In late medieval England learned medicine leapt the walls of universities and became available to people with no formal medical training (cf. also Jones 1999, Jones 2004). This widespread interest in medicine was partly triggered by the vernacularisation of medical writings. This process involved, among other things, (1) gradual evolution of conventions and norms for, e.g. recipe writing (cf. Carroll 2004) and/or (2) employment of various strategies to adapt the texts to the new audience.The study will attempt to explain what strategies were employed to adapt medical texts, in particular recipes, to the intended audience, i.e., “who speaks [writes] what language to whom and when” (Fishman 1979: 15). For instance, some recipes contain foreign (mostly French and Latin) or sophisticated terminology whereas other recipe collections make use of vernacular resources. This implies that the language of medieval recipes might be the indicator of a social distinction between the readers. The data for the paper come from the Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT), a computerised collection of medical treatises written between 1330 and 1500.

The aim of this article is to examine early English references to those involved in storing, selling and making medicinal preparations. Also, we will attempt to find out how early pharmacists were perceived by other medical practitioners. The study is mainly based on the language material from two medical corpora Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT) and Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT). In order to make the list of references to early pharmacists as comprehensive as possible, the online editions of the following dictionaries have been consulted: Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE), Middle English Dictionary (MED), and Oxford English Dictionary (OED).