Chemical vocabulary in Middle English medical manuscripts

Abstract

Hunt (1990: 19) has claimed that in medical recipes “mineral and chemical elements are unusual”. Even if the number of elements cannot be compared to the estimated 1,800 plant names attested in Middle English (Sauer 2011: 57), our research reveals that in Middle English medical manuscripts, there is a good number of chemical items including substances like metals and their compounds, extracts from plants, medical earth and man-made medical ingredients. A comprehensive linguistic analysis of the entire material containing these substances in medieval medical manuscripts has yet to be carried out. In order to study the lexis of chemical ingredients, a corpus of about 215,000 words has been specially compiled from different British libraries. The aim is to undertake a linguistic analysis of the lexicon of this field in Middle English based on the data retrieved from representative authentic sources, most of which has never been published. We examine the provenance of the nouns according to their etymology to check whether they are borrowings or native words in the case of simplex terms. We also analyse the structure and the constituents present in nominal combinations according to the usual taxonomies based on Bauer (1983 and 2017) and Marchand (1969), but specialised classifications on the topic are also used (Norri, 1991).

Keywords

• Middle English
• medical manuscripts
• chemica
• simplex terms
• noun combinations