French Medicinal Recipes in Manuscript

Paul Dubé, Le medecin et le chirurgien des pauures. A Paris : Chez Edme Couterot, rue S. Jacques, [1671]. 
2 pts. in 1 v. ;  16 cm (12mo).


Literally translated as "the physician and surgeon of the poor," this book offers vernacular remedies for the indigent sick in seventeenth-century France. Paul Dubé was a physician and medical reformer from Montargis, France who specialized in the treatment of the poor—a concentration that earned him the title "Le père des pauvres" (the father of the poor). Dubé disapproved of expensive medical tinctures prepared according to Galenic recipes, complaining about their inaccessibility to the poor and even claiming they had no physical effect in France (as foreign medicines). As an alternative, Dubé suggests physicians concoct their medicines from local plants and herbs, thereby making the practice of physic cheaper and more convenient for physicians. Language was another factor in Dubé's drive for medical reform: rather than disseminating such knowledge in the universal scholarly language of Latin, he wrote his books in French, making the secrets of the physician available to all. 


The Center's copy of Dubé is particularly interesting because of its manuscript content. An early owner in perhaps the late-seventeenth or eighteenth century added manuscript medical recipes to the book's front and rear endpapers, in effect putting Dubé's advice into practice.

My French transcription/translation skills are not great, but I will do my best to at least identify these recipes. The first (shown above) is a recipe for a "Decoction fameuse," which contains elderberry (among other ingredients). 

The second recipe, a "Remede contre l’hidropisie" (remedy against dropsy [edema]), is another botanical remedy, its key ingredient being a half gross of the squill plant infused for a day in white wine ("un demi gros de scil que vous serez infusee pendant
24 heures dans une bouteille de vin blanc"). 

The book's third and final leaf of manuscript notes contains a recipe for a "Potion qui d’esaltére et excite la libertée du ventre" (potion to refresh and stimulate the liberty of the belly), which contains both tamarind and ground barley.

More research (preferably by an expert in French) could reveal the extent to which these manuscript recipes actually follow the advice Dubé lays out in the printed book. While tamarind may have been a rarer ingredient at the time, I'm sure "une bouteille de vin blanc" was on-hand in most French households. 


I'll be away for the next ten days, so expect another entry the week of 6/13.
 

Commonplacing and Binding Practices in a Sixteenth-Century Estienne Dictionary

This post (as well as several more to come in the near future) corresponds to the Center's rare book exhibit for Fall 2010, "The Living Library: Books and their Owners in Early Modern Europe." The exhibit highlights evidence for different reading and ownership practices in our collection of early printed books, including the prize inscription, the sammelband, provenance, and printed paratexts. If you're in the Amherst, MA area, feel free to stop by and see the exhibit, and if you can't I hope these posts capture the essence of the physical display.

Front hinge

Rear hinge

Upper cover

Lower Cover

Robert Estienne, Dictionarium nominum propriorum uirorum, mulierum, populorum, idolorum, urbium, fluuiorum, montium, caeterorumq[ue] locorum, quae passim apud melioris notae auctores leguntur : liber longè auctior, quàm is qui elucidarius poëticus uulgò inscribitur, ad intelligendos poëtas, oratores, ac historiographos non solùm utilis, uerùm etiam necessarius à multis quibus antea scatebat, uicijs repurgatus. [Cologne: Printed by Walter Fabritius, 1558]. 8vo. Contemporary blind-stamped full calf binding.

The scholar and printer Robert Estienne (1503-1559; Latin surname "Stephanus") prepared a number of important books during his career, including the Dictionarium latinogallicum (1552) and Dictionarium seu linguae latinae thesaurus (1531), in addition to landmark editions of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament. This copy of his “Dictionary of Proper Names” (we also own a 1575 edition) survives fully intact in a remarkable contemporary binding; an early owner, almost certainly from England, bound the dictionary in modestly decorated calf leather, using two old manuscript scraps for the book’s endpapers.

Recto of front MS endpaper

Verse of front MS endpaper

Recto of rear MS endpaper

Verso of rear MS endpaper

Although the texts represented in the vellum scraps have yet to be identified, we can be relatively certain about their languages, scripts, and approximate dates (front endpaper: Latin, bastarda anglicana, c. xiii-xiv sec; rear endpaper: English and Latin, fifteenth-century English secretary hand). As is common with early books surviving in contemporary bindings, the dictionary’s endpapers bear ownership inscriptions, pen trials, and manuscript notes from several different owners.

Inscriptions on front endpaper

 The latest to leave a mark was “C. Aston 1847.” A “Francis Fisher” (writing in a late sixteenth or early seventeenth-century secretary hand) signs the book three different times, once with the Latin motto tu decus omne tuis (“you the sole glory of your kindred”). His relation Robert Fisher signed the book with a Latin inscription in the 1650s.

Title page inscriptions

Title page signatures record the names of “Ro: Gaton” and (in a sixteenth-century secretary hand) William Brabin (probably the earliest owner); according to the note, Brabin purchased the book for 2s 3d.

MS miscellany of commonplaces on endpaper, in the hand of William Brabin

He used the endpapers as a manuscript miscellany, recording Latin commonplaces from Plato, Erasmus (from Adagia III.ii.36), Ovid (Tristia IV.x.3-4), and Marc Antony, in addition to a recipe (containing urine and eggs) and the proverb tempura mutantur et nos mutamur ab illis (“times change and we change with them”). Here is a transcription (with some translations) of a few of the notes:

Plato:

plato de xenocrate dixit venere dicendi carebat. idem de Iamblico dicatus. 

