“A Very Rare & Tested Secret”: Recipes Against Plague in BnF Ms. Fr. 640

Alice Bai
Fall 2025
HIST4962: Making and Knowing in Early Modern Europe

Ms. Fr. 640 contains an assortment of therapeutic and medicinal recipes, addressing a broad range of bodily concerns from stomach disorders to skin whitening. While a small percentage of total entries, numbering forty out of a total 930, these medicinal recipes can reveal interesting insights into the geographical, temporal, and intellectual context of their collection and inscription. Xiaomeng Liu, analysing the medical recipes of Ms. Fr. 640 as part of the Making and Knowing Project, argues that these recipes “present medical knowledge from a layperson’s perspective,” evidenced in the fact that they do not reflect standard formulas or claim to derive their knowledge from authoritative texts.¹ Rather, they fit into the broader genre of the manuscript as a work that engages with artisanal epistemology, a kind of “vernacular science” that is developed through direct experience with observation and experimentation.²

Of particular interest within this corpus of medical recipes are two recipes that claim to offer effective remedies for the plague. The second plague pandemic, often referred to as the Black Death, began in Central Asia in the 1330s and reached the West in 1347.³ While no manifestation of the plague was so devastating or deadly as the initial outbreak from 1347-53, claiming the lives of as much as half of Europe’s population, the disease persisted in the continent until the 1830s.⁴ In France, there was not a single year between 1500 and 1770 when plague was absent from the whole of the country.⁵ Even as the number and extent of outbreaks in the official record declined in the second half of the seventeenth century, the plague returned in full force to Marseille during the 1720-22 outbreak.⁶ The author-practitioner of Ms. Fr. 640 would certainly have experienced plague during his lifetime, providing a deeply personal impetus for the recording of these cures in his book of secrets.

This essay seeks to closely examine the contents of these recipes against plague in terms of their ingredients and processes in relation to other plague treatments and habits of medical thinking in the early modern period. Additionally, this essay will elaborate on the manifestations of plague specifically in Toulouse, relating the author-practitioner’s potential experience with the disease and situating the recipes in their original context of production.

Contemporary Views on the Causes and Manifestations of Plague

The medical landscape of late medieval Europe at the time of the initial outbreak of plague in the fourteenth century was firmly established in scholastic humouralism, in the tradition of Galen and Hippocrates.⁷ In this view, each person was composed of four humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm) which influenced their respective qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry). The standard for medical practice was to maintain health by promoting moderation, by evacuating overabundant humours and restoring balance in the primary qualities.⁸

However, this genre of medical thinking was challenged by the practical experiences that medical practitioners had with plague. While Galenic medicine taught that the manifestation of illness varied due to the different humoural constitution of each individual, the widespread and universal nature of the cataclysmic disease countered this conventional wisdom.⁹ The plague inspired great fear as a disease that could strike and kill suddenly, with entire villages coming down with the illness all at once within the same day or hour, leaving victims sometimes with only a “few hours” to live once they contracted symptoms.¹⁰ The age and class profile of the victims also differed from other known infectious diseases in a terrifying way; rather than mainly striking the poor, the young, and the elderly, the plague seemed to target individuals in the prime of their lives all across the class strata. The universal nature of the disease led to interpretations of the plague as a supernatural event, a sign of divine wrath and judgement.¹¹

In the words of contemporary medical writers such as Piacenzan notary Gabriele de’ Mussis, the plague progressed through the human body in four stages: an initial “tingling sensation” was followed by the emergence of “an extremely hard, solid boil” (known as buboes) in the armpit or groin, then the development of acute fever and severe headaches, and finally additional bodily swelling and the vomiting of blood.¹² While it is now known that bubonic plague was only one of the types of plague that circulated throughout the late medieval and early modern period,¹³ this description encapsulates some of the key symptoms that lay at the heart of contemporary understandings of the Black Death, so named for then characteristic dark buboes.¹⁴ Historian Colin Jones also notes that numerous other diseases circulated in late medieval and early modern Europe concurrent with plague outbreaks, including typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox, and dysentery; however, due to the “cultural dominance” of plague, the impact of these diseases on mortality and morbidity may be obscured from view as they were symptomatically classified as precursors of plague.¹⁵

