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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:03.142)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary. I'm here today with Melissa Reynolds, Dr. Melissa Reynolds, Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History at Texas Christian University. And we're talking about her book, Reading Practice, The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print. Dr. Reynolds, it's wonderful to have you on today.
Melissa Reynolds (00:24.536)
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
PJ (00:28.292)
So tell me, Dr. Reynolds, why this book? What was your purpose in doing it and how did you come to do it?
Melissa Reynolds (00:36.75)
That's a great question. I mean, the short answer, as with all academic books, is that this was a labor of love that took many, many, years to complete, started in graduate school, finished after that. The sort of animating question that started this project over 10 years ago had to do with the relationship that sort of quote unquote, I'm doing air quotes here, ordinary people had with.
books, that was the driving question, building on scholarship that has shaped my field for decades now, that has investigated the rise of literacy and the change in bookmaking practices that made manuscripts more affordable, and then of course the introduction of the printing press in the mid 15th century. So all of those questions were in the back of my mind, and specifically I was curious
about the English context because England is slightly different from continental Europe in that, not surprisingly, it tends to be insular. It's an island after all. And so its culture of knowledge is sort of contained. The English have a sort of a very particular response to the Reformation.
that is not necessarily mirrored elsewhere in continental Europe. And there had been other scholars like Eamonn Duffy, like Tessa Watt, other scholars who had talked about the relationship between books and ordinary people that fed into some of the big developments we know in English history, sort of the adoption of Protestantism and the expansion of a literate culture. So I started out just by going to the archives and trying to locate books that I thought ordinary people might be able to access.
I was looking for manuscripts written in Middle English. And what I found as I started to comb through archives, again, relying on the work of scholars who came before me and manuscript catalogs, was that so many of these manuscripts were dedicated to what we would consider scientific or medical knowledge, what I call natural knowledge in the book, because it's knowledge that relates in some way to the natural world.
Melissa Reynolds (02:48.726)
and very often to sort of practical engagement with the natural world. So these aren't so much theoretical texts, sort of theorizing nature. They're more medical recipes or prognostications that allow you to sort of predict weather patterns or predict healthcare outcomes. Some directions related to like agriculture. And so I started to think that there was something very particular about this category of knowledge. One that people seem to really want to access it.
and that they seem to think that there's something particular about accessing it in books. And as I say, it's practical knowledge. So it's often knowledge that has a hands -on component, which doesn't have to be transmitted in books, right? Like if I'm a medical practitioner in England in 1420, I could just as easily, know, orally teach someone how to prepare a medical recipe or show someone how to tend a cut, let's say.
But there's something that happens when you get access to books that people want to collect this knowledge in written form. And so that's really what the book is exploring. It's exploring what happens when this practical knowledge is collected in written form in such a way that's accessible to much broader portions of the population than it happened a century before. And then it traces what happens as this knowledge moves into print and how accessing knowledge, essentially the earliest information economy, what we would go to Google to search for today.
how access to this wealth of practical knowledge ends up shaping not just the trajectory of that knowledge, how it circulates within society and even changes to the sort of standard medical recipes and that sort of thing, but also how the interactions with books over time shape English culture. So it's sort of a reciprocal relationship between books and people. And so I'm looking both at how the books change and how I think the people are changing in response to the books.
over a period in English history, so roughly from 1400 to 1600, that is widely appreciated as this really transformative period, right? So we start at a period with manuscripts and kind of unstable medieval government, Wars of the Roses, civil wars happening in the middle, and we end with like the end of Elizabethan England, right? The end of sort of this flowering of Tudor knowledge and science and all the sort of
Melissa Reynolds (05:09.932)
the famous bits of Tudor history that you can plug in the middle there. So I cover a really broad period of time, but I follow these kind of like these kind of everyday workaday books and the knowledge that shows up in them over this two century period.
PJ (05:26.436)
Awesome. I, let me ask, and this might be just like way out of the blue, but the way that you describe this, and we don't even really have these as much anymore. mean, we do, but people don't use them as much. It almost has, like a farmer's almanac feel. Okay. And so that's kind of like the, the, I can put it, you know, the dying end of that tradition, right? Like because it's shifting over to Google. Okay. So I was like trying to place that genre. Yeah. Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (05:41.024)
Mm -hmm. Absolutely. Yes.
Melissa Reynolds (05:48.654)
absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, and no, and to be honest, I mean, one of the things that's so cool from my perspective about this genre of book is that it's so resilient. it does, the farmer's almanacs survives until the 20th century. I it still exists. People just don't tend to read it all that often. But yeah, like, so I've given, you know,
PJ (06:11.876)
Right, right. Yeah, yeah, I've seen them. Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (06:16.014)
book talks and things about the text that I look at. And I can show you, know, like an almanac from Benjamin Franklin published in America in the late 1700s has the same sort of figures and many of the same recipes as an almanac published in England in 1530. So there's this real longevity of the knowledge, which in some respects, you know, as a historian, you're trying to figure out what changes, right? Like that's our job is change over time.
And but what I think is so interesting about these sources, because they're so resilient, because these ways of understanding the world are persistent, even as our sort of bigger narrative about science and nature changes, is that you can kind of trace how people's reactions to these things, public, this sort of popular perception of this knowledge shifts, even as the knowledge remains kind of the same. there's a way in which...
the longevity of these texts actually allows you to ask different questions about what people did with this knowledge, how it was perceived, how it was appreciated, that sort of thing over time. But you're right, the farmer's almanac is the, like, it's the fruit, it's the culmination, or really it's just the continuation of the texts I look at.
PJ (07:31.484)
Thank you. That's actually really, I was kind of gratifying. was like, wait, I think I've heard of this before. I mean, if you don't mind explaining for our audience, I think we kind of have this heading under Farmer's Almanac where maybe people could be familiar with it, but what is a practical manuscript?
Melissa Reynolds (07:36.204)
Yeah, absolutely.
Melissa Reynolds (07:47.074)
Mm -hmm.
Sure, absolutely. That's a great question. So I use the term as kind of a catch -all. So I want to be clear that the practical manuscript is kind of a term that I put onto these collections, again, because I saw so many similarities in terms of what is in these books. So as I said, when I started this project, I was looking for the kinds of books that I thought ordinary, not the most elite, not the most educated members of late medieval English society could access.
