The Corpus of Early English Recipes (CoER)

Our main objective is to compile a corpus of early English recipes to provide new data for linguistic, cultural and philological research. Recipes seem to have been more accessible to a wide and varied audience since they exceed largely the number of surviving manuscripts in libraries, and so we suppose that linguistic innovation can be more easily detected and assessed, but also disseminated. The topics of the texts fall within the categories given in the electronic Voigts and Kurtz (in alphabetical order), namely, alchemical, ale, arboriculture, artificial jewels, book production, clothworking, cosmetic, culinary, dental, dyes and pigments, falconry, fishing, glue, gunpowder, gynaecology and obstetrics, horticulture, hunting, ink, leather, medical, metallurgy, ophthalmology, soap, veterinary, wax, wine; with the exception of the categories magic and taking birds, which are not included in CoER.

Project leader: Dr. Francisco Alonso-Almeida
Time of compilation: 2002–
Size: 1,500,000 words
Language: English
Number of texts/samples: +150 texts
Types of texts: recipes
Period: 1375–1850/1900
Released: EModEnglish forthcoming soon.

Manual

An updated description of the corpus is given in Quintana-Toledo's dissertation The formulation of promise in English medical texts (1500-1600): Description and analysis from a relevance theory perspective (Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2013) and in Vazquez's volumen Creation and Use of Historical English Corpora in Spain (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).

Compilers

Francisco Alonso-Almeida, Ivalla Ortega-Barrera, Elena Quintana-Toledo

Availability

Not available as yet. More information will be available through the Research Unit's webpage.

Information for the entry was edited and approved by Dr. Francisco Alonso-Almeida