[Sca-cooks] Re: [Sca-cooks]Cookbooks was Tips on Redactions

[johnna holloway]

OED gives incunabula as meaning:
Books produced in the infancy of the art
of printing; spec. those printed before 1500.
So unless the work can be dated to an edition before
1500 it is not an incunabula. Given that the first
printed cookbook in English is dated 1500, one can say
that there are no incunabula in English Cookery.

OED gives manuscript as:
Written by hand, not printed. Abbreviated MS.

The Harleian MS. 279 is first printed in the
volume Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books in 1888.
Within our period prior to 1600, it was a manuscript.
Now it's included in a book. Manuscripts may be bound
into books; manuscripts that are handwritten may even be
bound with printed books into one bound work that consists
of both. This happened within our period of interest.

It is fair to say that a printed work may be called a
book or within our sphere of interest a cookbook. Unfortunately,
we do have a manuscript source for most of the printed volumes.
A MS. that contains recipes is usually described as a culinary
manuscript or perhaps as a manuscript of recipes. It is
usually cited by the name of the collection or the Library
in which it resides, thus Harleian MS. 279.

OED gives facsimile as:
An exact copy or likeness;
an exact counterpart or representation.

Some editions of cookbooks are facsimile editions;
others are simply reprints. Take a look at The French
Cook which was reprinted in 2001 and compare that to
The English Experience number 950, published 1979...
The Jewell Houfe of Art and Nature by Hugh Platte. 1594.
The first is a reprint; the second is a facsimile.
For my talk at CooksCon on  Early English Printed Cookbooks,
I was lucky enough to be able to share with the audience
a number of excellent facsimile editions. They do exist, even
if they prove elusive or expensive to acquire.

Johnna Holloway
Johnnae llyn Lewis

Johnna Holloway
Johnnae llyn Lewis

Stefan wrote:
> I got chastised recently for using the word "manuscript" to
> describe an original period printed cookbook. Is there a good
> name to refer to the original cookbook, whether handwritten or
> printed?
-------------------------
I don't quite know, but "incunabula" is a term commonly used to refer
to early printed books.  Use it when you mean "printed manuscript" or
something like that :)Yours, Katherine