-An academic insight into one of the oldest recipe books in the world -Discover the relevance of this manuscript's physical form to its medieval audience Compositiones Variae is the earliest surviving example of medieval artisanal recipes. Translated into Latin from a Hellenistic source and copied at Lucca, it is thought to preserve technical knowledge extant in Tuscany from around 800 CE, and to have offered practical assistance to the Lucca scriptorium. Studies of the text have examined its historical and liturgical contents; however, its intriguing physical and material features have...