Harley MS 1605/2

This manuscript is the second of three volumes that comprise Harley MS 1605 (the others being Harley MS 1605/1 and Harley MS 1605/3). Harley MS 1605/2 contains three parts that were separately produced in the 15th century and brought together at an unknown point in time before or after they reached the Harleian Library. The first part (ff. 43r-51v) contains a large collection of Middle English recipes. The second part (ff. 52r-52v) contains a Latin charm and Middle English recipes against vermin, and a Latin text for medical treatments according to the time of the year. The third part (ff. 53r-97v) contains a treatise that was previously catalogued as ‘Admonitiones spirituales’, but is a hitherto unknown copy of the Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem (Book for a Sister on the Manner of Good Living). This is a late 12th- or early 13th-century treatise with religious advice for nuns that was spuriously attributed to St Bernard of Clairvaux throughout the Middle Ages. The copy in Harley MS 1605 is fragmentary, but important since full-text copies of the Latin work have only been identified in ten manuscripts so far (private communication with Anne Mouron; and Mouron, The Manere of Good Lyvyng (2014)).

Harley MS 1605/2 was joined with Harley MS 1605/1 and Harley MS 1605/3 in the Harleian Library, but perhaps only as a loose gathering: Humfrey Wanley (b. 1672, d. 1726), Library-Keeper of the Harleian Library, described the manuscript as a ‘parchment-Book in quarto, consisting of divers Tracts to be bound up together’ (see Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts (1808), II, p. 149). Harley MS 1605 appears to have been separated and bound into three separate volumes at the British Museum.

Contents:

ff. 43r-51v: A collection of about 120 Middle English medical recipes, including a few trick and cosmetical recipes. The first two pages (ff. 43r-43v) are heavily faded and include Middle English medical recipes ‘ffor to make water of [...]’; and an added Latin recipe for orpiment, beginning: ‘[Auri]pigmentum q[uam] habet venas aureis’. The first recipe with a legible title features on f. 44r: ‘Ad faciendum album plumbum’. The trick recipes, all featuring on f. 45r, contain instructions (1) ‘To make hennys or checkenys seme dede’; (2) ‘[T]o make an ey so hard þat hit shal noȝt breke þawȝ hit [be] cast aȝenst þe wal’; (3) ‘[T]o seþe [boil] eyryn yn cold water sunner [sooner] þanne yn hot’; (4) ‘To make seme [appear] hefdles men [headless men, possibly blemmyes]’, involving a magical lamp, with an additional instruction to make snakes appear as well. Recipes (1), (2), and (4) also feature in San Marino, Huntington Library HM 1336 (eastern England, c. 1450), ff. 27v-28r. The cosmetical recipes, all featuring on f. 49r, contain instructions for making a bright, rosy or white face: ‘[T]o make a fayr face’; ‘[T]o make god colour’; ‘[T]o make red colour’; ‘[T]o make þy face hwyt’.

f. 52r: Recipes against vermin, beginning with a Latin charm to expell mice and rats from a house or barn (‘Carmen contra mures et ratones in grangijs’). The charm instructs one to write the names of the Four Evangelists on four stones (‘Scribe in .iiii.or petris ista nomina subscripta’), recite seven Pater Nosters and Ave Marias before entering the building, and another seven, together with a prayer that invokes Christ to protect grain against the gnawing of rodents, upon entering it. Inside the building, one should place each of the four stones in a different corner while saying ‘Ewangelium Sanctum’. Finally, one should recite a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria while standing at the middle of the house. The charm is followed by three Middle English recipes against mice, spiders, and fleas; beginning: ‘Tak the iuys of marubium vulgar and a party of qwhiksilver and meng togider’ [Listed in eVK2, no. 6148.00].

f. 52v: A Latin note relating to medical treatments according to the time of year, beginning: ‘Nota [...] preservacioni sanitatis [...] prima ebdomada lunacionis adolescentes’, explicit: ‘intestinorum nec pregnante nec menstruosis’.

ff. 53r-97v: Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux, Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem, imperfect, missing chapters 1-2 and 41-73. PL 184’s Chapter 27 (‘De confessione peccatorum et poenitentia’) has been divided into two separate chapters in Harley MS 1605: ‘De confessione et contricione peccatorum’[27] and ‘De confessione peccatorum’ [28]. As a result, the manuscript’s chapter numbering does not match that of PL184 after chapter 27. Several bifolia are missing, causing loss of sections and chapters between Chapters 3-40. The remaining chapters, following PL184’s numbering, are: 3 (imperfect at the beginning), 4 (imperfect at the end), 7 (imperfect at the beginning), 8-9, 10 (imperfect at the end), 11 (imperfect at the beginning), 12-21, 22 (imperfect at the end), 23 (imperfect at the beginning), 24-[35] , [36] (imperfect at the end), [38] (imperfect at the beginning), [39], [40] (imperfect at the end).

Decoration:

ff. 43r-52v: Small (1-line) red initials. Red paraphs and underlining, with rubrics in red and small (1-line) capitals highlighted in red on ff. 52r-52v; ff. 53r-97v: Large (3-line) blue or red initials. Small (1-line) capitals highlighted in red. Rubrics in red.