SC - RE: Fermented Beverage Recipe Question

[david friedman]

Minna responds:

  <<RuddR at aol.com wrote:
 
 << A scenario might go like this:  Somebody who could afford it wanted a new
  cookery book.  A professional scribe (or bookseller's staff of scribes),
 could
  do a cut-and-paste of available material, and a "new" cookery book is born,
 to
  come down to us as a primary source.  I suggest that a bookseller, seeing a
  demand for such books, might have had a couple of extra copies made up to
 keep
  on hand.  "Mass market production" in the Middle Ages is not to be confused
  with what we now understand by that term.
  
  There are certainly other scenarios that are also as likely.   >>
 
 Another scenario:  A bookseller has a collection of interesting titles
(mostly
 NOT cookbooks, probably) and instead of selling the originals, takes
 commissions to have them copied.  This version seems more like the way many
 luxury goods (boots, jewelry, silver dishes) were produced in period--since
 they were so labor intensive, they were not made until ordered.  (We could
 still see multiple copies from the same source as word spread that a title
 could be had from a given shop...)>>

Very nice!  A good variation on what I had in mind.  

It would be interesting to know if there are surviving medieval booksellers'
inventories. What titles *did* they have on hand, both for copying on request,
or available for ready money?  Is this an area anyone on the list has looked
into?  (Although the results of such research would probably be mostly off-
topic.)

Rudd Rayfield
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================