A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions tabulates the verbs a late Latin recipe book uses for putting a solid into a liquid, and finds one quire that does not share the habits of the rest.
Four hundred and twelve clauses from a late Latin collection show one gathering of leaves preparing its remedies in a vocabulary of its own
Honey is a patient thing to read about. I am grateful to whoever kept this book dry for long enough that we could be patient with it in return.
— Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, School of Underlying Conditions
So Dr Obiora introduces Taken Up in Honey: Verbs of dissolving and their liquids in a late Latin recipe book, a research poster prepared with Ms Sunniva Balogun, Doctoral Candidate in the School of Emergent Priorities. Its subject is a single unedited manuscript of 318 recipes, and within it every instruction to put a ground or whole ingredient into water, wine, vinegar, honey, oil or milk.
The poster brings close reading, patient tabulation and the School’s long practice of description to bear on 412 such clauses, sorted by the verb each one uses and by the gathering of leaves in which it stands. Across most of the book the vocabulary is settled: one verb for what is to disappear into its liquid, another for what is to be held in it. In the tenth gathering the settlement lapses, and the authors read those leaves as copied from a different source and left as found.
It is the University’s settled view that a school of earth sciences is no worse for an afternoon in the reading room, and it is pleased to see the afternoon so fully accounted for. Ms Balogun said the work had “taught the two of us to count to four hundred and twelve in a language neither of us orders lunch in”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.rl8jgs.