The plague’s ravages that “seemed to strike down people indiscriminately” and the virulent symptoms that were so unlike any other “pestilential diseases” described by the ancients highlighted the incongruence between the scholarly learning and the lived experiences of contemporary medical practitioners.¹⁶ Nevertheless, the majority of medical practitioners and writers continued to prolifically cite ancient authorities in their work. The most popular trifecta of medical authorities cited by contemporary plague treatise writers includes Avicenna, Galen, and Rhazes, incorporating a lineage of ancient medical knowledge that was either passed down directly from the Greco-Romans or through Arabic mediators.¹⁷ Early modern medical historian Lori Jones claims that from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, plague medicine as a field saw little substantive change; even as plague doctors grappled with reconciling their personal experiences with their textual learning, medical practices and remedies stayed conservatively within the bounds of the traditional canon.¹⁸

Corrupted air was a primary explanation that contemporary medical practitioners turned to as a cause of plague. The production of “evil vapours” could be a result of more universal phenomena like celestial disturbances and adverse conjunctions, or more localised causes like stagnant bodies of water, unburied corpses, or earthquakes. This aligned with longstanding ancient ideas of miasma theory, which claimed that invisible poisonous vapours containing decomposed matter would enter the human body and cause disease by upsetting the humoural balance.¹⁹ These were combined with theories of contagious transmission; while predating modern epidemiological understandings of germ theory, medieval and early modern physicians recognised that close proximity to patients increased the chances of infection.²⁰ It was argued that the plague-infected would pass on their infectious miasmas through their clothing, bedding, and persons, an explanation that supported rather than contradicted miasma theory.²¹

Explanations for the plague also adopted religious and spiritual valences, as some writers interpreted the great pestilence to be a sign of God’s displeasure. The fifteenth and sixteenth century saw the rise of religious content in plague treatises, promoting spiritual advice for mitigating sin and restoring Christian community. French priest Estienne Ydeley, writing in the 1580s, argued that “the plague is not a disease, but a rod of God” sent to punish sinners and redress the iniquity of the world.²² The sins that provoked such wrath were different in the opinions of every writer, from the vanity of women to the fragmentation of the social order.²³ The rise in religious moralising in plague treatises can also be interpreted as a reflection of the religious warfare of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mapping a physical disease onto the spiritual illness of heresy and reformist ideas that invaded Christian communities.²⁴

Recipes Against Plague in BnF Ms. Fr. 640

The two recipes addressing plague in Ms. Fr. 640 are found on folio 44v and 170v of the manuscript, as below:

Fol. 44v: Excellent water against the plague of Monsieur de Montorsin

Take some theriac, rue & dittany, & good vinegar, put the whole in a glass bottle, leave it half-open & well strapped, and put it in a very long bath for three or 4 days. Then separate your decoction from the residue, of which in time of need you will pour some on a flaming red tile & receive the vapor of it & also fumigate your clothes with it. This is a very rare & tested secret.

Fol. 170v: Against Plague

Take, against pestilential fever or poison or plague, an écu’s weight of your opiate soaked in scabious or bugloss water or thoroughly tempered wine, if one is afflicted. After taking it, one needs to make oneself sweat.

The first recipe appears to be a preventative tactic, a method for fumigating the clothes and body as a prophylactic against contracting the plague. The other posits itself to be more curative in nature, to be used specifically when “one is afflicted.” It is curious that Ms. Fr. 640 includes both a preventative and a curative recipe against plague. While advice for plague prevention proliferated widely in contemporary plague treatises and pamphlets, many shied away from the issue of treating and curing the disease once contracted as it was an acknowledged fact that “little could be done” once the patient actually contracted the plague.²⁵

The ingredients, processes, and descriptions contained within the recipes of Ms. Fr. 640 strongly align with the contemporaneous medical landscape of plague treatment. With a view to processes, fumigation and sweating are both characteristic features of a preservative regimen focused on the regulation of the six non-naturals. The six non-naturals are the categories that undergird the traditional corpus of health advice regarding the maintenance of a regimina sanitatis, or “regimen of health,” based on ancient Greco-Roman dietetic doctrines. The six include food and drink, sleep and wakefulness, exercise and rest, passions and emotions, air, and excretion.²⁶ During the time of the plague, the two non-naturals of air and excretion were viewed as particularly vital. Given the emphasis on the corruption of air as a source of infection, many preventative plague regimens recommended ways to “correct” the air through methods such as fumigation.²⁷ The burning of aromatic herbs and spices were used as a protective measure meant to both cleanse rooms and people’s bodies, following the logic that if foul odours propagated disease, then sweet air by extension promoted health.²⁸ Excretion, in the form of bloodletting, defecation, urination, vomiting, sneezing, and sweating, was another non-natural heavily featured in preservative regimens against plague. Special potions or concoctions were often taken to induce sweating, such as is the case with the recipe prescribed in fol. 170v. These methods were believed to evacuate the body of not only bad or excess humours, but also the poisonous matter or blood that many doctors saw to be the true cause of plague.²⁹