PJ (08:01.531)
Okay.
Melissa Reynolds (08:18.476)
That's still not, I'm still not accessing, you know, back in that time period in the 1400s, most people couldn't read and write. So it's not as if I'm getting to the the very lowest levels of society, but I was trying to do the best I could to get to not the wealthiest, the nobles, right, the most educated. And as I was looking for these manuscripts, what I found is they very often contained the same genres of text. So I sort of mentioned them before. Most of them have medical recipes on them.
So medical recipes, meaning there might be descriptions of how to prepare a particular ointment to treat, like a burn or a cut, or they might be recipes for sort of medicaments that are supposed to treat a headache. A lot of them have prognostications, which I mentioned earlier. And what these are, are very often very simplistic verses or really sort of simplistic instructions that
tell you how to predict outcomes of certain things, very often based on the lunar or solar calendar and sometimes based on weather patterns, things that we would never put any stock in today, right? Like if the moon is is waxing on the second half of the month and you fall ill on the third day of the new moon, then you are not in great shape, let's say. I sort of made that one up. But that's the kind of thing that's in these prognostications.
PJ (09:35.223)
Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (09:39.086)
And they're just everywhere. So not just the same kinds of material, but very often the very same medical recipes, the very same prognostications are copied over and over and over again. I ended up looking at over 180 manuscripts that I sort of categorized as a practical manuscript. And as I said, I came up with this term to try to describe what I saw as a very common genre of book that seems to be devoted almost entirely to like how to help you interact
with the world in your daily life? What are the most important things you might need to know to manage? What are really precarious and often unexpected circumstances in pre -modern life that are accessible, that are written in English, and that are not super fancy, if that's clear? They're not really beautiful manuscripts. If you've seen a medieval manuscript and you have a picture in your head of a beautiful gilded book with gorgeous illustrations, that's not what I'm talking about for the most part. These are not...
PJ (10:24.539)
Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (10:38.252)
that they're like working books, right? They seem to have been intended in some, to some degree, not always, but to some degree to have been put to use.
PJ (10:48.272)
Part of that distinction, if I'm was able to get this from your book was the distinction in language, especially when you talk about this distinction between like a maybe a middle class versus like an upper class sort of book, because the nobles would be speaking or understand Latin, French, you know, that's probably going away in some ways. But I mean, obviously, the Normans, you know, in
Melissa Reynolds (11:04.874)
Mm
Melissa Reynolds (11:11.438)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
PJ (11:15.974)
couple centuries earlier bringing French over, so.
Melissa Reynolds (11:16.238)
Right, Absolutely. Yeah. So there's the 15th century, the 1400s, which is sort of the first half of the book is an interesting time period. I mean, all across Europe, you see a real shift towards the vernacular, towards the language people speak. England is no different. So you're absolutely right. The most educated, if you are a... So I'll put it in concrete terms. If you want to be a physician in...
1400s England or 1400s France or Italy or Germany. A physician specifically is someone who has a medical degree. So the word physician is only used for someone who has gone to university and has a medical degree. And if you've gone to university and you have a medical degree in 1450, it means you read Latin. So that's the only language you're studying medical texts in in 1450, again, if you're going to university. But we know that there's lots of people who care about
They're trying to maintain their health and they're all kinds of sort of village elders or community experts that are practicing medicine in the pre -modern world who are not physicians. They can't use that title because they didn't go to university and they don't have an MD, but they are still experts in their craft, in the craft of medicine. And it's these people who seem to have collected and really prized these groups of medical recipes. Very often we think women probably did
consult these, and we do have some evidence of women owners of these manuscripts by the late 1400s, because very often it was women who were doing the medical care within the household. Not surprisingly, it's women who have knowledge about herbal cures and who are tending the sick within their household. So there is this bifurcated, sort of stratified society in terms of medical practice, and really for the entire period I cover in this book.
But just because you don't read Latin and just because you haven't gone to university and just because you're not a physician doesn't mean that you're not invested in medical practice. And as it turns out, everyone is because it should probably go without saying, but this is pre -germ theory. This is pre sort of any of our modern medicine. And so there's just a lot of precarity, right? There's a lot of uncertainty. You get that sense in the books that people collect.
Melissa Reynolds (13:36.254)
multiple recipes for like the same thing, let's say for headache or for fever. And part of that is, you know, the remedies aren't particularly effective, but the collection of lots of different recipes helps you feel like you're doing something in the face of a problem that might kill you, it might kill your loved one, right? And there's, because there's not a direct relationship between efficacy and practice here, you see that just collecting knowledge, just accessing knowledge. And this is one of the arguments of the book.
Just having access to knowledge in book form gives people a sense that they have some power in the face of what seem to be inexplicable and often catastrophic circumstances.
PJ (14:19.132)
And when you're talking about you have the physician and then would would barber be the right term for like kind of that hand like a Homey sort of surgeon like cuz you know a physician didn't I think I remember a little this from Meg Leha we were talking about that. Sorry I it's kind of fun for me. This is kind of like I feel like I'm like slowly stringing together episodes I gotta find someone for like the 1800s. Yeah
Melissa Reynolds (14:26.38)
Yeah, so that's...
Melissa Reynolds (14:34.324)
Yeah. Right.
Melissa Reynolds (14:41.902)
Yeah, there you go. So, so barber is a term to get that's actually another category, but you're not wrong. So you've got the physician, there's a very clear hierarchy, the vision is at the top. In pre -modern medicine, specifically 1516 hundreds, the physician knows all the theories of medicine at the time. So these theories are all coming out of the ancient world. They're all sort of galenic, Hippocratic medicine. So the four humors and
the relationship between the humors and the balance in the body, the relationship between the humors and the environment. This is all theoretical knowledge that's been codified in Latin texts, first written in the ancient world and then transmitted all the way up to the 15th, 16th centuries. Then you have the barber surgeons. These guys are practitioners, but unlike the sort of like community expert, homegrown healer, these guys are trained. They usually have an apprenticeship.
