The Author-Reader Relationship in Early Modern English Recipes

Early Modern English medical compilations, printed and published in large quantities, were available to a wide audience – learned physicians and laypeople. According to Wear (2000: 103), these texts constituted “a shared material culture between lay people and medical practitioners”. Therefore, medical compilers had to employ various strategies to adapt their texts to the intended audience. The aim of this paper is to examine the use of interpersonal strategies in Early Modern English medical recipes. The study will explain whether the differences in the intended audience, learned and lay, are reflected in the texts under examination, i.e., “who speaks [writes] what language to whom and when” (Fishman 1979: 15).Celem proponowanego artykułu jest opisanie strategii komunikacyjnych stosowanych przez autorów angielskich tekstów medycznych powstałych w szesnastym i siedemnastym wieku. Badanie oparte jest na korpusie tekstów medycznych powstałych w języku angielskim w okresie od 1500 do 1700 roku (Early Modern English Medical Texts, EMEMT