HenricusHirschdörfer

If the fanciful pseudo-antique spelling of this document and other suspicious things about it had not been enough to prove its falseness, the reference to "the rolle of the blacke mainger" should have been conclusive. The citation of the "blacke mainger," evidently thought by Chatterton to be some dire form of disease, is amusing. Barrett, in a serious note, illustrates it by quoting Chaucer, "on his skin a mormalle had he & a blacke manger." this misquoted reference is to Chaucer's Cook (Prologue, 386-7). Even without his surgical knowledge, Barrett ought not to have made this ludicrous mistake. After giving a description of the Cook's prowess in his particular business, Chaucer says:

"But greet harm was it, as it thoughte me,

That on his shine a mormal hadde he;

For blankmanger, that made he with the beste."

Blankmanger, different in composition from the blancmange of to-day, was a well-known Middle-English dish and is frequently mentioned in contemporary books, in which its ingredients and mode of preparation are given. It appears in the Catholicon as "Blawemanger," and several other references to it will be found in Mr. Herrtage's note to it in the Camden Society edition. Were it not that no literary crime can be pardoned we might, for the exquisite drollery of its blunder, be tempted to forgive the Chatterton-Barrett conversion of the appetising "blankmanger" into a disease, "blacke mainger," presumably a sort of "Black Death."

Mormal was well known as a term for an intractable sore and derived its name from malum mortuum.

The Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Journal, vol. xiv no. 54, Scraps

Among others we find the two lines respecting the mormal on the leg of the pilgrim's cook.

"But great harm was yt, as it thought me,

That on his skinne a mormall had he."

Skinne is here mis-copied for shin. This mistake, and another more whimsical, we can trace into the Rolle of Seynote Bartholæmeweis Priorie, printed in Barret's History of Bristol, to whom it was communicated by Chatterton. Among a list of medical books, said to be preserved in the Infirmary, or Ache-chamber of the Priorie, we find Gylbertines rolle of Ypocrates: the same fryarres booke of brenninge Johan Stowe of the cure of mormalles and the waterie leprosie: the rolle of the blacke mainger.

The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. vol. 17, Chatterton

But it would not be going too far to say that the coexistence of the pretzel croissant and the Cronut is worth thinking of as a form of competition, if only on purely Darwinian terms, in which all coexistence is competition held briefly in equilibrium, particularly because their coexistence is representative of something new, pervasive, and quite possibly perverse: the hybridized and fetishized schnecken.

Adam Gopnik, Bakeoff, The New Yorker, November 3, 2014

Now, although this expression is put in the mouth of a clown, it has a meaning which might not be apparent to the casual reader. The pia mater covers the brain and protects it, and nourishes it by the blood supplied by the vessels which ramify through it and penetrate the cerebral substance; so when the clown speaks of a weak pia mater, it is onoly a delicate way of saying that the person alluded to is somewhat lacking in one of the anatomical constituents of intelligence.

"Now what connection," asks Dr. Richardson, "has this book of Anatomy by Helkiah Crooke, with the plays of Shakespeare? This remarkable connection--that the man who printed the works of Crooke was W. Jaggard, of the Barbican, London, the same man who was the printer for Shakespeare. Within easy walking distance from the Globe Theatre, the scene of the great William's managerial glory, was the printing office of Jaggard, where the plates and letter-press of Crooke would for long seasons be the most remarkable presswork of the time. To that office the indefatigable playwright would often be drawn by his own business, and there he would hardly fail to see unfolded before him the anatomy of man, from a sure source and in just the form that would most readily appeal to his ever absorbing mind."

R. Newton Hawley, "The Medical Lore of Shakespeare", The Medical Age, vol. x, no. 24

Now follow the bones of the Spine, or Back-bone, which are just four and thirty, that is, seven of the neck, twelve of the chest, five of the loins, six of the holy-bone; and four of the rump.

Thomas Johnson trans., The Workes of that Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey Lib. 6, Chap. XLI