The ingredients recommended by the author-practitioner in the recipes are also frequently echoed in contemporary medical advice on preventing and curing plague. Rue, dittany, bugloss, and scabious were herbs that were commonly promoted for their ability to help the user resist infection.³⁰ These herbs could be administered directly via their juices, or as counselled by the author-practitioner in these recipes, through the medium of wine or water.³¹ Vinegar was used in various ways to sanitise and ward off disease, either deployed in cleaning regimens, consumed orally, or gargled and applied to the face.³² Liu remarks that vinegar was also generally used as a solvent in medical recipes and treated as a panacea in its own right in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in reference to the medicinal use of vinegar in other recipes of Ms. Fr. 640.³³

Opiate, a derivative of opium, was another ingredient frequently found in early modern remedies against plague.³⁴ The author-practitioner advises the use of an “écu’s weight” of opiate, which can be understood in the context of dosage prescriptions in the early modern period that referred to equivalent sizes and weights in coinage;³⁵ the écu d’or was a common gold coinage used in medieval and early modern France.³⁶ In addition to being used as a standalone ingredient, opium was also incorporated in heavy doses in theriac, one of the most popular compound medicines prescribed against the plague.³⁷

Theriac is a particularly noteworthy plague medicine to highlight, as it is identified as among the most popular preventative remedies of the time. A medicinal compound originally attributed to the ancient Greeks, theriac was a complex substance that was used as a “universal antidote” against all types of poisons and illnesses, with some formulations including up to eighty ingredients. Theriac operated on the principle of combating poison with poison, with its wide-ranging ingredient list including components like venomous snake flesh, and was heavily endorsed by many plague doctors for its fantastic antidotal properties. Beyond its prescription as a treatment for plague, it was also widely endorsed for relieving a broad range of other ailments, from asthma to kidney stones to menstrual disturbances.³⁸ Italian physician Gentile da Foligno claimed that the substance was “opposed to all poisons” and “suitable for those illnesses in which other medicines are found to be ineffective.”³⁹

Historian John Aberth notes that for all the mentions of theriac in plague tracts, the ingredients of the compound are never fully listed, leading to the understanding that it was likely a ready-made ingredient that could be bought in an early modern apothecary or pharmacy.⁴⁰ This is verified by the work of Ahnfelt, Fors, and Wendin, who identify Montpellier and Venice as celebrated early modern producers of theriac that exported the product far and wide.⁴¹ One could plausibly imagine that the author-practitioner of Ms. Fr. 640 could have purchased a theriac of Montpellier origin in his local pharmacy, as an export from the nearby Provençal urban center, for use in his proposed recipe.

The 1570s to the 1710s were also termed the “heyday of theriac” for the proliferation of literature on the subject as early modern scholars sought to reproduce classical recipes all while innovating in their own right.⁴² Although theriac has been an enduringly popular medicine throughout the medieval and early modern period, the particular revival of theriac at the time of the author-practitioner’s creation of the manuscript in the 1580s could help to explain its particular inclusion in the recipe. Historically, theriac was typically administered orally, either in small quantities straight from the container or rolled into pills. Although the medicine could also be applied externally, the author-practitioner appears unique in incorporating theriac into a fumigatory solution.⁴³

Cures in Context: Plague and Its Responses in Toulouse

In the late medieval and early modern period, Toulouse established itself as a vibrant urban center.⁴⁴ The city had been the administrative capital of the Languedoc region since the thirteenth century, as a military stronghold and strategic supply point that benefited from a strong royal presence. Toulouse was also optimally located as a dynamic trading power, on the road to Spain and within reach of the Pyrenees and the Atlantic via the river system, and celebrated for growing quality pastel woad.⁴⁵ Historian Robert Schneider characterises the early modern city as a buzzing hub that attracted visitors from all over. Traders came seeking their fortunes in the pastel pigment processing business, university students flocked to the University of Toulouse to study Roman law, and pilgrims passed through the city as a key stop en route to Compostella.⁴⁶

