Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T12:30:41.908Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 3 - John Mirfield’s Gouernayl of Helþe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2022

Irma Taavitsainen
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
Turo Hiltunen
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
Jeremy J. Smith
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
Carla Suhr
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
Get access

Summary

A version of John Mirfield’s Gouernayl of Helþe found in Wellcome Collection MS 674 demonstrates the continuing relevance and adaptability of medieval regimens to post-medieval contexts. First composed in the late fourteenth century, Mirfield’s work was among the earliest medical texts printed in late fifteenth-century England. It then reappeared, considerably revised, in a late sixteenth-century manuscript. This chapter traces the substantive changes made to Mirfield’s medieval regimen over time to understand which aspects of health culture were identified as needing revision, notably in terms of the non-naturals, and what was regarded as harmful or beneficial to health.

Type
Chapter
Information
Genre in English Medical Writing, 1500–1820
Sociocultural Contexts of Production and Use
, pp. 32 - 51
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Primary Sources

London, British Library, Additional MS 29301.Google Scholar
London, Wellcome Collection MS 674.Google Scholar
[No author]. 1489–90. The Governayle of Helth. London: William Caxton.Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis. 1598. Of Regiment of Health. London: John Windet.Google Scholar
Boorde, Andrew. 1547. Compendyous Regyment or Dyetary of Helth. London: William Powell.Google Scholar
Bullein, William. 1558. Gouernment of Health. London: John Day.Google Scholar
Cogan, Thomas. 1584. Haven of Health. London: Henry Midleton.Google Scholar
Elyot, Thomas. 1539. Castel of Helth. London: Thomas Berthelet.Google Scholar
Harington, John. 1607. The Englishmans Docter. Or, The Schoole of Salerne. London: William Jaggard.Google Scholar
Paynel, Thomas. 1528. Regimen sanitatis Salerni. London: Thomas Berthelet.Google Scholar
Phayer, Thomas. 1543. Regiment of Lyfe. London: Edward Whytchurch.Google Scholar

