This artifact, which was put together for a History of British Literature class in the spring of 2024, is a series of transcriptions for five recipes from a Middle English medicine book. I find this assignment to be an appropriate display of some of the skills I would need in one of my primary fields of interest, linguistics. It specifically applies being able to read and interpret text in unfamiliar lettering and spelling conventions, and accurately transcribe it. Doing the reading, researching, and writing in this assignment helped me better understand the process behind producing transcriptions and writing appropriate commentary for them.

Now, I do understand that this is on the very basic and simple end of what all goes into examining manuscripts and rendering their text into a form independent from the original parchment. For example, the handwriting was decently clear (having seen photocopies of some of Tolkien’s hastily jotted story drafts, and reading over some of my older journaling, I am acutely aware that knowing what letters are represented by a series of marks is not always a given), and it was in a language I could more or less understand, so making transcriptions and commentating on them was much easier than it might have been with a different given manuscript. Nonetheless, having the opportunity to work through odd calligraphy, unusual spelling, and words that have been long out of date gave me some experience in linguistic analysis, and some insight into Middle English herbal medicine practices as an aside.