This volume contains a collection of new editions of all the known fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English technical recipes for painters, strainers, scribes, illuminators, and dyers, written c. 1300-1500. Most are previously unpublished and many are previously unknown. The collection contains 125 sets of recipes (around 1500 individual recipes), taken from 95 manuscripts, and forms the largest published corpus of such recipes in any language.
These anonymous craft recipes describe the preparation of materials, outline their uses, advise on decorative effects, and confide tricks of the trade. In addition to recipes for conventional painting and illuminating are a number for 'staining' (figurative painting on cloth) which provide the only practical information on this one widely-practised, but now lost, English medium. The editor also identifies for the first time the earliest surviving recipes for block printing on textiles. The recipes are professional in origin, but were subsequently taken over by amateurs and encyclopaedists. Household recipes for colouring wax, fishing lines, hair, and food complete the collection.
Most of the texts were originally composed in English; few are translated from pre-existing material. They are a valuable record of Middle English technical vocabulary, much of it previously unrecorded.
The collection should appeal to a wide range of disciplines: students of medieval English, medieval historians, historians of fine art, and professional conservators, including those engaged in museum studies.