Medical Beliefs, Winds, and Humors in Middle English
While my transcription was not exactly a recipe, it was still an explanation retaining different medical beliefs at the time, specifically citing the different humors. This page describes different types of people and how they react to different weather and seasons. It talks about how melancholic people are the best in spring, and feel worse in autumn. It also discusses the four winds that we now know as cardinal directions, East, South, West, and North. Every wind is assigned a temperature and moisture quality, and all of these things were believed to impact human health at the time. The text also highlights different types of people, including choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic, and they are all associated with a respective humor. The environment was believed to control health as well as being dependent on balancing different body fluids as well.
The process of learning Middle English felt really difficult to me at first. I spent a lot of time first trying to understand the context of my assigned page to better fill in gaps and words I did not understand. I tried my best to pick out the words and letters that I already recognized at first glance and fill in from there. This proved to be somewhat successful, especially after I learned and better understood the different ways letters are written. Even though there were still some tricky words I had to ask for help while figuring out, and the grammar structure did not feel as natural, I still was able to understand what my page was talking about after it was fully translated. After this assignment, I am wondering who originally wanted to record all of this medical knowledge and who the intended audience was at the time. I am also wondering if there are different errors or misunderstandings that would happen as people were reading this manuscript, as sometimes the language and grammar were more about personal preference in writing rather than what was correct English. Encoding the text with XML mark-up could significantly transform its usefulness by making the structure and relationships within the manuscript easier to analyze. For example, XML tags could label elements such as the four winds, the humoral temperaments, or qualities like hot, cold, moist, and dry. This would allow scholars to search for specific concepts and compare them across multiple manuscripts much more easily than reading each text individually.
Similarly, in this way, XML coding also reflects Pameal Smith’s idea of translating tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Just as early writers had to take practical or assumed knowledge and explain it clearly in writing as a tutorial, encoding requires scholars to interpret the text and make sure its structure is reflected through tags and categories.
You can view the manuscript page featuring my transcription here:
Dyngley Edition Manuscript Page
Transcription
Malencolye folke ben best in ver, wel in
somer & in wynter, and worst in hervest.
These ben the
foure wyndes
Eest
Southe
Weste
Northe
Eest Wynde is hoot & moist.
Southe Wynde is hoot & drye.
West Wynde is colde and moist.
Northe Wynde is colde and drie.
Colerike folke ben wel, while the sonne or
the wynde be eest, west & north, but evel
thei ben while the sonne or the wynde are south.
Sangweynn folke ben evel while the sonne
or the wynde is in the eest, but thei ben well
while the wynde or the sonne is in the sowthe,
and in the weste, or in the northe.
Fleumatike folke ben wele whan the
sonne or the wynde is eestwarde, sowthwarde
or towarde the northe, but they ben evel
whan it is westward.
Malencoyle folke ben evel whan the
sonne or the wynde is south.
TEI Encoding
<text>
<body>
<p>Malencolye folke ben best in ver, wel in somer & in wynter, and worst in hervest.</p>
<p>These ben the foure wyndes</p>
<lb/>Eest
<lb/>Southe
<lb/>Weste
<lb/>Northe
<p>Eest Wynde is hoot & moist.</p>
<p>Southe Wynde is hoot & drye.</p>
<p>West Wynde is colde and moist.</p>
<p>Northe Wynde is colde and drie.</p>
</body>
</text>