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Gyf hyr this medycyn: analysing the Middle English recipe medical discourse

Paper · 2015 · Francisco Alonso Almeida

Summary

The paper looks at a little-studied corner of historical English: practical medical writing, and the medical recipe in particular, which literary-focused scholarship has largely ignored. Alonso Almeida examines 53 recipes from MS Yale 47 (ff. 60r–71v). This fifteenth-century gynaecological and obstetrical treatise is a partial English rendering of Gilbertus Anglicus's Compendium medicinae. He works from his own 1997 edition, because Hallaert's 1982 transcription contains errors and leaves out the marginalia, which partly carry the text's organisation.

The study has three aims:

  • to explain how recipes sit inside a larger treatise,
  • to identify the recurring linguistic cues that let a reader spot them,
  • to list traits typical of the genre.

Its framework combines Görlach's definition of a text-type and his catalogue of recipe features with Hoey's problem–solution pattern. On this view a recipe works like an answer to an unstated question: the ailment comes first, then the remedy. The paper also places these texts within the "Englishing" of science for lay readers and criticises current schemes for cataloguing recipes. This matters because thousands of such vernacular texts remain untranscribed or uncatalogued.

Key points

  • The corpus is 53 recipes from MS Yale 47, held at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale. The source text is a partial translation of Gilbertus Anglicus's Compendium medicinae (ca. 1230) dealing with obstetrical conditions.
  • The base text is Alonso Almeida (1997), not Hallaert (1982). The marginal notes, partly in Latin, are treated as essential to the text's structure.
  • Görlach (1992) lists eight genre markers:
    • form of headings
    • sentence length
    • verb forms
    • possessives on ingredients and tools
    • object deletion
    • temporal sequencing and adverbs
    • sentence complexity
    • loanwords or genteel diction
  • The paper reviews how recipes are indexed. The Voigts–Kurtz incipit catalogue drops "loose" recipes that do not belong to a group of three or more. The IMEP and Hargreaves (1981) guidelines record only the opening recipes. Schmidt's proposal, which the author prefers, is to transcribe the first fifteen words of every recipe.
  • Recipes in the appendix tend to begin with connectives or imperatives such as "Or", "Also" and "Take". Many open with a "make a plastre" formula, followed by ingredients, preparation and application.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Reading an instructive text as a reply to an implied question ("what cures X?") yields a simple two-slot structure: a problem and a solution. Many how-to genres fit this skeleton.
  • I2. Görlach's checklist turns a fuzzy idea of genre into concrete, countable surface features. Examples are object deletion, sequence adverbs and imperative verb forms.
  • I3. Object deletion is listed as a typical feature of recipes ("bake [it] … eat thereof"). Missing arguments are therefore normal in the genre, not a parsing error.
  • I4. Recurring openers such as "Or", "Also" and "Take" signal where one embedded recipe ends and the next begins inside running prose. Rubrication and marginalia reinforce these boundaries.
  • I5. Schmidt's indexing proposal favours recording a short sample from every unit over a longer sample from only the first few. This gives better coverage of the whole collection.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): A procedure frame could include a problem/goal slot filled from the heading, so that every imperative step is linked to the purpose it serves.
  • I2 (tokens): These features could drive a lightweight, explainable genre tag that later stages use, for example to expect imperatives without overt subjects.
  • I3 (world): When a step's object is missing, the system can fill it with the most recently mentioned ingredient or mixture in the world state, instead of leaving the role empty.
  • I4 (tree): Sentence and discourse segmentation could treat such cue words and paratext as soft boundary signals, rather than discarding layout and margin notes during preprocessing.
  • I5 (learn): When building evaluation sets from long documents, Mova could take a small slice from every section rather than reading only the opening sections closely, to avoid bias towards how documents begin.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran CanariaLas Palmas de Gran Canaria · Spain3 works · 1 citation

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPhilosophy · 211 worksClassics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 3Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksDiscourse analysis · 394 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Francisco Alonso Almeida. 2015. Gyf hyr this medycyn: analysing the Middle English recipe medical discourse. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 6.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{almeida2015gyf,
  title = {{Gyf hyr this medycyn: analysing the Middle English recipe medical discourse}},
  author = {Francisco Alonso Almeida},
  booktitle = {Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 6},
  year = {2015},
  url = {https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/174}
}

References

26 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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