The Recipe

Huntington Manuscript 144 has come a long way in its more than 500-year life. It originated in England at the end of the fifteenth century, and is currently housed in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. This miscellany includes versions of Chaucer’s Melibee’s Tale and Monk’s Tale, as well as works by Lydgate and Lichfield, but it also contains hidden treasures. Many years after the original compilation of the miscellany, on the back of a blank page toward the end of the book, one sixteenth-century writer added their own special touch: a recipe for a medicine against the plague.

Riverside, California. Fifty-one miles east of this manuscript’s home, I’ve studied and transcribed this curious and oft-forgotten page for a graduate course on Medieval Manuscripts, where we’ve been discussing the importance of manuscripts as material objects, rather than just a means to acquire information. What’s lost when textbooks and anthologies only publish the “important” stuff, like the Chaucer, and leave idiosyncrasies like the Plague Page behind?

I’m interested in an experiment. Let’s not only include the plague page, but celebrate and highlight it. Let’s bring its materiality back to life.

Let’s make the recipe.

Click The Medysyne Then for information about the ingredients, and click The Medicine Now for a video documentary of my experiment.