The Problem with Practicality: Rethinking the Function of Late-Medieval Medical Recipes 1400-1550. (360G-Wellcome-108641_Z_15_Z)

I intend to examine late-medieval manuscripts containing English medical recipe collections, in order to establish a clearer and more nuanced understanding of their cultural functions. I aim to analyse the navigational aids, reader annotation and manuscript context of these collections, in order to complicate the current critical conception that they only or predominantly served practical functions. I also hope to destabilise modern ideas of medieval boundaries between remedies and other text-ty pes, between the utilitarian and the non-utilitarian. In doing so, I shall build upon the recent work of scholars such as Carrie Griffin who has suggested that these texts are suitable for closer, more in-depth literary and codicological analysis than they have hitherto been subjected to (see my extended research proposal for further details).