Browse Exhibits (4 total)
Introduction
The “Plague Page,” as my peers and I refer to it, is a “recipe” written against the plague and added to the manuscript in a sixteenth-century secretary hand. Where do the dragons come in? We'll have to learn to read the scribal handwriting to find out.
This website is an attempt to bring the “Plague Page” back to life by providing a new transcription and accessible translation of its recipe, and using twenty-first century media to reimagine the "medicine" this page taught people to create more than 500 years ago.
Transcription
This exhibit provides three ways to read the Plague Page of HM 144. The First is an academic transcription using standard conventions to convey the text of the page as faithfully as possible.
The second, "Punctuated Transcription," retains the original phrasing and spelling of the Plague Page, but adds in punctuation and line breaks, and clarifies the text when necessary, to make the syntax and logic more clear.
The third, "Modern Translation" provides my best approximation for how we might explain the recipe in today's English. Like the Victorian(ist) that I am, please note that my translation is amateur and I would be grateful for constructive feedback.
Finally, for scholars and amateurs alike, I have provided a useful guide to the particularities of the Plague Page writer's hand. I based this particular webpage on the model of the immensely helpful Late Medieval English Scribes site.
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.
Dragons?
This website 144dragons.omeka.net is named after one of the HM 144 plague recipe’s most "sexy" ingredients: “a quantity of dragons.” As much as we may wish that this medicine really called for an undisclosed number of fire-breathing mythical creatures, the truth is much simpler. The recipe calls for “a quantity of dragons—the crop or the root." This reference could refer to a variety of possible plant species from the Croton, Dracaena, Daemonorops, Calamus rotang or Pterocarpus genera.
Since Roman times, the sap of some of these plants has been used as bright red pigment, but the ancient Romans, Greeks, and other cultures also believed that the leaves and roots of the plant itself had medical properties. Such uses for the plant persisted through medieval medicine, alchemy, modern folk healing, and even into modern day Neopaganism. To see "dragons" in action, click on The Medicine Now.