The anonymous Trinity Encyclopedia (translated here from Middle English for the first time) is a collection of unusually detailed 14th century English craft recipes, collected from several individuals and from a number of written sources, for manufacturing pigments, dyeing, preparing skins and furs, imitating expensive imported leathers, counterfeiting semi-precious materials, ‘multiplying’ (adulterating) verdigris, and for making soaps and confectionery. In many cases, the recipes attempt to codify and make explicit the practical knowledge of the craftsmen, conveying it by means of tips, clues, indicators of progress, tests for quality of materials, tests for progress, and tests for completion.
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List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The technical content: overview and highlights
The Trinity Encyclopedia as a source of ‘lost’ technical vocabulary
The manuscripts
Composition and compilation: the typology of the recipes and their sources
Author, title and date
Purpose and audience
As the manner is …
The Trinity Encyclopedia in context: craft recipes in medieval England
Principles of the translation
Tools and equipment
The Trinity Encyclopedia: Translation
Appendix 1 London, British Library, MS Sloane 73 (MS S): contents, concordance, additional recipes
Appendix II Typology of the recipes
Appendix III Earlier studies
Appendix IV Revisions to the Early English Text Society edition of the Trinity Encyclopedia
Glossary
Bibliography
... As always with Archetype publications, the production value is very high, with clear print on high quality paper. [...] The Encyclopedia is unusual amongst published recipe books, in that its recipes were originally written in Middle English, apparently in England and, as such, the volume containsthe first translation of the text into modern English. [...] the Encyclopedia is undoubtedly a fascinating document and, in view of the almost complete lack of any other English evidence from the period, its translation and publication will be of enormous interest to those studying medieval English crafts.
Lara Broecke for Journal of the Institute of Conservation, 42:2 2019 pp 170-172
... The other unusual aspect of this work is the level of detail in the various recipes, in many cases clearly the result of personal experience. There are many recipes extant describing how to make lead pigment, but the one in the Trinity Encyclopedia goes into detail about exactly how to perform each step, which equipment to use, and what the temperature should be at each stage. A recipe for dyeing a leather skin red mentions turning the edges of the leather inward when sewing it into a bag to help prevent leaks when the dye is poured into it. Some recipes contain addenda along the lines of “this is what the recipe says, but if I were doing this, I would do it this different way.”
The Trinity Encyclopedia manuscript focuses primarily on recipes useful to painters and limners. Of the seventy recipes in this book, textile-related content is limited to six recipes for processing and dyeing leather, two for dyeing textiles, and four for making soap. The quality of these recipes, however, is solidly above that usually found in medieval recipe collections, and the book is worth reading for those interested in learning more about the details of medieval crafts, as well as those interested in attempting to recreate them.
Drea Leed for Medieval Clothing and Textiles Volume 15, 2019 pp 185/186
A review in Spanish by Rocío Bruquetas Galán in Ge-conservación, [S.l.], v. 1, n. 15, p. 186-187, jun. 2019. is available here
