The Adaptation of Medical Knowledge in Late-seventeenth- and Early-eighteenth-century Manuscript Household Books

Following the methodologies of corpus-assisted discourse analysis and historical sociopragmatics, and making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods, the present paper analyzes a small corpus of household recipe books written in Britain between the 1660s and 1800s, with the aim of tracing the print sources of the medical information included in these texts and of charting the linguistic, discursive and textual strategies through which the compilers transformed, manipulated and adapted such published material to the new context. The analysis offers an insight into the production circumstances of late modern English household recipe books and on the role that written medical information, whether popular or specialized, played in Late Modern English healthcare.