---
title: "Chemical vocabulary in Middle English medical manuscripts (2021)"
description: "The authors challenge the older view that minerals and chemicals are rare in medieval medical recipes. 24 references."
authors: ["Irene Diego Rodríguez", "Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas"]
year: 2021
venue: "Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 27"
source: "https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/1341"
licence: "CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos)"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/rodriguez-2021-chemical-vocabulary-middle-english-medical/"
---
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# Chemical vocabulary in Middle English medical manuscripts

**Authors:** Irene Diego Rodríguez and Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas · **Year:** 2021 · **Venue:** [Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 27](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/revista-de-lenguas-para-fines-especificos/) ([Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 2021](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/revista-de-lenguas-para-fines-especificos/2021/)) · **Licence:** CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/1341) · [PDF](https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/download/1341/1195) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4313485427)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The authors challenge the older view that minerals and chemicals are rare in medieval medical recipes. They built a corpus of roughly 215,000 words of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English medical writing, drawn from manuscripts in Glasgow University Library, the British Library and the Wellcome Library. Several of these texts had never been published. The corpus covers specialised treatises, herbals and pharmacopoeias, and recipe collections.

Using Norri's four-way grouping (man-made ingredients, minerals and their compounds, plant extracts, and medicinal earths), they extracted 345 chemical noun items. They split these into single-word terms and multi-word combinations. For single words they traced etymology mainly through the OED and MED. For combinations they classified structure using the taxonomies of Bauer, Kastovsky, Marchand and Norri.

French is the main source of the single-word terms. Among the combinations, the Noun + of + Noun pattern dominates, which the authors attribute to Latin and French models. Plant names show the opposite tendency and favour Noun + Noun compounds. The study is presented as the first systematic quantitative and qualitative survey of this vocabulary.

## Key points
- The corpus has about 215,000 words. Sources include Sloane 121 (a humoral tract), Wellcome 537 (a Middle English Compendium Medicinae by Gilbertus Anglicus), GUL Ferguson 147 (Antidotarium Nicholai), and GUL Hunter 185, 307, 328 and 497.
- 345 chemical items were found, 111 of them single-word terms. Compound medicines such as electuaries and ointments were deliberately left out, even when a mineral or resin was their main ingredient.
- Origins of the single-word terms:
  - French: 37.83% (42 items)
  - Latin: 29.73%
  - Old English: 15.31%
  - Mixed French/Latin: 9.91%
  - Unidentified: 7.20%
- Clearly Latin phrases (e.g. the *olium …* oils) and French combinations (e.g. *sangdragon*, *verdegres*) were placed in a separate category of foreign elements.
- Among English combinations, Noun + of + Noun accounts for 78% and Noun + Noun for 13%; the remaining patterns share 9%. Compared with plant names:
  - Noun + Noun: 12.57% in chemical terms vs 54.33% in plant names
  - Adjective + Noun: 5.14% vs 20.67%

## Interesting ideas
- Etymology comes from a fixed cascade: the OED first, the MED as fallback, and glossaries only as extra support, with the OED winning any conflict. This makes every provenance decision traceable.
- Instead of forcing every word into "borrowing" or "native", visibly unintegrated Latin and French strings get their own foreign category, because code-switching boundaries are fuzzy.
- The authors separate simple substances from compound preparations using a dictionary definition of a mixture (an ingredient blended with honey, syrup and so on).
- Multi-word names are classified by the word class of their head, so different surface patterns become comparable categories.
- Comparing construction distributions across two domains (chemical vs plant terms) revealed strong domain-specific preferences that a single overall figure would hide.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (world): When merging WordNet, FrameNet and Wikidata facts, apply an explicit source-priority order and store which source won, so each compiled fact can explain its origin.
- **I2** (tokens): Mark embedded Latin/French spans as foreign material rather than forcing English lemmas and tags on them, which keeps downstream errors from spreading.
- **I3** (world): The ontology can tell "substance" from "mixture made of ingredients", so recipe-like texts produce correct part-of and holding relations.
- **I4** (frames): Treat "oil of X" and "X oil" as variants of the same head-plus-modifier frame, so both resolve to one entity.
- **I5** (learn): Stratify parser evaluation by domain and track how often each construction occurs, so a weakness with "N of N" in technical text becomes visible.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Universidad de Alcalá](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universidad-de-alcala/) — University, Alcalá de Henares, Spain · 2 works · 1 citation

Also on the byline: [Universidad Nebrija](https://ror.org/03tzyrt94).

📚 Shelves (2): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works

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## Cite

Cite as: Irene Diego Rodríguez and Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas. 2021. Chemical vocabulary in Middle English medical manuscripts. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 27.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{rodriguez2021chemical,
  title = {{Chemical vocabulary in Middle English medical manuscripts}},
  author = {Irene Diego Rodríguez and Isabel {de la Cruz Cabanillas}},
  booktitle = {Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 27},
  year = {2021},
  url = {https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/1341}
}
```

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## References

24 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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4. Bauer, L. (2017). Compounds and Compounding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108235679)
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*Updated 24 October 2026*