Scholarly History

One of the only scholars to publish a full transcription of this piece was English philologist and co-founder of the Oxford English Dictionary, Frederick James Furnivall. In 1878, Furnivall published a small piece on “Chaucer and Lydgate Fragments” in Notes and Queries series 5, volume 9. He described this page of the manuscript as “A Recipe for Edward IV’s Plague Medicine, from Mr. Huth’s paper MS. of Chaucer and Lydgate pieces, &c., about 1460-70 A.D.; leaf 150 bk.”

However, Furnivall's transcription was only published to a very small academic audience, and even today, is only available in a difficult-to-find archive with unreliable image-to-text recognition of Furnivall's piece. Similarly, though the Huntington Library has digitized several more “important” pages of HM 144, the "Plague Page" usually flies under the radar of both academics and medieval enthusiasts alike. 

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.