Hannah Bower’s study of later medieval recipes is grounded in an analysis of twenty-five vernacular medical collections. The monograph grew out of Bower’s doctoral research at Oxford; unsurprisingly, many of the primary sources are from the Bodleian, with an equal number from the British Library and a handful from other repositories, including York Minster. However, the bibliography makes clear that consultation has been much wider (it lists eighty-nine manuscripts and seven early printed books), and Bower is also clear that there are many other collections to be explored, mentioning straightaway that “one substantial database records over 1,800 extant medical recipes or recipe collections copied in English in the fifteenth century” (2). That is also a conservative figure: individual medical recipes survive so numerously, and in so many manuscripts, that catalogers and indexers have often quantified them only in bulk. There is indeed great scope for research in this field, and...
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