Beginning in 1400, English men and women gained increasing access to practical medical and scientific knowledge, first in vernacular manuscript collections, and later in inexpensive, printed books. More than two hundred years of engagement with this knowledge—much of it very old—in recipes, prognostications, almanacs, and other pragmatic texts, gradually encouraged readers to see themselves as adjudicators and even progenitors of knowledge in their own right. This talk explores how 15th century readers developed creative means of using an unusual genre of manuscript to manage their health, understand their environment, and even predict the future. Through analysis of a small group of folding almanacs, this talk will show how communities of monastic readers developed a shared visual language for making sense of an uncertain and unpredictable world. We will see how this visual language spread more widely to those who sought to impose order in society that was unsettled by war, dynastic feuding, and religious conflicts.

Dr. Melissa Reynolds is a historian of later medieval and early modern European medicine and science, with research interests in the history of material texts and the history of the body in relation to its environment. She is an Assistant Professor in the History department at Texas Christian University and was formerly a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University and the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024, was awarded the John Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies, and was recently shortlisted for the William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. She is currently at work on a new project, exploring the relationship between commerce, environment, and conceptualizations of the body in later medieval and early modern England.

In 2013, Dr. Reynolds won a Schallek Award from the Richard III Society-American Branch while she was working on her PhD at Rutgers University in New Jersey.