Manuscript Location

Folger Shakespeare Library, Manuscripts

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

ca. 1626-ca. 1700

Description

This is a medical receipt book, but it also includes about a dozen recipes for fruit wines, as well as recipes for mead, cider, metheglin, and chocolate (leaf 30r). The book contains an index at the front, followed by approximately 234 pages of recipes written on 180 numbered leaves. The first leaf is headed, "A book of receiptes which was given me by severall men for severall causes, greefes and disseases, and these first were mr mathias his receipts." Recipes that appear to be in the hand of the heading continue to the middle of leaf 5v, where a recipe in another hand, dated 24 December 1626, is written. The remainder of the book is in a number of different hands, some of which recur from the beginning to the end of the volume. A recipe for "The bitter watter for That Epidemic Destemper,' on leaf 138v, is dated 1684. 

Among those whose names appear are: Mr. Mathias, Dr. Shelden, Dr. Willis, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Kenelm Digby, Mr. Ball and Dr. Wright. The manuscript cookbook of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) was posthumously published by his assistant in 1669 and went on to become a bestseller.