Medicinal and Culinary Miscellany

Type: Manuscript

Date: 14th-17th Century

Setting: City

Produced By/For: [unknown - created for personal use] [Bologna, Italy]

Contents: Medicinal and culinary recipes (composite miscellany)

Shelf Mark: Ms.Brown.It.1

Location: Brown Collection Box 3 (Acc. 1992-044, Item #2)

Description by Dr. Adrienne Williams Boyarin (Department of English) and Dr. Joseph Grossi (Department of English), March 2015

Medicinal and Culinary Miscellany

Miscellany of medical recipes, culinary recipes, and other ephemera, mostly in Italian (Bolognese dialect), some in Latin. Incomplete composite manuscript, compiled for personal use. Variety of scribal hands. One dated folio (32v): "3 Dbre 1614 in bolog(n)oa." Some lively pen trials and doodles (50-51).

Extent: 33 leaves, old 17th-century foliation 31-62, modern foliation in pencil, on paper with the exception of one leaf of reused medieval parchment (36). Paper quality and size inconsistent, some watermarks visible. Bound in plain modern boards. 30 x 22 cm.

Provenance: purchased by Bruce and Dorothy Brown from Maggs Bros. Ltd (London).

Identification and transcription of erased (washed) text on parchment fol. 36. Transcription and description* by Sonya Chwyl, with assistance from Dr. Adrienne Williams Boyarin (ENGL), as part of coursework for her manuscript studies class, December 2015.

Partial transcription: folios 34r-v and 39r-39Av, six recipes written in the same hand, three with ascriptions, late seventeenth-century script. Transcription* by Renée Gaudet, with assistance from Dr. Adrienne Williams Boyarin and Dr. Joseph Grossi (ENGL), as part of coursework for a manuscript studies class with Dr. Williams Boyarin, December 2015.

Catalogue and preliminary identification of watermarks by Natasha O'Reilly, with the assistance of Dr. Adrienne Williams Boyarin (ENGL), as part of coursework for a manuscript studies class with Dr. Boyarin, December 2016.

Fifteenth-century leaf from a Medicinal and Culinary Miscellany (fol. 38). Transcription* by Ashley Bucci, with assistance from Dr. Adrienne Williams Boyarin (ENGL), as part of coursework for a manuscript studies class with Dr. Williams Boyarin, June 2022.

Fifteenth-century leaf from a Medicinal and Culinary Miscellany (fol. 38). Study by Kerri Li, with assistance from Dr. Adrienne Williams Boyarin (ENSH), as part of coursework for a manuscript studies class with Dr. Williams Boyarin, Fall 2023.

* Transcription conventions follow Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca, 2007), pp. 75-77.

Images

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Images also available through Fragmentarium.

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