Historical medical recipes open a window into contemporary therapeutic practices in formal and household-level settings. They allow us to trace social information sharing networks and capture the rise and decline of medical authorities and particular treatments. Lists of suitable herbs and other ingredients—together with preparation techniques—are perhaps the clearest information we can glean from these historical sources. Recent attempts to test the efficacy of some historical herbal remedies in modern laboratories have both shown their usefulness and revealed the long-forgotten healing properties of some natural products. These recipes thus have engaged historians of medicine for quite some time. In her new book, Hannah Bowers proposes that our traditional, practical encounters with medieval medical recipes, which focus on bodily healing, are insufficient. Instead, she challenges our reading and assessment of their wider role and purpose.

Recipes were, Bowers argues, an integral part of contemporary social and textual lives. Their very ubiquity placed them at the intersection of what we now perceive to be separate and distinct forms of written and spoken styles, spaces, and identities. Aside from their solely practical healing objectives, she suggests, they also served other, less tangible, ends. Would a late medieval reader, she asks, “really leaf through a book about scabs, boils, and broken bones for pleasure, distraction, reassurance, or imaginative inspiration?” (3). Her answer is a resounding yes, as she walks us through the many ways in which writers, copiers, and collectors pushed and pulled discursive boundaries, allowing the recipes to exist firmly within “tangled webs of medieval textual culture” (4).

In her introduction, Bowers situates recipes in their better-known medical context and provides a useful summary of the origins of, and subsequent mediating influences on, recipe collections and the development of vernacular translations and adaptations. Of particular importance for Bowers's purposes is the explosion of late medieval vernacular extractions. In formal milieus and humble domestic settings alike, they largely were stripped of their theoretical underpinnings and collected together with a variety of other scientific and literary texts. In this way, they ultimately became both more practical and less specifically medicinal.

Over three main sections, Bowers examines a selection of recipes through a literary lens, presenting them as stylistic and linguistic fragments that tell a different story about how and why they were written, collected, and utilized. The first section considers their literariness; here, Bowers investigates the poetic nature of prose remedies and the aesthetics of verse remedies. Bowers's work reveals, even to seasoned readers of medical recipes, how some prose recipes are awash with figurative and imaginative language—repetition, puns, similes, etc.—more commonly associated with poetry and devotional texts. Verse remedies likewise served a far greater literary purpose than as formulaic mnemonic devices. In both cases, Bowers points to the artistic overlaps that mark a shared tradition of medieval writing and textual reception—one which united rather than separated texts within seemingly disparate genres. In the second section, she turns to the purpose of remedy collections, exploring their paleographical, codicological, and paratextual features to investigate the complex, multilayered, and at times contradictory motivations behind their gathering and arrangement.

Here, again, we should not examine medical recipes as forms of writing and collection distinct from other, more purely literary genres; instead, recipes contribute “to broader discussions about medieval conceptions of order, textual integrity, and aesthetic experience” (110). In the third and final section, Bowers homes in on concepts of time—contrasting the labor-intensive and sometimes convoluted process of following recipe instructions with the rapid cures they are meant to bring about. Meanwhile, boundaries are crossed—marvelous and mundane, natural and supernatural, licit and illicit. Temporal and imaginative flexibility gave medical recipes a “shifting, metamorphic quality” (183) that, she contends, acted as playful stimulants for writers and readers alike.

Bowers urges us to look beyond medical recipes’ practical, conventional nature, insisting that we be open to their purposeful aesthetics, imaginary value, and, most importantly, their emotional and physical effects on people's minds and bodies. Her literary and linguistic approach to discursive boundaries and connections may not appeal to those who are interested what the recipes reveal about medieval healing practices and networks. Most medical recipes are, after all, simply practical instructions, and Bowers admits that her corpus is limited. Nevertheless, her work could influence the way we reread historical recipes for wounds, apostemes, broken bones, worms, aches, and fevers.