Quarto: 148 + 14 pages, in marbled paper covers. This is a manuscript inspired by Madame Fouquet’s Recueil de receptes où est expliquée la maniere de guerir à peu de frais toutes sorte de maux tant internes, qu'externes inveterez, et qui ont passé jusqu'à present pour incurables, a published work which was something of a best seller in 18th century France. Marie François Fouquet (1590–1681) was a French medical writer and philanthropist. At a time when intelligent women were to be found principally running salons and writing romances, she took charge of a variety of hospitals and provided medical care to the poor and indigent. Compendia of medical recipes and self-help guides published at the time of the Catholic Counter Reformation were intimately connected to a renewed dedication to charity and concern for the poor. French physicians and clerics, including Paul Dubé, (1612-1698) author of Le Médecin et le chirurgien des pauvres (1669), and Nicolas Alexandre, compiler of La Médecine et la chirurgie des pauvres (1714), provided a model for the rest of Europe. But by far the most successful compiler of charitable medical works was neither a physician nor a man of cloth, but Fouquet herself – a devout Catholic lay woman. Madame Fouquet was only woman to publish a book of traditional remedies in early modern France. This book is Fouquet’s Recueil de receptes choisies expérimentées & approuvées, contre quantité de maux fort cõmuns tant internes qu'externes inveterés, & difficiles à guerir. It is for this book that Fouquet is remembered. To be more accurate, her fame was and is still based on the dozens of editions and compilations of this work which appeared in the decades after the first appearance of the book. Fouquet’s aim was to make medicine accessible to the less fortunate by providing affordable and simple cures based on readily available and inexpensive ingredients. It also suggests that folk or domestic medicine was not entirely incompatible with scholarly medicine. Indeed, Madame Fouquet’s texts were inspired by the work of Paul Dubé, as she wrote in the Preface to her 1675 (first edition): ‘Monsieur Dubé, an illustrious doctor of medicine, charitable and experimented, has recently produced a book of remedies for the poor that are easy to prepare at little cost’. She congratulated him as a ‘savant’ for revealing the secrets of his art for the benefit of the poor” and for making medicine accessible to everyone. Dubé had been criticized by his medical colleagues for writing such work. Fouquet’s brand of medicine certainly fits into the category of domestic medicine. It may also be defined as folk medicine, as it was a type of medicine practiced outside the realms of the professional world of university-trained physicians and guild-instructed surgeons. Domestic medicine can be characterized as an early modern version of ‘folk medicine’ which had been around since ancient times. Folk medicine can be distinguished from ‘scientific’ medicine in that it lacks a theory of a disease: it does not follow logical testing based on observations. Folk medicine tends to be practiced in rural areas. Fouquet’s book was adapted to the needs of the isolated rural poor. It became the principal vade mecum for every parish priest and nursing sister. It was used in the hospital pharmacies of the Daughter of Charity. The earliest example of its use in a hospital setting was at Colombes in 1681. The anthology remained in use in the rural areas of France until at least the middle of the 19th century. There are at least thirty-one different French editions extant today. The text was also and re-edited and re-printed several times into the nineteenth century in several European countries and languages. Of the editions outside France which are extant, there is a Belgian edition from 1684 and 1699 (in French); a Dutch edition, published in Amsterdam in French in 1704, 1720 and 1738. The collection was published in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and German. In Italy, the book was published in several different cities (Milan, Bologna and Venice) in several editions between 1683 and 1750. 'Recueil de receptes' was first published in 1675, anonymously, and was printed in Villefrance-en-Langedoc as a tiny book with large type (32mo: [29], 352 pages). It is cited in 18th and 19th century bibliographies but never, so far as I can tell, has it been the subject of study. I have traced only one copy, and this is in Virginia. The manuscript listed here is difficult to date with certainly but it probably originates from the early years of the 18th century. Although its title indicates that the manuscript contains ‘various remedies drawn from Madame Fouquet’, it is both less and more than this. It is less because evidence suggests that whatever parts of the manuscript derive from printed sources come in fact from editions of Fouquet’s work published after her death which are quite possibly the work of another author. And it is more because it contains material that appear for the first time and seem to be quite original. The manuscript presented here takes some of the recipes first presented in Fouquet’s work, it combines and collates these and some of Fouquet’s descriptions of diseases and remedies, and it applies Fouquet’s approach to some areas of women’s anatomy and physiology. Amongst other topics, the manuscript deals with problems of the cervix, the prevention of unwanted abortion, how to produce milk after a child’s birth, stomach disorders and flatulence, and then covers such subjects as stones in the bladder, spitting blood and fevers. In all cases recipes are provided, and emphasis is given to so-called ‘simple recipes’.