The city, like others across Europe, was majorly wracked by plague in the fourteenth century, with the initial outbreak in 1347 reducing the population by a third.⁴⁷ Although the city steadily recovered throughout the fifteenth century, the sixteenth century was another time of major troubles for Toulouse as it was gripped by religious warfare, economic decline, and renewed outbreaks of the plague.⁴⁸ The city served as a haven in both physical and spiritual senses, housing Catholic refugees during periods of religious unrest and tending to the sick and dying during times of plague. Additionally, the pattern of rural indigency in the countryside attained unprecedented proportions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, leading to a steady flow of homeless poor that poured into the city, which swelled to nearly untenable proportions during times of famine and plague.⁴⁹ Writing in the 1580s, the author-practitioner would have been working at a time of immense unrest and uncertainty, as plague epidemics in 1586 and 1587 coincided with a militant Catholic insurrection at the end of the decade.⁵⁰

In the face of the ever-present threat of plague, city authorities established the office of the Capitaine de la Santé (Captain of Health) and the Bureau de Santé (Health Board) in 1515. Nine of the city’s hospitals were consolidated into one municipal institution in 1505, followed by the completion of the new Saint-Sébastien hospital in 1514 which was conceived as a “special hospice” for plague patients to centralise their treatment.⁵¹ Toulouse also housed a number of churches and convents of religious significance for plague victims, attracting diseased supplicants in search of spiritual comfort. The convent of Minimes housed a fourteenth-century chapel dedicated to Saint Roch, patron saint of the plague-stricken, while the Augustines had a statue of the Virgin Mary imbued with miraculous healing powers. Toulouse’s citizens also turned to the Black Virgin in the Church of Dalbade, processed by crowds of clergy and lay people to ward off collective calamities in times of natural disaster and plague outbreaks, and made offerings to the holy relics of Saint Sernin as thanksgiving for protection from the plague in 1528.⁵²

In addition to the practical and spiritual measures taken by the city to mitigate the disease, Toulouse was also active in the realm of plague treatise publication. In the period from 1500-1770, Toulouse was the third most prolific plague treatise publisher in France, numbering twenty-one publications and joining Lyon as a major provincial publisher outside of Paris. The circulation of these plague tracts among urban audiences was an act of “vulgarisation” that made medical knowledge accessible to those beyond the academic institution. Not only was the content itself made more accessible for readers outside of academe, the plague treatise was also a genre of medical publishing that was largely written in vernacular French rather than scholarly Latin.⁵³ One of the stated aims of these treatises was to equip the learned reader with the ability to treat themselves in the event of infection. As treatise author Louis du Gardin wrote in 1617: “The plague is a dangerous illness that brooks no delay… however, you can always use me, night and day, early and late, by means of this volume.”⁵⁴

The two recipes for plague prevention and treatment written down by the author-practitioner in Ms. Fr. 640 may well have been copied from self-treatment recommendations derived from this corpus of plague treatises, either from one of the many tracts published locally in Toulouse or else another French plague text circulating nationwide. The recipes do not provide the reader with specific ingredient quantities or accurate descriptions of processes, nor do they reference theoretical justifications or medical authorities, reinforcing the author-practitioner’s identity as a medical layperson and making it unlikely that he was the original creator of these recipes.⁵⁵ This accords with the view of Pamela Smith, historian of science and director of the Making and Knowing Project, that the enigmatic and partial descriptions of processes in the manuscript could at times be attributed to the author-practitioner’s own ignorance.⁵⁶ He may well have used these recipes to preserve his health during outbreaks of plague in Toulouse and found them beneficial through personal experience, thus being motivated to record them for future reference, but it is unlikely that the author-practitioner was the original creator of these recipes.