So a barber surgeon is going to be a member of a guild. But the difference between we, we still have this distinction in modern medicine, but we don't think of it the same way. So a surgeon in the pre -modern period is someone who does the practical work of healing the body from like cuts and broken bones and burns and bruises. Those ailments don't require a theoretical understanding of
PJ (15:38.029)
Okay
Melissa Reynolds (16:06.232)
the sort of like internal workings of the body according to pre -modern medicine. So like to heal a cut, you don't need to know about humoral balance. But if you wanna heal, let's say, I don't know, cancer or something, you do. So that's the distinction. A physician has theoretical knowledge, a surgeon has practical knowledge. I'm making this a little bit more absolute in black and white than it was in practice because obviously physicians by this period realize they probably need some like hands -on skill.
and like practice healing bodies. And surgeons also start to get, attend university and become more educated. So these categories are in flux, but generally speaking, that's how it works. So a barber surgeon does hands -on stuff like bleeding. So we probably all think of, I don't know, you've probably seen popular representations of pre -modern medicine. The barber is the one that's gonna cut your veins to bleed you. The physician you're gonna go to to consult about, you know, some bigger ailments in your body.
If that helps. don't know if that helps, but I do. So one of the things I think it speaks to in the book is that what's happening in these popular collections of medical knowledge is not just that people are like, great, I have access to a medical recipe. It's actually starting to break down some of these hierarchies that were longstanding divisions that kept knowledge into these separate categories and prevented people from, in some ways, from accessing them, but also just helped to
PJ (17:04.572)
I think it
Melissa Reynolds (17:32.024)
to mix it all up. And as you mix up different recipes from different sources under different sort of paradigms, you get people reinventing and rethinking and reexamining what they know about medicine and health. So the whole structure and hierarchy of medicine is background in the book to try to say, this is what's changing in this time period. The categories are still there, but the knowledge is just circulating so much more freely that some of these distinctions don't matter as much in terms of accessing knowledge as they do.
just in terms of sort of authority. You still have to use the right title. Otherwise the College of Physicians will come after you. But if you're a regular person, you can still pick up a book by a physician or a surgeon, right? So there you go.
PJ (18:14.522)
Yeah. So a couple of questions kind of spring from this one. Thank you. Really interesting answer. You're talking about like kind of this stratification and then you're talking about like it's starting to break down. I had Paul Craddock on to talk about transplant surgeries. And so like you have transplant surgeries during this time, but it's very, very like you're talking about like a few pioneers like on the fringe.
Melissa Reynolds (18:33.801)
cool.
Melissa Reynolds (18:42.604)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ (18:43.13)
Right. It's like it's so you do have that sort of thing where, what you're, what you're talking about, what you're talking about there. and, so you get into this really like, that's where he's like, for him, we were talking a lot about the religious debates around that, right? Like, or it's like, you know, you're like, maybe we should actually cut open dead bodies and people like, you know, freaking out and it's like, no, wait, wait, wait, wait. so
Melissa Reynolds (18:58.275)
Mm
Melissa Reynolds (19:03.808)
Yeah, yeah. Although they did a lot more of that in the 1300s and 1400s than we thought for a really long time, we now realize that they were doing dissection. And a lot of it like earliest, there's a wonderful book by Katherine Park, I don't know if you've read it, Secrets of Women, wonderful book, classic in the history of medicine, where she sort of argues that some of the earliest dissection practices were postmortems on female saints, people, women who claimed
PJ (19:30.423)
that makes sense.
Melissa Reynolds (19:31.054)
Yeah, they claim to have like the image of Christ imprinted in their heart. And so these Italian physicians, think Claire Montefalco, I'm gonna mess up the name. But anyway, Catherine Park has these wonderful chapters early in the book where she shows that this is where some of the diagnostic sort of dissection practices emerge. They actually emerge in a religious context and then they move into the university. So it's a revisionist, it's a, I mean, now it's widely accepted, again, a classic in the field, but really good on that question.
PJ (20:01.03)
Well, and it's really that sort of thing's really fascinating where they get permission because of religion. mean, that's whenever I talk to any historian at this time period, like people today just do not understand how intertwined it's like every question was a religious question.
Melissa Reynolds (20:05.836)
Mm -hmm.
Melissa Reynolds (20:14.088)
absolutely. Yes, every question was a religious question. Every explanation was a religious explanation. It's impossible to think outside of theology, I think, if you're trying to ask questions of, get in the mindset of anyone who's living in this time period.
PJ (20:33.318)
So actually, that kind of leads us into one of the questions I wanted to ask you was, how did the role of these sorts of practical manuscripts?
Melissa Reynolds (20:44.867)
Mm -hmm.
PJ (20:47.128)
interact with kind of these higher level physicians, like they're not higher level, just physicians in general. What did they think about it? Was there a lot of interaction or was it just kind of like ships passing in the night because they're just different, you know, strata of society.
Melissa Reynolds (20:51.8)
Sure.
Melissa Reynolds (20:58.688)
Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (21:02.776)
So I think I can answer your question in two ways. So one way that I sort of get at the relationship between what I call sort of learned elite cultures of knowledge and popular cultures of knowledge and those two intersect in these books in lots of interesting ways. And it's one of the things I'm interested in tracing. Because again, I'm interested in like, what happens when you give regular people access to knowledge that they didn't have? What do they think about it? What do they think about being able to consult a book when they need to do something? Which is just not.
PJ (21:09.52)
Cough
Melissa Reynolds (21:32.524)
what people did for a really long time, right? They went to their neighbor, they asked an expert, they didn't go to a book, only really, really, really learned that people could look at a book. So one of the ways that elite sort of learned physicians show up in these books is that these manuscripts and then later the printed editions of these collections of texts carry forward lots of...
established learned knowledge from the earlier Middle Ages. So the kinds of recipes collected, the kinds of prognostications collected in these texts, nearly all of them can be traced back to Latin collections from like the 13th, 14th centuries. So they're getting translated into English at some point. And then once they're in English,
People do what people do, like they mix them up and they take what they want from one collection and the other collection and they reshuffle, right? But originally these texts are from a very learned and literate tradition, which is one of the things that scholars knew about this already. But I think in the popular imagination, it's one of the things that I emphasize when I talk about this book. In the popular imagination, we sort of imagine that recipe books.
always come from practice. It's people doing something and then writing down what they did. And so that they're recording some kind of folk knowledge. And what I show in the book is that while these books relate, these practical manuscripts do end up influencing practice in interesting ways, people are drawn to them because they are sort of emblems of this very learned culture that they want to participate in. Because they see a book as something kind of special and precious.
