Carrie Griffin

Instruction and Inspiration: Fifteenth-Century Codicological Recipes

Abstract English codicological recipes survive in great numbers in manuscripts that were produced in the later Middle Ages. I argue that they suggest a little-theorized engagement with the medieval manuscript. Such recipes are not simply and straightforwardly instructional: in fact, they offer us fascinating glimpses into late-medieval perspectives on that relationship between the written word and the decorative aspects of words on a page, a nexus that seems central to the medieval book and that must have been a central cultural and visual symbol. Moreover, they also show that manuscript and document production was increasingly less specialized and occurring in domestic contexts in the fifteenth century. This article will be twofold, looking first at the landscape of surviving recipes, and examining in a more speculative way the relationship between their content, their materiality, and their imaginative qualities.

‘Lynes of my Lore': Judas and the Mark of Mars In the York Play of The Conspiracy

This paper considers the influence of popular scientific theories on the vernacular drama of the English Middle Ages. It does so by considering a minor yet significant moment in the York play of The Conspiracy, where Judas’s face is ‘read’ by the figure of the Janitor according to the popular principles of physiognomy. This instance, and the tradition which informs it, may help to broaden our sense of the ways in which scientific theories were received and understood in the medieval period and, specifically, how they found ways into literary and performance texts and reached varied audiences.