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5. CORPORA AND METHODOLOGY<br />

corpus. Remedy books usually include texts from “recipe collections and materia medica”<br />

as well as “regimens and health guides”. For our purposes here, only texts from the former<br />

were included, since they had a more popular audience (for further details see Section 6.3).<br />

A total of nine authors were selected from each of the three subperiods, in an attempt to<br />

capture the whole picture of medical writing at the time. Thus, there are native authors<br />

such as Thomas Gale and Richard Wiseman as well as translations from foreign authors,<br />

including Chauliac and De Vigo. A continuous extract of 5,000 words from the beginning<br />

of the corpus text was analyzed for each text. This is considered to be a representative<br />

sample of the text, after earlier pilot studies showed that larger samples did not lead to<br />

significant differences in findings. In the case of the academic treatises in E1 (1500-1570;<br />

see Table 7 below) the number of words is higher, since only two authors were available,<br />

so a longer sample from these two texts proved necessary. Tables 5, 6 and 7 give details on<br />

number of words, texts and data of publication:<br />

Table 5. Number of words analyzed per text in the category of remedy books<br />

Period Year Title Author Words<br />

E1 1525 Newe mater Anonymous 5,381<br />

(1500- 1526 Grete herbal Anonymous 5,387<br />

1570) 1563 Antidotaire Gale, Thomas 5,462<br />

E2 1573 Treasurie of commodious Partridge, John 5,394<br />

(1570-<br />

1640) 1597<br />

conceits<br />

Garden of health Langham,<br />

5,272<br />

William<br />

1639 Alphabetical book Wood, Owen 5,444<br />

E3 1652 London dispensatory Culpeper,<br />

5,126<br />

(1640-<br />

1710) 1678 Royal pharmacopoea<br />

Nicholas<br />

Charas, Moyse 5,473<br />

1700 Supplement to the compleat Woolley,<br />

5,112<br />

servant maid<br />

Hannah<br />

Total 48,051<br />

139

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