And they recognize that they collect knowledge that is authoritative, that comes from a really important and learned source. So that's one of the ways that learned physicians show up in these books. So they're not unauthorized collections. It's not like somebody's out there, I'm pushing back against the man, and I'm going to make my, that comes later. That kind of attitude absolutely comes later, really sort of post -print. You get a far more popular like,
Melissa Reynolds (23:39.074)
This is the secret version of recipes. And I actually talk about that in my book, that I have a whole chapter on secrets, where people are collecting from peasants and illiterate women out in the countryside. And they're not really doing that, by the way. They're just repopulating. They're publishing the same recipes that existed in But it's a really good marketing tactic. But the other way that this works is that the learned physicians, once they realize how
PJ (23:42.096)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (24:07.214)
popular these books are, especially in print. I mean, there's just so many of them published in English. And the same is true in other European vernaculars, too. I just happen to be a historian of England. They get in on the action. By like the 1560s, 1550s, you have learned physicians who, like for example Thomas Eliot, who is Sir Thomas Eliot, a very learned physician under Henry VIII in England.
He's actually a translator of Galen's Greek manuscripts. So he's like one of the most learned physicians in Europe at the time. He recognizes that there's a market for like, you know, distilling this knowledge into English. So he basically writes this book, The Castle of Health. It's one of the best sellers of the first half of the 16th century intended for regular people. It basically takes Galen's ideas about the body and it puts them in English and adds some recipes and he publishes it on the cheap. It's like a really little book.
It sells for very not a lot of money and people buy it like crazy. So it's not a necessarily antagonistic relationship between like the learned and the regular folk. In terms of books, now in terms of practice, that's a different story. So like the College of Physicians, which is the official licensing body in England by after 1518, they don't like it. Like if you claim to be a physician, you have to have a certain set of credentials. You can't go around practicing medicine without credentials, which...
I get, right? Fair enough. Yeah, yeah. But as long as you don't claim to be a physician, it's fine. But yeah, as far as the circulation of knowledge, there isn't that kind of antagonism that you maybe would expect that people would want to clamp down. They don't, necessarily.
PJ (25:36.656)
Yeah, yeah, that could be important. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ (25:52.07)
Something you said kind of at the beginning of this leads right into that second question I wanted to ask. And it seems to be a major thread in your book. What were the consequences of putting common people at the center of the new information economy?
Melissa Reynolds (26:08.14)
Yeah, thank you for that question. It's a very good question. And it is like kind of, it's the point of the whole book. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's definitely the question I was driving at. And part of the reason I do just to like give you a you know, historian speak background is that in the history of medicine and science, England gets important at the end of the 16th century. So like kind of under Elizabeth,
PJ (26:13.818)
Right, right. I was like, this seems important. Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (26:37.078)
And you get Francis Bacon, and then you get the Royal Society. And it just feels like, now we have science. And England is this cradle of scientific innovation. But the 15th century, the 1400s, the first half of the 1500s, England seems like it is just like a backwater according to the trends of European knowledge, like elite learned culture. All the cool stuff is happening in Italy. That's where anybody who wants to learn to be a physician or anything is
They're there. And part of the reason for that is that if you look at the archive of texts of books that are circulating in England in this time period, so many of them are published in English, not Latin. If you're a learned physician, you're going to go to the continent to publish your book, even if you're English. And they do. They go to John Caius, a very learned physician, goes to the continent to publish his book in Latin. And so historians had said, it's just like,
It's just a backwater and it's just people reading these like lame old English books and they don't have anything new in them. So like, why do we care? It's the same old medieval knowledge. Like, what's the point? And so one of the things I wanted to do in this book is show that, in fact, just by nature of the sort of the characteristics of the English information economy, which is geared toward
your average reader rather than toward a very elite market. Not necessarily intentionally, it was a byproduct of the fact that England's like out there on an island and all the best print shops at the time are in Italy and Germany and France. But as a result, like you get everyday people engaging with these books and then you start to see learned people going to print to spread information towards everyday people, like not publishing in Latin, publishing in English.
And as a result, think there's a kind of openness and a culture of curiosity that comes out of these interactions. It's one of the things I show at the conclusion of the book is that you get this kind of homegrown scholarship that's, again, doesn't always meet our standards of scholarship. These people aren't necessarily getting the big books written about them by historians as discoverers of great theories, but they feel like they're participants in a culture of information exchange and knowledge creation.
Melissa Reynolds (28:58.252)
And that, I argue, is one of the things, one of the sort of preconditions that makes the sort of flowering of English science possible. But if you don't have that to begin with in the 16th century, you don't get the Royal Society. You don't get the sort of big name developments of the 17th century, where England does seem all of a sudden to be like this hotbed of scientific innovation.
A lot of which is like crowd -sourced, crowd -funded, like English science even in the 17th century is like, let's go out and see who we can find that knows this thing. And I think that comes out of that earlier culture of like, hey, there's a lot of people out there. Let's spread this knowledge around and see what happens, see what comes back to us, you know?
PJ (29:39.164)
And I might be just completely off track here, but I did want to ask when we talk about Writing for the common person in English and then writing for the continent in Latin
Melissa Reynolds (29:51.403)
Mm
Mm -hmm.
PJ (29:57.04)
Was there more of a focus on experimentation in actual efficacy, efficacy in English writing because there wasn't as much, it was less about debating and less about your reputation. Like, like, well, I don't want to contradict Galen. Like your average guy on the street, doesn't, like, he doesn't care if you caught it. He's like, that doesn't work. Like, I don't know if that makes, I caught a little bit of that I thought, but I wanted to, I was curious what you.
Melissa Reynolds (30:10.328)
Yeah.