Erasmus:

Kesos [in Greek] d[?]cn pictus cestus.2: cingulum veneris, efficax ad illectamentum gratiarum et Amorum, quo illa dicitur martem conciliare: Erasmus cestum habet veneris: [Adagia III.ii.36] /

Ovid: 

Ovides de se Pelignae gentis gloria dicar ego / Sulmo [Sulmona] est metropolis pelignorum vnde ovidius Sulmo mihi patria est gelidis vberrimus vndis millia qui novies distat ab vrbe decens. [Ovid, Tristia IV.x.3-4: “Sulmo’s my native place, rich in icy streams, and ninety miles distant from the City.”]

Marcus Antony:

Marcus Antonius / Huius viri illud inprimis admirabile dicitur, quod in otio Luxuriosissimus in negotio Laboriosissimus fuit [listed as a commonplace in Calepinus Dictionarium, 1576]         

Last item:

tempura mutantur et nos mutamur ab illis [Times change and we change with them: possibly Lothair I of the Holy Roman Empire (795-855)]

another commonplace [duplication of Ovid passage], with pen trials

The owners used another rear endpaper chiefly for handwriting practice, as evinced by the scribbled red stars, numerous strokes for majuscule “E,” and the words “De Anima” in an amateurish italic hand. The Center also owns several books printed by the Estienne family, including Robert’s fourth edition of the vulgate Gospels (1545), Polydore Vergil’s De inuentoribus rerum (1529), and an edition of Erasmus’s Adagia (1558), in addition to his son Henry’s editions of Plato’s Opera omnia (1578) and Maximus of Tyre’s Dissertationes (1557).

Estienne printer's device, from Erasmus Adagia (1558)

Here is the "Scribd" digitized document of these images:

Estienne Dictionarium 1558

1658 English Almanac with Manuscript Recipes

George Wharton’s Calendarium Ecclesiasticum: or, A New Almanack after the Old Fashion (1658) is in many ways a typical seventeenth-century almanac, containing conventional information on meteorological phenomena, tidal activity, market dates, English history, and law terms. But there are many features of Wharton’s book, published from 1657-1660, which set it apart from other printed almanacs. Wharton omits the woodcut of the “zodiac man,” a feature of virtually every almanac published in England in the early modern period, instead incorporating a humoural interpretation of the human body into the calendars themselves. There are also large sections on religious festivals (“a summary account of the Festivals and Fasts, as well Jewish as Christian, with the original end of their institution”) and seventeenth-century English historical events (“Gesta Britannorum, or a Brief Chronologie...from the year 1600...untill the present 1658”).

Wharton himself was well known earlier in the century for his politically charged and Royalist-leaning prognostications and almanacs. He used the pages of his works to engage in fierce verbal exchanges with Parliamentary almanac writers such as William Lilly, especially concerning astrological predictions of battles during the Civil War. Wharton found himself in a lot of trouble with the authorities as a result of his politicized almanacs, especially after the execution of King Charles I in 1649. After brief periods of imprisonment in the late 1640s and early 1650s, Wharton finally agreed to omit political prognostications from his almanacs, although his “Gesta Britannorum” delivers a largely partisan view on seventeenth-century English history. He continued to publish almanacs into the Restoration, switching to the title Calendarium Carolinum after 1660.

Although Wharton’s almanac is an interesting example of the genre and a very rare book (the ESTC lists eight other copies), our copy is much more interesting for its unique manuscript content. It is now widely known that early modern book buyers could purchase almanacs either as printed or interleaved with “blanks,” i.e. blank pages of paper. Many almanac owners filled these blanks with writing, typically that associated with the activities of daily life. Therefore we see annotated almanacs filled with notes of local travel, household accounts, and even medicinal or culinary recipes.

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A former owner of the Wharton almanac purchased the book interleaved with four blanks, in addition to an additional nine leaves at the end of the printed text. Written on these blanks in a large, italic hand (probably belonging to a woman) are dozens of recipes for a range of medicines, drinks, and food items. As is the case with many MS receipt books of this period, this MS compendia lists a recipe for ink first, underscoring the importance of writing technologies in producing the book’s handwritten notes. The remaining notes list recipes for a variety of concoctions, including medicines for pregnant women and equine illness, a “diett drink for scurvy,” and “Metheglean,” a “spiced or medicated variety of mead, esp. popular in Wales” (OED metheglin). Most of the recipes provide instructions for cooking a variety of food items, particularly cakes, creams, and “jumballs,” “a kind of fine sweet cake or biscuit” (OED jumbal). Here is a transcribed recipe for “shropsheer cake”:

Take a ^l [pound] of sugar: halfe an ounce of

sinnomen: 2 nutmegs a letle cloves &

mace: finly beaten: then break in 2

pounds & a halfe of butter: & 4 or 5

eggs: into your sugar & spice: & mixe

them with a gallon of flower: so mould

it together: as you doe, for past [paste?]: mak

it into letle round bals: waighing 3

ounces a pece so pating it into thin

cakes bake them

Not all of the recipes sound as appetizing as this one. While modern eaters may be able to stomach early modern recipes for pickled mushrooms and cucumbers, others containing ingredients such as “the spawn of toads” gathered “at the later end of February” and a recipe for preserving a side of venison for an entire year stretch even the most adventurous of modern palates.

Besides being an almanac and recipe collection, the book is also a wonderful example of early modern women’s writing. Further research into the almanac could reveal what (if any) recipes the annotator copied out of printed books. In a few cases, the writer identifies a particular individual with whom a recipe originated, suggesting the existence of a socialized textual network of local information exchange. In studying the social practices and quotidian uses underpinning an annotated almanac such as this, we can take a glimpse into the forgotten histories of average people in seventeenth-century England.

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