Hannah Bower, Junior Research Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge

Hannah Bower is a Junior Research Fellow in English at Churchill College, Cambridge and she specializes in medieval literature. Her research focuses on the boundaries, overlaps, and exchanges between literary writings and other, apparently practical or scientific texts. Her PhD, funded by the Wellcome Trust and completed at the University of Oxford, explored the linguistic and imaginative connections between medieval medical recipes and more canonical literary writings. She also completed a six-month secondment fellowship at the London Science Museum which explored the editorial history and reader reception of eighteenth-century medical pamphlets. Her current research investigates the representation of human-made marvels in all kinds of medieval and early modern writings.

"In addition to offering a new and welcome look at an understudied corpus of texts, the critical approaches used in this book will be valuable to a more general audience of scholars and students seeking new and challenging ways to evaluate and examine the textual history of the medieval and early modern periods." - Emily Kesling, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Modern Philology

"The scope of the study is truly impressive, encompassing over ninety manuscripts and early printed books consulted and a larger number accessed through medical databases. Instead of choosing to focus on a handful of texts, Bower's study aims to consider vernacular medical remedies as a corpus, albeit one intimately connected to other areas of knowledge and linguistic traditions. The book is written in clear and beautiful prose, approachable both to scholar and student." - Emily Kesling, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Modern Philology