Mm -hmm.
Right, yeah. Yeah, well, yeah.
PJ (30:26.81)
Like am I reading it correctly?
Melissa Reynolds (30:27.946)
Yeah, well the answer I think you're definitely catching on to something that I think is a little difficult to answer. It's one of the sort of contradictions of these books and of the time period. And I'll try not to, I don't know, hopefully my answer won't be too convoluted. But so there's a lot of scholarship in the history of science, mine just one small part of it that shows that experimental practices sort of come out of these popular books in the 16th century. So
A great book by William Eman, Science and the Secrets of Nature, talks about books of secrets coming out of Italy and how the recipe format really lends itself to experimentation. And I think that's true. Like having lots and lots of recipes published in one collection encourages you to like try all seven, you know? Like you've got a bunch of them, why not just keep going and try all the recipes for headache and see what happens? That said, and I think this is a very important caveat.
none of them are really effective. Like I want to be clear that yeah, like the, so it's really hard. And I mean this quite seriously. Like I'm not just saying this is a dig on 16th century practitioners. Like in our minds, the experimental method is so premised on efficacy that like did the thing work? Do we need to revise? And while
PJ (31:29.884)
Because the medicine is bad. Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (31:52.424)
these people probably convinced themselves that certain things did work, right? Like anecdotally, you just get better, but you took the recipe right before. And so then you think it's the recipe that did it. That happens all the time. Humans, we love anecdotal evidence that we then spin out into all kinds of theories, right? And the placebo effect, right? Absolutely. Very much a real thing. So I do want to say that we're not talking about a kind of systematic experimental method.
PJ (32:06.672)
Yeah. And the placebo effect, which is also a real thing. Yes. yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (32:20.302)
as would be described by Francis Bacon like 50 years later. But it does encourage people to like, just try, like just try, see if you can try. And I have a lot, there's tons of authors in this period who preface their recipe collections by being like, just try. And then there's one guy who I'm still writing about probably for a later project, maybe the second book, really weird English physician, but he's weird in a good way. In the 1580s, Timothy Bright, who like has this whole section of his book where he's like,
PJ (32:23.366)
Yeah, yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (32:49.772)
Don't take my word for it. Don't even trust the philosophers. Try the recipes in this book. So you get a sense that this idea that experience is a valid sort of ground on which to build knowledge about the body and about the natural world, that's already there. What we don't have yet is the kind of systematic experimental method that comes later. But again, you can't have that until you have this expectation that everybody should try it. And I think you're right. There is something about the vernacular that lends itself to that.
Because these recipes are unserious. They're not what you'd publish for your learned friend in Italy. And in fact, Francis Bacon, the famous father of English science, hates these recipe collections. He thinks they're silly because they're not serious. They're not systematic. They're not based in theory. They're just a bunch of collections of things that people have tried. So there is experimentation there. It's not quite the experimental method. But it's important, I think.
for understanding how that comes about.
PJ (33:50.204)
So a little bit of a silly question, but the only reason that I know what prognostication is, is because of Merlin and Sword in the Stone. So just for our audience, we use that word a lot. I like saying the word, but what is a prognostication? It feels kind of between like a prophecy and a prediction, kind of, I don't know.
Melissa Reynolds (33:56.95)
Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (34:05.133)
Yeah.
Sure.
That's actually, that is a great definition of prognostics. Between prophecy and prediction, like absolutely spot on. Okay, so one thing you should know before I talk about prognostications, if you're listening, and I think the thing that we have just forgotten, although there's now been a resurgence in astrology, is that the entire period I'm talking about, astrology is a science. It is taken very seriously. It's how we get astronomy, right? It's how we get the discoveries of like,
PJ (34:16.751)
Okay.
Melissa Reynolds (34:40.738)
Copernicus. They care about astrology because there's a very serious body of literature that comes out of Islamic scholars in the 12th, 13th centuries translated into Latin. All kinds of scientific information that tells us being, let's imagine we're pre -modern English people, that the movements of the moon are affecting the elements, the four elements. All of the earth is created of four elements according to Aristotle.
also play on the humors. And so we need to know about the movements of the stars and the moon and all of that, because that's how we can figure out our bodily humors. I will leave it at that and not go into more detail, although it is actually a science. Like they have, it's a fully theorized science. So, prognostications, especially the ones that I look at, are kind of really distilled and simplified ways of accessing this learned science.
in ways that, as I said, they're really simplified. So if you're a very learned astrologer, you're observing the stars every night, and you're looking at the positions, and you're calculating what's what. If you're not a learned astrologer, you might have a prognostication, like the ones I talk about in the book, for example, that say the waning of the moon, or the third day of the crescent moon, waxing crescent, is the ideal day to plant.
So you read that and you know that you're gonna sow your seeds in April on the third day of the waxing crescent moon. And it's building on this whole body of knowledge that is widely accepted among the learned, but it's distilling it down into this really simple sort of instructive statement. What I think is so cool about them in the book is that they are so simplistic and repetitive.
that to our minds, you're like, why would anyone ever follow this set of instructions? Like, the same thing is going to repeat every year or like every 30 days or whatever, you Like, you can't possibly believe that this is predictive of what's going to happen. But I think that's to miss the point, which is, again, so much of what I argue in the book, so much about the collection of this sort of instructive knowledge is about giving people a tool.
Melissa Reynolds (37:02.136)
to navigate calamity that makes them feel that they're doing something, that they're not totally helpless. And so even though they seem extremely simplistic, if you're like, really, you believe that if you go to this page and you see that it's the first day of the full moon and you got sick, you're now going to die, is that really helpful? I think it's helpful insofar as it imposes a structure on experiences that are inexplicable and that are really quite tragic often. Like failed crops, the sudden death of a child, like if you can impose a structure on that.
And one of the chapters of the book, I explore this really unusual set of prognostications that as far as I know only circulates in England. And there's a real theological component to it because I do think for people also, like, you the movements of the stars and the sun, these are manifestations of God's order, the order of the universe. And so if you're relating these calamities to what people imagine to be God's order and a divine plan, then there again, there's a kind of structure imposed on what is otherwise
quite calamitous and allows you to think that you're tapping into an order and you can predict what's coming next, even though you can't. But you know, it's useful.
