The Language of Charms in a Middle English Recipe Collection.

This essay focuses presence of charming language in a recipe collection in the Middle English. New Haven, Yale Medical Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney MS 47 1 contains a number of medical texts in Middle English, which have been indexed by Voigts and Kurtz. Its 118 numbered folios are preceded by six folios containing an acephalous table of contents of the first text, a collection of curative recipes. The MS includes four kinds of utilitarian material, all related to medicine: medical recipes, a gynecological treatise, medicinal uses of herbs, and astrological information pertinent to health. The binding incorporates in the guard papers scraps of parchment identified as documents related to Maxstoke Priory in Warwickshire. The main texts are written in two English hands, datable to the third quarter of the fifteenth century. An English translation of a gynecological treatise, titled the "Sekenesse of Wymmen," is the only text in the codex that has been extensively edited and studied. Not surprisingly, this English book features both Middle English and Latin. In her article "What's the Word? Bilingualism in Late-Medieval England," Linda Ehrsam Voigts points out the high proportion of code mixing (that is, the "juxtaposition of passages belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems, in this case Latin and Middle English," 818) found in medieval MSS written before 1475 and offers explanations for a selection of examples.