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Middle-English cookbook to go online
Manchester University has decided to digitize and put online a middle-age recipe book compiled by King Richard II's master cooks. Compiled in 1390, Forme of Cury, is a Middle English language collection of 205 recipes prepared for the royal household. The book will be digitally photographed by the John Rylands University Library. Readers can learn how to cook the long-forgotten dishes such as blank mang (a sweet dish made of meat, milk, sugar and almonds) and the original quiche, known in 14th century kitchens as custard, Guardian reported. The cookbook will be among the 40 literary treasures, slated to be digitized by a state-of-the-art high-definition camera and placed on the internet. An early edition of Chaucer's complete Canterbury Tales, John Lydgate's two major poems Troy Book and Fall of Princes and a 500-year-old English translation of the Bible are among the Middle English manuscripts, set to go online. "The library's Middle English manuscripts are a research resource of immense significance. Yet the manuscripts are inherently fragile, and until now access to them has been restricted by the lack of digital copies. Digitization will make them available to everyone," said director of the John Rylands library, Jan Wilkinson. "For the first time it will be possible to compare our manuscripts directly with other versions of the texts in libraries located across the world, opening up opportunities for new areas of research. We hope that this will be the beginning of a wider digitization program, which will unlock the tremendous potential of our medieval manuscripts and printed books for the benefit of the academic community and the wider public," he concluded. Posted by: Fred 2008-09-24 |
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