PJ (38:09.66)
Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I mean, that's what we do today. I mean, you see a lot of people it's like, why did I get cancer? Like I did I did all the thing healthy things I was supposed to and this guy's like over, you know, it's like, again, we love anecdotal evidence. You see a lot of people like my granny smoked and she was she lived to be 98. And it's like, yeah, that's not you know, and what we want to do is we want to, you know, it's like, well, don't smoke. And if you don't smoke, you won't get cancer. It's like,
Melissa Reynolds (38:19.106)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Melissa Reynolds (38:29.709)
Yeah.
PJ (38:40.636)
One, that's more efficacious than the prognostications. Let me be clear. But also, it's like, we're just trying to find ways to control. a lot of times, just things happen. And we have so much more power now than some poor peasant at the mercy of these social forces that literally are not even studied at that point. Nobody understands.
Melissa Reynolds (38:44.012)
Right, of course, of course, yes.
Melissa Reynolds (38:49.454)
Mm
Melissa Reynolds (38:53.1)
Right. Right.
Melissa Reynolds (39:05.389)
Right.
Melissa Reynolds (39:08.728)
Mm
PJ (39:10.772)
I'm trying to understand, like trying to imagine if like, you were in court. Well, I don't know if you'd be allowed to speak in court. I don't know. Okay. Yeah. Well, I meant, sorry, before the king and you're like, Hey, I think we should, I think we should put common people at the center of the information economy. Right? Like, like, they'd be like, what are you talking about? Like, like, like this whole this whole
Melissa Reynolds (39:18.38)
Yeah, I could speak in court. I wouldn't be an attorney, but like I could definitely testify on my behalf.
Melissa Reynolds (39:32.0)
Yeah, no.
No!
PJ (39:38.574)
like set of tools that that you have to like analyze this stuff, and that we're now using to try and analyze our own lives. It's just not even there. And like, yeah, anyways, so I don't know if that
Melissa Reynolds (39:46.444)
Right, right. Well, no, and I think what you're, an undercurrent of the book, and one of the things that really, I mean, thanks to circumstances while I was writing the book, really came to the fore for me was the question of disinformation or sort of like pseudoscience. Because by our standards, everything in these manuscripts is pseudoscience. Like there's not, I mean, maybe some of the recipes might happen to be efficacious, but it's kind of more of an accident if they are.
than like, wow, there was a really robust theory behind this. Of course, the prognostications we now think of as pseudoscience. And from the perspective of big English science, the famous guys of the 17th century, Francis Bacon, looking back on this stuff, they also think it's pseudoscience. Francis Bacon is very critical of astrologers and these empirics, these guys who just peddle recipes, whatever. And I think there's a temptation.
to see the sort of circulation of knowledge among the common people as just straight disinformation. And yet another example of what happens when you open the floodgates and people can look anywhere for knowledge. What are they going to do? They're going to pick the easy answers that make them feel better that aren't particularly rigorous. we've all, right, I was writing this book between 2019 and 2022. And I wrote a short piece in a journal about the relationship between the
the COVID anti -vaxxers who thought horse deworming medicine was going to be the right way to beat COVID, right? Like this sort of disinformation that was circulating widely on the internet. But I think to entirely paint it as disinformation again misses the fact that there are a set of critical tools. Can you hear that in the background? no, there's like an alarm going off because they're testing the alert system.
PJ (41:35.194)
Yeah, that was fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I heard that. No, I heard the alarm. Yeah, no, it was fun. That's
Melissa Reynolds (41:41.782)
Yeah, we may want to edit that out or maybe not. It's just an emergency test of the system. Nothing is nothing bad is happening here. Nothing bad is happening. Anyway, maybe I'll wait for it to I don't know if you can hear it. Maybe I'll wait. You can't. There's a voice speaking over an intercom in the hallway.
PJ (41:43.651)
No, no.
PJ (41:47.632)
Nothing, nothing that is happening. man. Sorry. Continue.
PJ (41:55.396)
I can't hear it now.
PJ (42:01.18)
I just put my ear to my microphone like I would hear it better. I don't even know what I'm thinking. Okay, anyways, no, sorry. Yeah, you're good. Continue.
Melissa Reynolds (42:06.382)
No, no, okay. Okay, I was saying disinformation, right. So there is no question that the information I look at, I don't wanna be someone who writes a book that's like, come and people get knowledge and everything is great. Like, no, the same problems we have about a kind of open information economy existed in the 16th century. People didn't always make the best choices about which knowledge to trust. However, my argument is...
that for enough people, maybe not everyone, but enough people had to bring a set of critical tools to information, in part because there was so much of it. And they had to try to distinguish, is this source better than that source? Why do I trust this guy over that guy? And is there some way that I can contribute to this if I can double check it? Again, we get back to the question of experimentation. There's enough of that that it does build into something that looks more like
rigorous scientific inquiry. It doesn't happen automatically and it doesn't happen among everyone, but it is a precondition. That's not to say that there isn't a lot of knowledge that looks even to contemporaries, even to people in the 1600s, that looks kind of silly. Like why on earth are you buying up these books of astrology, right? Yeah.
PJ (43:18.918)
Well, it is silly. Yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah, it doesn't look silly. Some of it you're like, I mean, it's interesting. Even you're talking about you need to plant this time on April. It's like, yeah, you don't have to do it at night, but like, that's a good time to plant. It's like, not because the stars, the moons or anything. You're like, yeah, right.
Melissa Reynolds (43:30.707)
Yeah, right. No. Exactly. And that's the case for a lot of these prognostications, right? You're like, well, yeah, that would be a good time to do things because that's just a good time to do something. And some of them are completely nonsensical. But again, it's giving people a sense of empowerment, which is what disinformation is playing on in our contemporary world, too. You give people who are scared and uncertain, certainly distrustful of authorities, an alternative source.
And it's really easy to see how people who have good intentions and think they're being critical end up trusting a source that isn't particularly rigorous, let's say.
PJ (44:11.974)
If you don't mind, I'd like to see if I'm tracking with you and maybe put this a different way. Or maybe I'm just like totally missing it and that's okay. You can correct me.
