Medical texts written in English during the late Middle Ages have in recent years attracted increasing attention among scholars. From approximately 1375 onwards, the use of English began to gain a firmer foothold in medical manuscripts, which in previous centuries had been written mainly in Latin or French. Scholars of Middle English, and editors of medical texts from late medieval England, are thus faced with a huge medical vocabulary which no single volume has yet attempted to define. This dictionary is therefore an essential reference tool. The material analysed in the Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375–1550 includes edited texts, manuscripts and early printed books, and represents three main types of medical writing: surgical manuals and tracts; academic treatises by university-trained physicians, and remedybooks. The dictionary covers four lexical fields: names of sicknesses, body parts, instruments, and medicinal preparations. Entries are structured as follows: (1) headword (2) scribal variants occurring in the texts (3) etymology (4) definition(s), each definition followed by relevant quotations (5) references to corresponding entries in the Dictionary of Old English, Middle English Dictionary, and The Oxford English Dictionary (6) references to academic books and articles containing information on the history and/or meaning of the term.

Current Projects in Historical Lexicography brings together seven papers by present and recent editors of historical dictionaries and lexical databases. The collection is introduced with an overview of the history of historical lexicography from the ancient world to the present day, with particular emphasis on the major nineteenth-century dictionaries of German, French, English, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish, and on their successors. In the first paper, Javier Martín Arista describes the present state of, and the prospects for, the Nerthus lexical database of Old English. The next two introduce specialized dictionaries of the language of medieval and early modern texts: Fernando Tejedo-Herrero’s comprehensive dictionary of the language of the great thirteenth-century lawcode Siete Partidas, and Juhani Norri’s Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375–1530. Marijke Mooijaart’s paper discusses the online integration of the four historical dictionaries which cover Dutch from the earliest times to the twentieth century. The next two papers, Stefan Dollinger on the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles and the Bank of Canadian English, and Maggie Scott on the Concise Scots Dictionary, describe projects to revise twentieth-century historical dictionaries as the language varieties which they register evolve. Finally, Jeremy Bergerson’s paper presents a project for an etymologically rich historical dictionary of Afrikaans. An appendix to the volume comprises two previously unpublished short documents by Katherine Barber and John Considine which bear on the history of the Dictionary of Canadianisms revision project. The contributions to this volume offer a rare set of insights into ongoing lexicographical work, addressing both methodological issues such as inclusion criteria and the balance between diachronic and synchronic coverage, and practical issues such as publication media and funding.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. Analysing recipe collections in over seventy late medieval manuscripts, this book explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to those texts' healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose. The study therefore presents a challenge to recipes' traditional reputation as mundane, unartful texts written and read solely for the sake of directing practical action. Crucially, it also relocates these neglected texts and overlooked manuscripts within the complex networks forming medieval textual culture, demonstrating that—though marginalized in modern scholarship—medical recipes were actually linguistically, formally, materially, and imaginatively interconnected with many other late medieval discourses, including devotional writings, romances, fabliaux, and Chaucerian poetry. The monograph thus models for readers modes of analysis and close reading that might be deployed in relation to recipes in order to understand better their allusive, fragmentary, and playful qualities as well as their wide-ranging influence on medieval imaginations.

In medieval England, women in labor wrapped birth girdles around their abdomens to protect themselves and their unborn children. These parchment or paper rolls replicated the "girdle relics" of the Virgin Mary and other saints loaned to queens and noblewomen, extending childbirth protection to women of all classes. This book examines the texts and images of nine English birth girdles produced between the reigns of Richard II and Henry VIII. Cultural artifacts of lay devotion within the birthing chamber, the birth girdles offered the solace and promise of faith to the parturient woman and her attendants amid religious dissent, political upheaval, recurring epidemics, and the onset of print.

