The anonymous early medieval compilers of recipe collections in Latin manuscripts are not often thought of as curious about new medical information. While the stereotype of medieval Latin stagnation in medicine has been countered, recipe compilers remain as recyclers of the ancient past. Close analysis of early medieval medical recipes, however, suggests that we should reconsider this view. This chapter focuses on a series of dental recipes found in related medieval adaptations of the medical portions of Pliny’s Natural History which suggests several changes over time, including a growing attention to precision and quantification, the deployment of a diverse range of new ingredients, and a link between claims of efficacy and ingredients identified as coming from Africa, Arabia, and India. These recipes reveal shifting uses for materia medica described in classical sources and provide insight into new ways that medieval medical writers were interpreting and adapting their source materials.

This chapter explores several Early Modern English medical recipe compilations extant in manuscripts held in Glasgow University Library to investigate the recipe genre as reflection of that time period. No other genre is so permeable to the changes in the cultural and social spheres, given that recipes mirror the contemporary society where they were written. This fact is especially noticeable in the abundance of new substances that are incorporated in the recipes of the period from the Continent and, especially, from the New World.

A key element of medieval and early modern medical practice was the creation of a positive attitude in the patient. To this end, a variety of persuasive strategies were employed, which are amply documented in available records of European medical texts, especially recipes. This chapter demonstrates through qualitative software analysis the conceptual categories related to persuasion and positive attitude, with special regard to their usage patterns, frequencies, and typical co-occurrences in the most common genre of sixteenth/seventeenth-century Medical Hungarian, that of medical recipes.

The study of persuasion in texts focuses on the means and strategies to alter the audience’s attitude and on bringing about a change in their minds. Persuasion can seldom be associated with linguistic phenomena or categories, or in other words, linguistic categories often contribute towards the persuasiveness of a text, carrying other functions at the same time. This chapter will investigate the ways in which persuasion is interlaced with the informative and instructive contents of Early Modern English medical recipes, looking beyond the customary recipe collections into other medical genres and the recipes embedded in their texts. The approach adopts metadiscourse analysis as a tool to map linguistic item inventories by which to anchor the classical concepts of persuasion to linguistic phenomena. The study suggests that persuasion in medical recipes resides in such linguistic phenomena that can be identified by metadiscourse categories. The approach provides a useful tool for triangulating one’s observations about the persuasiveness of a text. One of the trends emerging in the Early Modern English period is the increasing variety of metadiscourse classes used in recipes.