Introduction
The Project
Historians of medicine and science agree that something pivotal happened in England in the latter decades of the sixteenth century, as medieval theories about the body or the natural world diminished in the face of new discoveries, new ideas, and a new experimental method. And yet, the reading habits of sixteenth-century English artisans, bureaucrats, merchants, and farmers tell a different story, one that this project seeks to explore. Early modern English people were avid collectors of medieval manuscripts filled with centuries-old texts related to medicine, astrology, agriculture, or craft manufacture. Old Books, New Attitudes seeks to understand why early modern readers valued this medieval knowledge; how generations of readers engaged with these manuscripts over time; and what role these older books played in the development of the new medical sciences by digitally reconstructing the manuscript collection of a single, early modern collector: the sixteenth-century gentleman Henry Dyngley.
The aim of the project is to reconstruct the intergenerational transference of medical and scientific knowledge in books, and to show how medieval sources played an important role in facilitating a culture of scientific exchange and inquiry in early modern England.
Why Henry Dyngley?
Early modern English people were avid collectors of medieval manuscripts filled with centuries-old texts related to medicine, astrology, agriculture, or craft manufacture, but one of the most avid was Henry Dyngley, an Elizabethan gentleman who owned and annoted at least five fifteenth-century Middle English medical manuscripts. Dyngley was born in 1515, probably in Cropthorne, Worcestershire at the manor of Charlton, the family estate Dyngley inherited from his father, John, in 1541. He did not attend university, but he had a life-long passion for collecting and evaluating medical and scientific knowledge. It’s hard to say how he became interested in Middle English manuscripts, but it may have happened thanks to the dissolution of the monasteries, and especially one monastery just around the corner from his home. His first acquisition may have been Wellcome MS 5262, a late fourteenth-century collection of medical recipes from Winchcombe Abbey, which was only twenty miles from Dyngley’s family manor at Charlton and was dissolved in 1539 when Dyngley was only twenty-four. Henry inscribed his name and initials on the pages of this medical collection, but he also took care to partially obscure the illustrations of saints on the manuscript’s opening pages—a smart move in Protestant England. Dyngley used a similar technique of censorship to excise charms in Bodleian MS Rawlinson C.506, a thick manuscript of over 300 small paper pages, crammed with recipes, charms, and verses on bloodletting and equine medicine, which we can securely place in his hands before 1547 because of this reader mark, signed and dated: “the .14. day of august anno domini 1547.” Dyngley used a similar technique of censorship to excise charms in Bodleian MS Rawlinson C.506, a thick manuscript of over 300 small paper pages, crammed with recipes, charms, and verses on bloodletting and equine medicine, which we can securely place in his hands before 1547 because of this reader mark, signed and dated: “the .14. day of august anno domini 1547.”
By 1550, Dyngley had married Mary Neville, daughter of Sir Edward Neville, a courtier close to Henry VIII. By 1553, when he was appointed Sheriff of Worcestershire for the first time, he was also the proud father of three sons: Francis, the eldest, followed by George and Henry. And by 1554, Henry had managed to procure yet another medical manuscript, Trinity College Cambridge MS O.8.35, a professionally-produced vernacular medical textbook, with recipes and treatises on uroscopy, on the four humors, on anatomy, and on “simples.” Just as in his other manuscripts, Dyngley used blank space in the Trinity College manuscript to add extra recipes, including a list of “waters” added to the last page of the manuscript, which he again signed and dated, “Henry Dyngley anno Christo 1557 xxx may at Adyngton in Buckinghamshire.” Around 1560, Dyngley acquired both a new daughter, Mary, and another medical manuscript, British Library MS Royal 17 A.xxxii, which he again signed and dated over several folios. The following two years brought another two daughters in quick succession, Barbara and Alice, the last of Henry’s nine children.
In the manuscripts he collected and annotated with his initials, Dyngley was constructing an archive of natural knowledge for his children. In 1564, Dyngley began work on his own manuscript to leave for his children when he was dead and gone: Wellcome MS 244, a manuscript that reorganized the knowledge he had collected from old manuscripts into a valuable reference for those who would follow him. The manuscript opens with a kalendarium copied in Dyngley’s own hand, and at the very back of the manuscript, Dyngley wrote notes about the weather in 1564, followed immediately by a copy of a prognostication that would help him forecast future weather events. He closed this section with a disclaimer to the reader about the value of the recipes he’d collected for his manuscript: “Where so ever you see this character HD stand in the margin of this my book, against any medicine, oil, ointment, salve, plaster, trete, powder, syrup, electuary, unguent, water, or any other thing contained within this boke, that have I, Henry Dineley proved without doubt & none other have I myself proved.”
