“A good Receipt to purge”: The Medical Recipes in London, Wellcome Library, MS 8086

Abstract

Recipes, which have a primary instructional focus, are frequently encountered in scientific texts in the English vernacular written in all periods of the language. Research on recipes in English historical texts has mostly accounted for the linguistic and the structural patterns that they show, often intending to characterising not only recipes themselves, but also the type of text that includes them and/or the potential audience of the text. In line with this research, this article focuses on the recipes in London, Wellcome Library, MS 8086, which holds an Early Modern English recipe collection. The collection is analysed with particular attention to medical recipes, and its features are explored to put it into the broader perspective of recipes and recipe collections in the Early Modern English period. These findings are in turn used to examine the potential readership and character of the text.