Medieval recipes for baked owls and puppies stuffed with snails are going online

Need a cure for a bad case of gout?

Well, you could always bake an owl and grind it into a powder. Or perhaps you have a puppy and some snails going spare.

Simply stuff the latter into the former, roast it over a fire with a little sage royal, and use the rendered fat to make a salve.

These are just some of the thousands of medieval recipes being digitised for the first time by academics at Cambridge University.

More than 180 manuscripts are to be catalogued, conserved and made public online over the next two years as part of the ‘Curious Cures’ project.

They contain around 8,000 unedited medical recipes, mostly dating from the 14th and 15th centuries. Some examples go back even further, the oldest being 1,000 years old.

The texts are from the collections of the University Library, Fitzwilliam Museum and a dozen Cambridge colleges.

James Freeman, leading the £500,000 Wellcome-funded project, said: ‘For all their complexities, medieval medical recipes are very relatable to modern readers.

‘Many address ailments that we still struggle with today: headaches, toothache, diarrhoea, coughs, aching limbs.

‘They show medieval people trying to manage their health with the knowledge that was available to them at the time – just as we do.

‘They are also a reminder of the pain and precarity of medieval life, before antibiotics, before antiseptics and before pain relief as we would know them all today.

‘Other treatments include salting an owl and baking it until it can be ground into a powder, mixing it with boar’s grease to make a salve, and rubbing it on to the sufferer’s body to cure gout.

‘To treat cataracts – described as a “web in the eye” – one recipe recommends taking the gall bladder of a hare and some honey, mixing them together and then applying it to the eye with a feather over the course of three nights.’

A team of project cataloguers will prepare detailed descriptions of the text’s contents, material characteristics, origins and provenance, and place the recipes in their material, intellectual and historical contexts.

‘Until now, such texts have been quite difficult for researchers and members of the public to access and analyse.

‘A bewildering array of ingredients – animal, mineral and vegetable – are mentioned in these recipes.

‘There are herbs that you would find in modern-day gardens and on supermarket shelves – sage, rosemary, thyme, bay, mint – but also common perennial plants: walwort, henbane, betony and comfrey.

‘Medieval physicians also had access to and used a variety of spices in their formulations, such as cumin, pepper and ginger, and commonly mixed ingredients with ale, white wine, vinegar or milk.’