Secondary Sources

Adamson, Melitta Weiss. 2004. Baby-food in the middle ages. In Hosking, Richard (ed.), Nurture: Proceedings of the Oxford symposium on food and cookery 2003, 111. Bristol: Footwork.Google Scholar
Adamson, Melitta. 2010. Bernard de Gordon and Arnald de Villanova: A tale of two regimes. In Speer, Andreas & Wirmer, David (eds.), 1308: Eine Topographie historischer Gleichzeitigkeit, 419–35. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Barnett, Eleanor. 2020. Reforming food and eating in Protestant England, c.1540–c.1640. Historical Journal 63(3): 507–27.Google Scholar
Blades, William. 1858. The gouernayle of helthe: With the medecyne of ye stomacke. Reprinted from Caxton’s editio, (circa m.cccc.xci), with introductory remarks and notes. London: Blades, East, & Blades.Google Scholar
Cavallo, Sandra. 2016. Health, air and material culture in the early modern Italian domestic environment. Social History of Medicine 29(4): 694716.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cavallo, Sandra, & Storey, Tessa. 2013. Healthy living in late renaissance Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cavallo, Sandra, & Storey, Tessa (eds.). 2017a. Conserving health in early modern culture: Bodies and environments in Italy and England. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Cavallo, Sandra & Storey, Tessa. 2017b. Regimens, authors and readers: Italy and England compared. In Cavallo, Sandra, & Storey, Tessa (eds.), Conserving health in early modern culture: Bodies and environments in Italy and England, 2352. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Demaitre, Luke E. 1980. Doctor Bernard de Gordon: Professor and practitioner. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.Google Scholar
eVK2. 2019. An expanded and revised version of Voigts, Linda Ehrsam and Kurtz, Patricia Deery, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Fissell, Mary. 2011. Popular medical writing. In Raymond, Joad (ed.), Oxford history of popular print culture, vol. 1, 418–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Getz, Faye. 1985. John Mirfield and the Breviarium Bartholomei: The medical writings of a clerk at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the later fourteenth century. Society for the Social History of Medicine Bulletin 37: 24–6.Google Scholar
Getz, Faye. 2010. Healing and society in medieval England: A Middle English translation of the pharmaceutical writings of Gilbertus Anglicus. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Gil-Sotres, Pedro. 1998. The regimens of health. In Grmek, Mirko D. (ed.), Antony Shugaar (trans.), Western medical thought from antiquity to the middle ages, 291318. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hardingham, Glenn James. 2005. The regimen in late medieval England. PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Hartley, Sir Percival Horton-Smith, & Aldridge, Harold Richard (eds.). 1936. Johannes de Mirfield of St Bartholomew’s, Smithfield: His life and work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Honkapohja, Alpo. 2017. Alchemy, medicine, and commercial book production: A codicological and linguistic study of the Sloane manuscript group. Turnhout: Brepols.Google Scholar
Jones, Lori. 2016. The diseased landscape: Medieval and early modern plaguescapes. Landscapes 17(2): 108–23.Google Scholar
Jones, Lori. 2018. Unrecorded versions of John of Burgundy’s plague tract and identifying ‘lost’ copies of the same. Notes and Queries 65(1): 1417.Google Scholar
Jones, Lori. 2021. Itineraries and transformations: John of Burgundy’s Plague Treatise. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 95(2): 277314.Google Scholar
Jones, Lori. 2022. Patterns of plague: Changing ideas of plague in England and France, 1348–1750. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Peter Murray. 1995. Reading medicine in Tudor Cambridge. In Nutton, Vivian & Porter, Roy (eds.), The history of medical education in Britain, 153–83. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Keiser, George R. 2003. Two medieval plague treatises and their afterlife in early modern England. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 58(3): 292324.Google Scholar
Kiernander, A. R. D. 1980. The Governal of health. PhD dissertation, University of Auckland.Google Scholar
Leong, Elaine. 2018. Recipes and everyday knowledge: Medicine, science and the household in early modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Newton, Hannah. 2017. ‘She sleeps well and eats an egg’: Convalescent care in early modern England. In Cavallo, Sandra & Storey, Tessa (eds.), Conserving health in early modern culture: Bodies and environments in Italy and England, 104–32. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Nicoud, Marilyn. 2007. Les régimes de santé au Moyen Âge. Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slack, Paul. 1979. Mirrors of health and treasure of poor men: The uses of the vernacular medical literature of Tudor England. In Webster, Charles (ed.), Health, medicine and mortality in the sixteenth century, 237–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Slack, Paul. 1985. The impact of plague in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Storey, Tessa. 2017. English and Italian health advice: Protestant and Catholic bodies. In Cavallo, Sandra & Storey, Tessa (eds.), Conserving health in early modern culture: Bodies and environments in Italy and England, 210–34. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma. 2006. Medical discourse: Early genres, 14th and 15th centuries. In Brown, Keith (ed.), The encyclopedia of language & linguistics, 2nd ed., 688–94. Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Thirsk, Joan. 2006. Food in early modern England: Phases, fads, fashions, 1500–1760. London: Hambledon Continuum.Google Scholar
Walsham, Alexandra. 2011. The reformation of the landscape: Religion, identity and memory in early modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wear, Andrew. 2000. Knowledge and practice in English medicine, 1550–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wear, Andrew. 2008. Place, health, and disease: The Airs, waters, places tradition in early modern England and North America. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38(3): 443–65.Google Scholar
Weiss-Amer, Melitta. 1993. Medieval women’s guides to food during pregnancy: Origins, texts, and traditions. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 10(1): 523.Google Scholar
Yoshikawa, Naoë Kukita. 2013. The translation of the Regimen Sanitatis into a handbook for the devout laity: A new look at the Kalender of Shepherds and its context. In Petrina, Alessandra (ed.), The Medieval translator / Traduire au Moyen Age: In principio fuit interpres, 303–15. Turnhout: Brepols.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×