English codicological recipes survive in great numbers in manuscripts
that were produced in the later Middle Ages. I argue that they suggest
a little-theorized engagement with the medieval manuscript. Such
recipes are not simply and straightforwardly instructional: in fact,
they offer us fascinating glimpses into late-medieval perspectives
on that relationship between the written word and the decorative
aspects of words on a page, a nexus that seems central to the medieval
book and that must have been a central cultural and visual symbol.
Moreover, they also show that manuscript and document production
was increasingly less specialized and occurring in domestic contexts
in the fifteenth century. This article will be twofold, looking first at the
landscape of surviving recipes, and examining in a more speculative
way the relationship between their content, their materiality, and their
imaginative qualities.