One of the parallels with today, a lot of people panic because we were getting so much information and they say it's too much information, which is true. It's too much information. But what arose from the last time we had too much information was the creation of new critical tools. But that happened because there was just way, there was so much disinformation. And so a lot of times what people want to do is control the flow of information like today, when really...
Melissa Reynolds (44:31.308)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Melissa Reynolds (44:41.059)
Yes.
PJ (44:52.444)
almost like in a survival of the fittest instead of Instead of saying hey, let's structure the internet It's hey if we allow this to happen like yes a lot of people are going to get hurt But a hundred two hundred years from now or maybe faster because of the rate of technology Like we're going to develop some incredible critical tools to deal with this
Melissa Reynolds (45:07.735)
Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (45:15.106)
want that to be true. I mean, I'll be careful. mean, I'll be right. that's, know, historians were very careful to avoid teleology, which is like, you know, this bad thing happens so that the good thing can happen. Right. Like, I would say it's a really nice way to impose a framework on the past that is where everything is always moving toward progress. I so I think there is if there is a lesson to be learned from this, it's not that like, well, everyone will just automatically
PJ (45:16.268)
I do too! That's way more optimistic than anything I've... Anyways, yeah.
PJ (45:29.852)
Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (45:45.202)
learn tools to deal with this misinformation. Although I do think that that is the case. Like every successive generation we get told that the latest technology, first the internet, social media, whatever, is going to make it impossible for us to sort of make sense of what's real and what's not. And I think younger generations do a good job of handling that. Do they do a perfect job? No. Can we prevent disinformation, misinformation entirely? Absolutely not.
One of the things it forces, though, which is what was, think, the thing that was so transformative about the period I study and what I really focus on in the book is that there had been this very ordered hierarchy of knowledge where everyone who wrote in the Middle Ages as a physician knew the set of authorities to reference. You've got Galen, Hippocrates, Avicenna. There was a of standard corpus of like, this is who we're building on, and it's very orderly, and we're following this.
same lineage, let's say. And then when you open it up, people are still referencing Galen and Hippocrates, but in kind of spotty ways. And eventually that very rigid lineage just can't hold up because there's just too much out there. And I think we've existed in that ecosystem for a really long time, where we don't have a clear lineage. There's just a lot of information. And everything in our society is sort of premised on the idea that a free market eventually, you know, it's going to work out.
But, and I think that's, I think maybe in this time period, it's the beginning of this free market of ideas and maybe that's what shifts. What scares me now, if I'm honest, is that it's not necessarily a free market if we have big corporations running AI algorithms that are mining our information and redistributing it.
literally everywhere all at once. It's not like a single idea, you know, a marketplace where we're all equal competitors. It's a, it looks more like, to me, a kind of earlier model of knowledge where there are these big figures and big institutions and knowledge comes out of there and everyone else is just sort of underneath that big institutional structure. So that worries me because it doesn't seem like we're operating on an even playing field or that it looks like we might not.
PJ (47:39.525)
Mm.
Melissa Reynolds (48:04.226)
be operating on an even playing field in the very near future.
PJ (48:07.868)
So there probably, it does seem like having that much information does force people, not everybody will manage to do it, but it does force people to develop more critical faculties. But we have this problem with corporations. And even as we're talking about this, you're gonna, there is a question of just human capacity. Like our brains do have like a fixed, and maybe the internet is like.
Melissa Reynolds (48:19.106)
think so.
Melissa Reynolds (48:32.44)
Mm -hmm.
PJ (48:35.12)
But you know, maybe we could handle books, but maybe the internet's too much too. That's also, you know what mean? I mean, that's a real, like, so it's not a one -to -one thing, but we'll see. Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (48:38.062)
Yeah. Although you say that, yeah, you say that, but a wonderful book written by a mentor of mine, Anne Blair, called Too Much to Know is about exactly this problem that people living in the Renaissance learned scholars who had been trained in this tradition of essentially like you have your authorities.
and you know how to do exegesis and understand the principles. And then the printing press happens and they're sitting around doing exactly what we're doing about the internet going, there's just too much to know. Like how can we possibly get all this information in our heads? And so the book is basically about how these learned guys go about creating the first reference books. So that's how you get encyclopedias and these big tomes that are sort of just reference books because you just can't manage all that knowledge in your head, right? And now we have Google and we have...
you know, all the other internet ways to remember things, which I tell my students all the time, but like, you know, I know the internet exists. This isn't a class where I want you to memorize dates because why would you at this point? Like you have the internet. I don't need you to hold all that in your head. I need you to have critical thinking skills and examine the past, not just memorize. The internet's good at holding onto dates for us. We can let it do that.
PJ (49:39.932)
Yeah.
PJ (49:51.58)
I don't want to, I want to be respectful of your time, but I don't want to miss out on the opportunity to ask about this. You have a chapter on women's knowledge. Now you mentioned earlier that it's, that it was often used, you know, as a marketing tactic, but when you talk about censoring secrets, can you kind of expound on that a little bit?
Melissa Reynolds (50:01.101)
Mm -hmm.
Melissa Reynolds (50:07.096)
Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (50:11.17)
Mm -hmm.
Melissa Reynolds (50:15.244)
Sure, sure. Yeah, so the chapter you're referring to is sort of in the second half of the book when I start talking about how texts that had circulated in a manuscript are reprinted, repackaged, how you get the kind of earliest sort of marketing advertising tactics for these popular books. And so that chapter examines the ways that women's knowledge, again, I'm using air quotes, but what I mean by that very often is,
knowledge having to do with female reproduction, lactation, menstruation, conception. Also, importantly, knowledge that has to do with magic is coded as feminine in the late Middle Ages for all sorts of reasons having to do with misogyny and a kind of sort of longstanding belief that women are sort of more superstitious. But what I show is that in the manuscripts that I'm looking at in the 15th century,
This misogyny doesn't really show up that there's recipes for menstruation right alongside recipes for like how to cure a headache. There's just not a kind of like very clearly gendered dynamic within English practical manuscripts. I will say at the same time period, if you're reading manuscripts written in Latin in different regions, different places, you do see that, but not in my English ones, right? Not in these that are meant to like help ordinary people manage their lives.
