Take three spoonfuls of the juice of hkmklkk: an edition of fifteenth-century medical texts in Sloane 3160.

Abstract

This thesis is an edition of medical texts in London, British Library Sloane 3160, f. 151r-v and ff. 166r-170v, copied by a single scribe here referred to as Scribe M. The manuscript has been dated to the second half of the fifteenth century and consists of religious and medical texts. The medical texts produced by scribe M are of a practical kind (mainly recipes, diagnostics and charms), and they are written in a very distinctive Northwest Midland dialect. No study has thus far been published of these interesting texts, which contain language written in letter-substitution codes in both English and Latin, as well as a range of charm formulae. They present a linguistically complex and layered text that provides insight into the literacy skills of the medical practitioners that will have used the recipes in this manuscript. They also raise questions about the ways in which the manuscript might have functioned both within and outside of the medical community for which it was intended. The thesis is divided into two parts corresponding to its two main aims. The first aim has been to study and contextualise the work of the Scribe M. The manuscript context as well as the physical, visual and linguistic characteristics of the text have been studied, as well as the various coding and marking systems used in the text. Based on a contextualising discussion of the medical tradition and practice in Late Medieval English society, an attempt is made to identify the sort of role this manuscript might have played and the kind of discourse communities that might have produced and used it. The second aim of this thesis has been to present a diplomatic edition of the contribution of Scribe M. The edition is provided with extensive footnotes to aid an interpretation of the physical manuscript reality and followed by endnotes providing some clarification of or context to the contents of the texts. A translation of the text into Modern English has also been included, as well as a list of the ingredients included in the recipes.