source. Sometimes, the text supplied in these gaps does look like it could have been added by this scribe at a later date in a slightly modified script (e.g. f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(106);return false;'>2:36v-2:37r</a>). Elsewhere, however, one of the hands who added recipes to the first quire of Part 3 has inserted material into these gaps. For instance, on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(233);return false;'>2:100r</a>, in a recipe for an affliction of the bones, the main scribe has broken off copying mid-recipe after the phrase 'do hem on shepis'. The later scribe has completed this instruction by adding in 'lethir for fowling of your lynyn clothis'. In the rest of the gap left by the main scribe on the reverse side of the leaf, this later scribe has then proceeded to add a different recipe for 'water of coperose'. He gives the original text a neater and clearer end before squeezing in additional information to make the most efficient use of the space within the codex.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>This scribe adds recipes into many other places too. Sometimes, his efforts to squeeze in additional information confuse the text: for instance, on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(176);return false;'>2:71v</a>, he adds a recipe at the bottom of the leaf for a woman who has not had a rite of purification after childbirth; this insertion disrupts the prose of the main scribe's unrelated recipe for 'watir of borage' which is copied across the folios. In contrast, on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(187);return false;'>2:77r</a>, this later scribe has added a remedy for gout, sciatica, podagra and other ailments after a remedy by the main scribe for dropsy, sciatica and podagra. Here, the later reader has made use of the gap left by the first scribe to group information together in a way that makes it more usable, locatable and comparable. Elsewhere, this hand also corrects the text of the main scribe after it has been damaged or part of it has been lost. For instance, a missing leaf means that the remedy at the top of f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(129);return false;'>2:48r</a> is acephalous. However, the scribe has added in a title and supplied the imperative 'take' before the first named ingredient, in order to give the recipe a clear beginning; the recipe is here turned into something usable and it now reads as complete. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>This scribe's corrections and additions show how recipe collections could become collaborative, patchwork texts over time, as different hands reshaped and extended them. The texts in MS Kk.6.33 are patchwork compilations of voices in other respects too. I have noted elsewhere that some of the recipes within the manuscript reproduce - without acknowledgement - personal anecdotes wholesale from other sources. For instance, on f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(252);return false;'>2:109v</a>, there is an anecdote after a recipe for valence of wormode (wormwood) beginning 'This y haue muche yvsyd and louyd for withe it I helid a sherve at Bristowe the whiche of ϸe prikyng of a smal dager poynt in the lacert of the lift arme for peyne bolnyng brennyng and crampe was nye ded thorugh an vnhappi cure of a barboure...'. Similar versions of the recipe and the anecdote appear in other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts (such as <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-MAGDALENE-PEPYS-00878/166'>Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 878</a>, p. 160 and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_238'>Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1389</a>, pp. 221–22). Both seem to have been adapted from the writings of the fourteenth-century English surgeon, John Arderne. The scribe of MS Kk.6.33 may have copied this anecdote wholesale from another Middle English recipe collection without any awareness of Ardene's text. But, wherever he copied it from, it is testament to how comfortable scribes and compilers were reproducing within their own manuscripts the personal voices and testimonies of others. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>MS Kk.6.33 also contains several charms, which invite readers to imagine the codex supporting other kinds of vocal performance too: three charms occur in the first quire of Part 3. The charms are for treating burns and scalds (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(59);return false;'>2:4r</a>), for breaking a swelling (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(60);return false;'>2:4v</a>), and for healing wounds (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(61);return false;'>2:5r</a>). The charm for the swelling contains many performative utterances, which suggest an oral performance: 'I aske leue of oure lady...I blisse ϸis breste...'. However, the end of the charm contains the instruction 'Set that worde ϸer ϸou wilt haue hit ybroke'. This may invite the reader to apply the charm to the body in a written form. The charm for burns also displays an interesting hybridity: as T.M. Smallwood notes (2008, p. 89), it is written in 'unrhymed free verse'. Although the charm is written out in lines of prose, puncti indicate where verse lineation could be imposed; a refrain also reverberates across the charm, increasing its memorability and its capacity to charm readers in the multiple different senses of that word. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Other texts in the manuscript similarly appeal to readers' capacity for wonder: at the end of a series of recipes for medicinal preparations, it is written 'who so euer can worche wiþ ϸes wateris and oylis and askis schuld be namyd more a prophet ϸan a leche' (f. <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(184);return false;'>2:75v</a>). In these lines, a magnificent confidence is instilled in the reader: the preparations are so failproof that the 'leche' or physician using them will be able to foretell the patient's recovery with the confidence of a prophet. Regardless of whether this startling guarantee was taken seriously or seen as rhetorical bombast, it may have been a refreshing change from the difficult processes of trial-and-error that inevitably confronted medieval medical practitioners and users of large compendiums of recipes. </p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr Hannah Bower<br /> Faculty of English<br /> University of Cambridge</p><p style='text-align: justify;'><b>References</b><div style='list-style-type: disc;'><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>Hannah Bower, 'The Brickmaker, the Tavernkeeper, and the Knight: The Role of Obscurity and Imagination in Medieval Medical Recipes', in <i>Recipes and Book Culture in England, 1350–1600</i>, ed. by Carrie Griffin and Hannah Ryley (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), pp. 95-117</div><div style='display: list-item; margin-left: 20px;'>T.M. Smallwood, 'Conformity and Originality in Middle English Charms', in <i>Charms, Charmers and Charming</i>, ed. by Jonathan Roper (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 87–99</div></div><br /></p>
