What is it about?
Old medieval medical remedies were still used in the 16th century, as is shown by notes that later readers of medieval manuscripts added in the margins. Favourite recipes were marked, and indexes added to make finding particular remedies easier. This essay looks at one medieval book of remedies and its Tudor user, and also documents other remedies that were added to the original collection.
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Why is it important?
In medical science we assume that new discoveries are the most important. This essay shows that old remedies are also valuable, and that they have always been regarded as such by their users.
Perspectives
Annotations in the margins of medieval manuscripts can reveal a great deal about how those volumes were used in their own time and subsequently, and give insight into individual readers - a sort of window on the past. In this case quite a lot is known about the sixteenth-century reader, a man who lived in the reign of Henry VIII and saw tremendous social change. We often think of readers of medieval manuscripts as primarily interested in religious texts, but actually they read all kinds of books - just like we do.
Professor Margaret Connolly
University of St Andrews
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evidence for the Continued Use of Medieval Medical Prescriptions in the Sixteenth Century: A Fifteenth-Century Remedy Book and its Later Owner, Medical History, March 2016, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2016.1.
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