In 1573, a decade after he began composing his own recipe collection with this disclaimer about the value of recipes marked with an HD, at nearly sixty years old, Dyngley was still marking up old manuscripts. Alongside a vernacular treatise on reproduction in Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, Dyngley wrote, “Note H D 1573.” At the back of the same massive (and beautiful) manuscript, he also updated a running list of the dates of Easter with a comment that in 1573 “easter was the xxii day of march.” It is the latest date that appears in any of his manuscripts. Sixteen years later, in 1589, Henry Dyngley died at the age of seventy-four.
Dyngley’s Collection
Dyngley’s collecting habits were first noticed by the late Lister Matheson, who compiled notes on Dyngley’s annotations in two manuscripts and one printed book held in the Welcome Collection in the early 2000s. Matheson’s notes were an incredible resource for this project’s lead researcher, Dr. Melissa Reynolds, who has uncovered another four fiftenth-century manuscripts owned and annotated by Dyngley, bringing the handlist of Dyngley’s library to a total of seven items:
- Wellcome Library MS 5262, a late fourteenth-century collection of Middle English medical recipes, possibly created at Winchcombe Abbey in Gloucestershire
- Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C.506, a mid-fifteenth century manuscript composed of several, originally-separate manuscripts related to medicine, agriculture, and husbandry, which were joined together by a later medieval or early modern reader
- British Library MS Royal 17 A.xxxii, a manuscript from the first half of the fifteenth century containing Middle English texts on prognostication, an herbal, and a collection of medical receipts
- Trinity College Cambridge Library MS O.8.35, a later fifteenth-century Middle English all-purpose medical guidebook, identical in format and contents to Bodleian Library MS Add. B.60
- Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, a mid-fifteenth century manuscript featuring several translations of learned, Latinate medical texts in Middle English
- Welcome Library MS 244, a later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscript of medical, meteorological, and alchemical knowledge, begun by Henry Dyngley and completed by his descendants
- Wellcome EPB/A/7330, A newe book Entituled the Gouvernement of Healthe, by William Bulleyn, a medical manual and dietary published in London in 1558
About Trinity College Cambridge MS O.8.35
The first stage of the project, begun in summer 2023, focuses on Trinity College Cambridge MS O.8.35, a later fifteenth-century medical textbook filled with recipes, instructions for bloodletting, information on astrology, and on humoral medicine. Additional information on the manuscript’s contents, format, and provenance is available in the Wren Library’s James Catalogue Online. This manuscript was an ideal place to start because, while it wasn’t Dyngley’s first acquisition, it has significance in the broader ecosystem of Middle English medicine.
In fact, TCC MS O.8.35 is identical—in contents, format, script, and materials–to Bodleian Library MS Add B.60. The identical nature of these two manuscripts suggests, perhaps, that they were produced on speculation by an industrious fifteenth-century scribe or stationer. The contents of both manuscripts support this hypothesis. Both contain a typical array of Middle English recipes, but they also include basic primers on the four humors, four seasons, astrological cycles, apothecaries’ weights and measures, and medical nomenclature. In other words, these manuscripts would have been excellent all-purpose primers for a novice student of medieval medicine.
The other reason that TCC MS O.8.35 was selected as the first manuscript for transcription has to do with its format. It is written in a very neat and consistent professional hand, making it easier for undergraduate students to hone their paleographic skills. Other manuscripts in Dyngley’s collection, like Bodleian MS Rawlinson C.506, are much more eclectic and inconsistent in the various hands that appear on its pages. Finally, and most importantly, the librarians at the Wren Library, Trinity College Cambridge, have fully digitized TCC MS O.8.35 in IIIF format, which is a requirement for EditionCrafter to produce a viable digital edition.
Future Plans
While efforts are underway to complete the transcription of TCC MS O.8.35, the planned schedule for this work may continue for several years, as most work will be undertaken by undergraduate students. After producing a full transcription, our aim is to mark-up the text with tags that may help researchers understand Dyngley’s interest and engagement with medieval medicine more fully. In future, we hope to have a search function within the site that will enable querying the manuscript for tools, ingredients, or special terms.
In addition, we hope to begin work on translating another of Dyngley’s manuscripts, Wellcome MS 5262, in the near future. This manuscript may have been Dyngley’s first acquisition, and it is also the earliest within Dyngley’s collection. Both the hand and orthography of Wellcome 5262 are more challenging than TCC MS O.8.35, as it dates from the last quarter of the fourteenth century, making it one of the oldest Middle English medical manuscripts extant today. Advanced undergraduate students and graduate students may begin work on this transcription in Spring of 2027.