The present paper deals with an analysis of medieval culinary and medical recipes. A major feature which will be of interest is the use of measure terms. The research has been based on material from 14th and 15th century recipe collections. First, the major weight and measure systems which were used in the Middle English period will be presented. Then, the measure terms used in the analysed texts are collected and categorised into three groups: specific, non-specific, and container-related terms. The study, apart from showing the variety of measure terms used at the time, also compares two types of recipes, i.e., medical and culinary.
The study of complex noun phrases and their evolution in early English writings has attracted attention of many scholars (e.g. Norri 1989; Raumolin-Brunberg 1991; Moskowich 2009; 2010; Biber et al. 2011; Tyrkkö 2014). These studies have revealed that the trends in the use of pre- and postmodification in noun phrases have been subject to various changes over the centuries. The present paper offers an examination of the preferred patterns of noun phrase modification in Early Modern English medical recipes. The study will investigate whether there was a link between the level of the text (learned and non-learned) and the choice of noun modifiers.
One of the text-type features of a recipe is a certain degree of technical lexicon (cf. Görlach 2004). The aim of the present study is to compare the use and distribution of selected group of terms, here references to medical preparations, in Middle and Early Modern English recipe collections. Particular attention will be given to the factors responsible for the choice of terms. Also, we will concentrate on the rivalry between native and foreign lexical units.
In late medieval England learned medicine leapt the walls of universities and became available to people with no formal medical training (cf. also Jones 1999, Jones 2004. This widespread interest in medicine was partly triggered by the vernacularisation of medical writings. This process involved, among other things, (1) gradual evolution of conventions and norms for, e.g. recipe writing (cf. Carroll 2004) and/or (2) employment of various strategies to adapt the texts to the new audience. The study will attempt to explain what strategies were employed to adapt medical texts, in particular recipes, to the intended audience, i.e., "who speaks [writes] what language to whom and when" (Fishman 1979: 15). For instance, some recipes contain foreign (mostly French and Latin) or sophisticated terminology whereas other recipe collections make use of vernacular resources. This implies that the language of medieval recipes might be the indicator of a social distinction between the readers. The data for the paper come from the Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), a computerised collection of medical treatises written between 1330 and 1500.
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