But what I see is that by the 1550s, the English start publishing books of secrets. And they're actually marketed this way. They're supposed to be collections of secrets. And they do this because books of secrets are really popular in Italy first, and they actually translate a book of secrets from Italian into English. But one of sort of paradigms of a book of secrets is that it is literally knowledge collected from people who otherwise would have kept it. It would not be widely available.
one category of person you collect a secret from is a woman. And so what I show is that this idea of women's knowledge becomes both enticing, it can be a marketing tactic, when you're marketing a book that is otherwise filled with like kind of run of the mill mundane knowledge that's not particularly sexy, you put women's knowledge on it and maybe it's a little secret, it's a little exciting. On the other hand,
Melissa Reynolds (52:33.528)
There are books circulating in the 1550s in England that are explicitly about magic, one that is supposed to be credited to the great philosopher Albert the Great, Albertus Magnus. It's very magical. It's published in English, and it's all about spells and stuff. It's not attributed to a woman at all, because you wouldn't put women on that one, because if you did, then that would make it very suspicious. Then it would seem dangerous. And so what I'm trying to do is map out how this category of
women's knowledge operates against the backdrop of actual persecutions of women. So by the 1580s, 1590s, there are really widespread executions of women specifically in Essex witch trials. this isn't like a, yes, it happens at the level of advertising and what makes a book cool, but then it has consequences for how actual women are persecuted. Like some of the...
the specific examples or accusations leveled at real women who were caught up in the witch trials look very much like the information that is codified as women's secrets in these books. So there is a relationship there. And it's just sort of to show that this category is unstable and yet powerful. It can have real impact on people's lives. And also it can be an advertising tactic. Like the two things can be true. And sort of figuring out how, yeah, how these
advertising strategies play out. And I think we see this in contemporary world, like something, sort of, like a cultural moment where we, God, how do I describe this? Something that seems innocuous in an advertisement, like the way you characterize something as feminine or something, it can then have these sort of repercussions where it plays out in culture in a way that was never intended by an advertisement, that was just meant to sell like,
some cultural item and yet then it has these implications for how we think of women and women's place in our culture, I guess I'll say.
PJ (54:38.416)
Would it be similar, and I understand this takes us away from kind of the gendered side of it, but would it be similar to the way that banned books operate? Like you could get in trouble for having banned books in certain circumstances, but it definitely makes them sell way more. That's like, is that very, is that so kind of that, right?
Melissa Reynolds (54:49.938)
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's censorship, right? Censorship is unstable. It's never, it's never, it's always hypocritical, right? That like in one section, this book is a banned book and it's bad because it mentions this thing. And then you could pull out another book from the shelf and be like, but that one isn't banned. And that's because it's because the authority is more revered or whatever. You know what I mean? Like you wouldn't ban Shakespeare and Shakespeare writes about witches.
PJ (55:01.798)
And
Yep. Yep.
Melissa Reynolds (55:18.05)
which you might ban Harry Potter in a certain school, right? And it just has to do with the authority. It has nothing to do, like both books talk about witches. Yes, it's exactly that.
PJ (55:25.136)
Yeah. And you will definitely, you will definitely want to read it more because it's banned. That's not like that, you know, like, which is like, it's like, ooh, it's, it's women's knowledge, right? Like you're like, like, well, I don't, you know, like someone comes over and you're like trying to hide it, know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Melissa Reynolds (55:30.56)
Of course you will. Yeah, of course you will.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's clear to me in some of these books that they're marketed as women's knowledge so that it's a little exciting. then I also show in the chapter, it sort of comes back around in manuscripts, that 16th century collectors, so people that are looking at really old manuscripts, print has already happened, but they're really interested in collecting medieval manuscripts. They have this idea of women's knowledge that's been packaged in print. So they've been reading all these books that are like, women's knowledge is dangerous and secret.
PJ (56:03.877)
You
Melissa Reynolds (56:09.838)
And so they go back to these manuscripts that have been around for like 150 years, the same manuscripts that had women's knowledge in them with none of that sort of gender nonsense around it. And now they see it as secret. Now they're like, ooh, that's a secret because it's women's knowledge. And so there's this evidence of censorship where they're crossing them out. But a lot of times, again, it's still exciting. So they X them out, but they're still totally visible. It's just a good way to show like, I know that's women's knowledge and I'm going to cross it out.
But I do still kind of want to know what it is. So I'm going to not entirely cross it out, you know?
PJ (56:43.962)
I know it's like a platitude, I didn't expect to get here in this interview, but man, people are weird. That's like, man.
Melissa Reynolds (56:51.148)
Yeah, they definitely are. I think nothing gives you an appreciation for how weird people are quite like history, quite like getting in the archive and being like, wow, people have always been weird. They've been weird in a lot of the same ways too. Like we're weird consistently across time.
PJ (57:00.154)
Yo, yeah. yeah.
PJ (57:05.532)
Consistently weird I like that One let me thank you for coming on today. Dr. Reynolds, but Before you go if you could leave our audience with one thing What if you could have them kind of meditate on one thing or maybe do one thing this week after listening this episode, what would it be?
Melissa Reynolds (57:23.427)
Hmm.
Melissa Reynolds (57:27.584)
That's a really good question. I think what I would tell people to think about this week would be to examine their relationship to the sources of knowledge that they routinely turn to in their lives. Some of them you may examine and find they're great and you have absolutely no problem whatsoever. But just think about your relationship to authority.
as you approach it in your everyday life, for little things, right? Like I think we don't, we think about examining authority when we're reading a news story, for example. But I think it's an interesting exercise to think about all the things you trust in your life as authoritative that you don't question, like the time. I don't question the time. I don't go around wondering if my Google, with my Apple Watch is correct. I know that it is, but it's little things like that that help you to see how authorities, sources of knowledge about your world are kind of baked in that you don't take.
you don't take a moment to consider.
PJ (58:25.968)
Dr. Reynolds, incredible application. Thank you, it's been a joy talking to you.
Melissa Reynolds (58:30.592)
It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.