Introduction giving full explanation of the nature of the corpus and the historical context. This will allow readers to understand the nature of the texts, and to make inferences about how the medical texts which follow might have been used. Notes giving sources and analogues for the recipes in other contemporary European languages (Latin, Middle English, Anglo-Norman). These will allow readers to understand the common theories underlying the recipes and to make judgements about the place of this material within the larger European medical tradition of the time. Comprehensive glossaries. These will allow readers to find any recipe based on the ingredients used in it, or the condition treated, allowing them to compare with recipes in other sources themselves, from other time periods, or investigate the corpus of the way different ingredients were used. Comprehensive plant-name glossary giving evidence for the interpretation of the plant names in the corpus from a series of previously unstudied pre-modern plant-name glossaries. This will allow readers to evaluate the evidence for the interpretation of the plant names and hopefully spur on further research on this neglected topic.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides stark evidence of the importance of medicine on a global scale. However, revisiting the influenza pandemic of 1918 provided a perspective as we searched for a viable vaccine and instituted public health measures. This shows that medical knowledge is an accumulative process extending to the past and it is in the spirit of that legacy that this bibliography has been compiled. The book is a one-stop resource that cites literature related to the historical aspects of medicine. It also acknowledges medicine’s global reach and devotes significant effort in that respect. Although the online world seems to dominate on both a social and educational level, there is still a need for thoughtfully curated and focused reference works and this bibliography accomplishes that goal. The book has 9,000+ citations. It utilizes the WHO's International classification of Diseases for the section on diseases and disorders and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration's Product Code Classification Database for the section on medical devices, equipment, and instruments. It includes detailed subject, geographuc, and people indexes for an easy reference.

Discovery in Haste is the first book to survey the English printed medical dictionary, a greatly under-researched area, from Andrew Boorde's Breviary of Helthe of 1547 to Benjamin Lara’s surgical dictionary of 1796. The book begins with Andrew Boorde’s Breviary of Helthe of 1547, moves on to medical glossaries, which were produced through the whole period, the ‘physical dictionaries’ of the mid-seventeenth century which first employed ‘dictionary’ in the title, the translation into English of Steven Blancard’s dictionary, Latin medical dictionaries of the late seventeenth century by Thomas Burnet and John Cruso, the influential dictionary by John Quincy which dominated the eighteenth century, surgical dictionaries through to that by Benjamin Lara, Robert James’s massive encyclopaedic dictionary and the work derived from it by John Barrow, as well as George Motherby’s dictionary of 1775. The characteristics of each are discussed and their inter-relationships explored. Attention is also paid to the printing history and the way the publishers influenced the works and, where appropriate, to the influence each had on succeeding dictionaries. This book is the first to locate medical dictionaries within the history of lexicography.

Henry Daniel’s Liber Uricrisiarum is the earliest known work of academic medicine written in Middle English, presented here for the first time in a complete edition. Working in the late 1370s, Daniel combined authoritative medicine from written sources with his own personal experience, creating a text that stands out for its linguistic originality, intellectual scope, and wide circulation. Extant in over three dozen manuscript witnesses and two early modern print copies, Liber Uricrisiarum describes medieval humoral theory, anatomy, physiology, disease, medical astronomy, reproductive processes, and more, all within the broader context of uroscopic diagnosis. The introduction situates the text and its author in their medical, intellectual, linguistic, and bibliographic contexts, outlining the uroscopic tradition to which Daniel contributes, and describing the relationships among the many manuscripts containing the Liber Uricrisiarum. This edition presents the Middle English text, with a general glossary, glossary of proper names, and explanatory notes that explain obscure words and phrases and identify Daniel’s sources. It also includes the complete set of diagrams contained in the Royal manuscript; appendices providing the Latin and English versions of the prologue and epilogue; an extensive translation from one of Daniel’s important sources, Isaac Israeli’s De urinis; tables relevant to Daniel’s astronomical measurements; and an analysis of the Royal manuscript’s dialect. Cumulatively, the edition and apparatus introduce readers to an important yet understudied text, the details of which will have significant impact on studies of medieval medicine and science, intellectual history, and Middle English language and literature.