Digital Transcription

69v

or to speke with fyghters, and forto touche þe feet 
of man with iren, for why that signe piscis
makith the feet of man & of womman in his
moder Wombe. And if eny man or womman
be wounded in the feet whan the mone is under-
neth that signe unnethe or evere he shal be cone-
red.

70v

This table tellith of digestives.
symple & compound of every humour. that
is to say of colere, fleume, and malencolie
The first chapiter of medicyns symple

Honestly, attempting to read these pages was quite overwhelming. The “recipes” I found are not even for food, they’re bizarre medieval medical recipes. Part of the text is curing both man and woman’s feet from wounds and what is needed to do this. The other page was a little hard to make out. It seems like the beginning of a new recipe for “digestive.” It is quite absurd to think that in the past, a “recipe” was basically a combination of science and astrology.

It took me way longer to learn how to transcribe this than I thought it would. At first, it just looks like a bunch of squiggles. However, I learned that some of the letters aren’t even close to the letters we use. For example, the letter s looks just like the letter f. So I just read it and hoped it sounded like a word I know. Some words were not spelled right and that made it even harder. The word “fyg htere” turned out to be the word “fighter,” and the word “wombe” just means womb.

The main question I have is how people were able to make these recipes accurately. The directions are so vague. They don’t really have exact quantities of anything which is surprising because that may be one of the most important parts. It almost seems like the person writing this even knows how to do it, or were they just copying it from another book and didn’t know if it worked or not. It’s like a cheat sheet, but they leave out half the steps.

The transcriptions are really hard to understand what is being said, whether you’re an expert or just learning how to do it. I think this is where XML can come into play. If you can tag things it makes it easier for the person that is reading your transcription to know what is being said. I think this is an important part of this because it helps with making the average person understand it which is nice when they are trying to go through these giant books of transcriptions

This is similar to what Pamela Smith said about the concept of “translating” knowledge. She discusses how experts have an “embodied knowledge,” things that they just know how to do, but they have trouble explaining. Putting it in writing is the first step in the translation process to make so there is no debate on what was written down. I think that putting it in XML is the next step in the translation process. I think XML helps with understanding what was written down and makes the hidden info explicit. XML is a huge help with bridging the gap for people that are transcribing these texts and people that are trying to understand it.