A major reason for the promotion of self-treatment in these widely circulated treatises was the regrettable lack of reliable trained medical personnel to attend to most plague victims. Toulouse, as a regional capital where medical doctorates were granted, likely possessed more trained medical practitioners than the average town or commune. However, there were only an estimated 400 to 600 learned physicians and 2000 to 3000 surgeons in the entirety of sixteenth-century France.⁵⁷ Historian Patrick Wallis also notes that while early modern states and cities sponsored civic initiatives to maintain cleanliness and social order during times of plague, their deployment of physicians to render medical assistance to the sick was marginal.⁵⁸ Many physicians working during epidemics of plague fell victim themselves, and it was commonly assumed that he had contracted it from his patients in the line of work.⁵⁹ Rather, medical practitioners themselves grappled with the morals of staying to tend to the sick, at the risk of their own health, versus fleeing the pestilential city. In fact, flight was one of the only preventative tactics that writers almost universally agreed upon to be effective for guarding against plague.⁶⁰ In the words of sixteenth-century Toulousain physician Oger Ferrier: “Three words against the plague are more useful than craft: Flee quickly, go far, and don’t hurry back.”⁶¹ The moral debate on flight struggled between the sacred duty of self-preservation and the community obligation of charity and neighbourliness. However, there was widespread agreement that magistrates and clergy, as public officers, could not depart and abandon their positions during outbreaks of plague in their jurisdictions.⁶²

The author-practitioner explicitly attributes the recipe for plague prevention on fol. 44v to Monsieur de Montorsin. The referenced individual was almost certainly César de Montourcin, master of the Toulouse Mint in 1590-1.⁶³ Although in earlier periods the city magistrates of Toulouse typically fled the city alongside other elites at the first sign of plague to take refuge in country properties, this custom began to change from the mid-sixteenth century. During the plague of 1556, which struck 4,500 houses and killed 200 people daily, the magistrates refused to flee the city.⁶⁴ The conviction of magistrates to remain during epidemics was a testament to their commitment to their public duty to ensure domestic order during times of crisis. The small and ill-equipped nature of the city’s police force in the early modern period meant that the presence and personal authority of ruling officials was necessary to impose order on a restless and ailing population. There were also records of magistrates tending to patients alongside physicians during the plague of 1628-32, the deadliest in the city’s history, evidencing the ways in which city magistrates actively involved themselves in the medical dimensions of plague mitigation.⁶⁵

Hence, the attribution of the recipe on fol. 44v to a city magistrate was likely intended to lend a certain level of authority to the recipe as originating from a public officer obliged to remain in the infected city, who may possess some additional know-how on combatting the disease either in preserving his own health or potentially even through ministering others. This is reinforced by the phrase “This is a very rare & tested secret,” suggesting that the efficacy of the remedy had been proven in previous applications, either by Montourcin or the author-practitioner himself. While the labelling of the recipe as a “secret” conjures associations of esotericism, Pamela Smith makes clear that the supposed secrets contained within Ms. Fr. 640 most often consisted of “resolutely practical techniques.”⁶⁶ Rather, books of secrets like the author-practitioner’s work were an articulation of experiential knowledge, the only secretive dimension being the “hidden” nature of the knowledge for those not experienced in the craft.⁶⁷ This type of personal experience and testimonial was also frequently used by plague treatise writers to authorise and validate their recommended treatments, claiming to have successfully cured themselves or the patients they ministered.⁶⁸ The experiential validation of the plague recipe on fol. 44v aligns it with the epistemological framework of the overall manuscript as a book of secrets, but learning by doing also appeared to play an important role in shaping early modern plague medicine, especially in the context of the repeated outbreaks of late sixteenth-century Toulouse.

Conclusion

While the recipes against plague on fol. 44v and 170v are only marginal entries among the 930 recipes found in Ms. Fr. 640, they reveal surprisingly deep insights into the context of early modern plague medicine and experiences of plague in Toulouse. Prescribing ingredients and methods that strongly aligned with contemporary paradigms of plague treatment, these recipes could have been written down by the author-practitioner as reference for himself or in dedication to a potential reader.⁶⁹

The dissemination of medical knowledge about the plague through plague treatises and local networks allowed the author-practitioner to collect these recipes, recorded with an emphasis on practical instructions and efficacy over theoretical interpretations.⁷⁰ The vernacularisation of medical knowledge about the plague was vital in the context of a medical culture of self-treatment in the absence of learned physicians,⁷¹ especially for a disease as virulent and fatal as the plague. The emphasis on the tested and tried nature of the recipes further reflects the importance of experiential knowledge in plague medicine just as in artisanal craft, illuminating epistemological convergences across disciplines contained within the practical plague recommendations of Ms. Fr. 640.

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