Transcribing Middle English
My page contains not food recipes, but astrological medical guidance. The page includes the end of one zodiac entry, the full section for Capricorn, and the beginning of Aquarius. Each entry explains which medical activities were considered safe or risky depending on the moon’s position in the zodiac. The Capricorn section, for example, recommends planting seeds, setting young trees, tilling the land, and even taking a wife. At the same time, it warns against bloodletting or drinking herbal medicines and electuaries. To modern readers this might sound strange, but it actually made sense within medieval medical logic. People believed the moon controlled bodily fluids in the same way it controls ocean tides, so a cold and dry sign like Capricorn was thought to interfere with treatments that depended on the body’s fluids flowing freely.
that is a good signe forto make castels & houses
and forto brynge men to be acorded with love
and forto begynne to worche & to do all thynges
whiche that longen to worthy religioun of
hye lyvyng. and forto bathen & forto be laten
blood. It is forto eschue than forto aske dette
& forto sowen & forto plante trees.
<head>Capricorn coold & drie</head>
Whan the mone is in Capricorne þat
is a goot that signe Capricornus is a signe
comonn coolde and drye. malencolie of the
erthe good it is forto sowe sedys. forto sette
ympe trees. Forto erpe londe. & forto make
gardens. Forto take a wyf. In that tyme
lete thou no man blood ne forto drynke
medicynes of herbys. or other electuaries.
<head>Aquarius hoot & moist</head>
Whan the mone is in Aquario. that
Learning to transcribe Middle English was surprisingly fun, although it definitely came with a learning curve. The hardest part for me was recognizing the letter shapes and figuring out the abbreviations. Some of the characters look nothing like the letters we use today. The thorn (þ), which represents the “th” sound, looks a lot like a modern “y,” and the ampersand (&) is written in a looping shape that looks almost like a “z.” At first I actually transcribed that symbol as the letter “z” across the entire page. Once I realized what it really was, the text suddenly became much easier to read. Having friends to look over my transcription helped tremendously as well, because they could sometimes recognize words or letter that I could not. Once my eyes adjusted to the handwriting I could start following the meaning of what the scribe was writing.
Seeing this kind of text in a manuscript made me think about how medical knowledge was recorded and shared in the medieval period. I found myself wondering who the intended audience for this compendium was. Was it written for a practicing physician, a wealthy household trying to manage its own health, or a monastic community? The instructions are very direct, such as “lete thou no man blood,” which makes it seem like something people might regularly consult as a reference. I also started wondering about the scribe who copied the text. Were they copying from an earlier source, and did they personally believe in astrological medicine? Or were they simply reproducing information because it was part of their job?
Encoding the transcription with XML tags made me think about the way knowledge gets translated into different forms. Pamela Smith talks about how early practitioners had to translate embodied knowledge into written instructions. In other words, they took knowledge that originally came from experience and practice and turned it into something explicit on the page. Encoding the text with XML feels similar. When we wrap a heading in <head> tags or mark a title with <title>, we are making decisions about the structure and meaning of the text that a human reader might naturally understand but a computer cannot. In that sense, the medieval scribe translated medical practice into language, and we translate that language into structured data. Both processes involve interpretation, and both leave traces of the translator’s choices in the final result.