DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.11123120
title: Contents, Format, and Reader Interactions with Middle English Practical Manuscripts, ca. 1375–1500

description: These three .csv files contain datasets intended to supplement the book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (University of Chicago Press, 2024). They convey information on 182 Middle English "practical" manuscripts created between ca. 1375 and 1500. Practical manuscripts are defined as manuscripts written entirely (or nearly so) in Middle English containing contents entirely (or nearly so) related to medicine and practical science, like agriculture, animal husbandry, and craft manufacture.

To identify these 182 manuscripts, I first searched the Voigts-Kurtz database of Medical and Scientific Writings in Middle English, compiled over several decades by Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz and now containing data on more than 1200 manuscripts containing Middle English medical or scientific texts. After identifying promising manuscripts in the Voigts-Kurtz database, I followed this initial search with consultations of manuscript catalogues for the Beinecke Library, Yale University; Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; British Library, London; Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; Morgan Library, New York; National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; Trinity College Cambridge Library, Cambridge; University of Glasgow Library, Glasgow; and Wellcome Library, London. In addition to identifying manuscripts not cited in the Voigts-Kurtz database, these catalogue searches enabled me to weed out manuscripts that contained too much Latin for my purposes or those that contained just a small section of medicine and science and were otherwise devoted to literature, law, religion, or other texts. From these searches, I identified over 300 fifteenth-century manuscripts that I hoped would reveal how English lay people thought of books as tools for collecting and utilizing knowledgerelated to day-to-day medical practice, agriculture, or husbandry. However, I couldn't ascertain if the manuscripts I had identified were the sort of book that a non-elite person might ownuntil I made research trips to the libraries and archives that held them. I was fortunate to begin this project at the same time that many libraries in the U.K. were changing their policies in regards to digital photography. As a result, I was able to photograph scores of manuscripts in a single trip, which I then analyzed and catalogued in my database over the following months. These research trips, conducted over summers and academic holidays between 2014 and 2021, enabled me to whittle down my initial corpus of over 300 potential "practical manuscripts" to the 182 manuscripts analyzed in Reading Practice and described in these appendices. Part of thisprocess entailed identifying fifteenth-century manuscripts that had been bound into composite volumesby later collectors. These once-separate manuscripts are counted individually in my corpus, and their folio numbers in those composite volumes are noted in the spreadsheet below.

The "Manuscript Attributes" .csv file contains the following information on each of these 182 vernacular manuscripts:



Shelfmark

Archive/library

Approximate date of creation

Writing support (paper or parchment)

Number of folios (and folio numbers, for composite manuscripts)

Size in mm

Quality of scribal hand

Information on contents

Information on reader marks

Information on reader cancellations or censorship

URL for digital facsimile, if available


The contents field of the "Manuscript Attributes" .csv file indicates whether the manuscript contains texts in the following genres, and which texts those are, if readily identifiable:



Illustrations

Medical recipes

Herbals

Charms

Medical treatises

Treatises on phlebotomy

Reproductive recipes

Uroscopy texts

Surgical texts or surgical recipes

Craft recipes

Dietaries or health regimens

Plague treatises

Prognostications

Texts on weights and measures

Texts on animal husbandry

Texts on planting, grafting, or gardening

Texts on hawking, hunting, or fishing

Almanacs

Treatises on astrology

Culinary recipes


The "Reader Marks" .csv file contains transcriptions of every reader mark in a fifteenth-century practical manuscript that I could attribute to a reader or which could be dated definitively. In addition, the spreadsheet contains notes about other reader and scribal additions,like added recipes or indices. I note the location of these marks and indicatewhether they were made in the fifteenth (XV), sixteenth (XVI), or seventeenth (XVII)centuries. In total, the spreadsheet contains notes or transcriptions of over 500 separateinstances of reader interactions with practical manuscripts.

The "Cancellations" .csv file contains information about which manuscripts feature censorship of any kind and what sorts of material was censored or cancelled.