On this page are downloads of the diplomatic transcription of the 1593 edition of Het excellente kookboek, from the cpoy that was used for the facsimile in our book: Allard Pierson-De collecties van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, signature KF 62-189. The links are at the bottom of this page.
Short description of the Cocboeck
The text is printed in a font that modern readers are not used to. It is a so-called ‘gothic font’, that evolved from Late-Medieval handwriting that used a pen with a broad tip. This caused strokes with different width, depending on the angle of the pen. Moreover, rounding curves were not possible or difficult, which caused the letters to look rather angular. One of the Gothic fonts is called Fraktur.
The text in the picture looks like this in a modern font: “, ende steket met een mes vol gaten,” with abbreviations resolved in italics. The punctuation mark that is now called forward slash, is also called German comma, and indeed, in the transcription we used comma’s. The different shapes of the letter s do not indicate difference in meaning, so these are all transcripted as ‘s’.
The ‘long s’ may easily be confused with the letter f. The difference between the two can clearly be seen in the word above. Transcripted into a modern font, it reads ‘wrijftse’ (= rub it, or rub them) in which ‘se’ is enclitic (the word froms part of the preceding word). These enclitics have all been resolved in the translation, f.e. ‘wrijft ze’. Unlike the English language, where enclitic forms can be used in print to indicate informal language (doesn’t, can’t), these are rarely used in written or printed modern Dutch.
The humanist font, based on the Carolingian minuscule, was also used. In the Cocboeck its only use is the word Nota, to mark extra information at the end of a recipe.
The semi-diplomatic transcription
A diplomatic transcription is an exact rendering of the text, including expanded abbreviations in italic, typographical errors, punctuation and line breaks. The typographical errors have been marked in footnotes. Differences in font-weight have not been marked.
For Dutch people, it is best to read the text aloud. Many words that seem strange will become familiar. For non-Dutch speaking people the transcription may be of help in reading the facsimile.
The PDF with the semi-diplomatic transcription can be downloaded here.
On the website Shakespeare documented is a short explanation of what a semi-diplomatic transcription is.
Codicological description of KF 62-189
This is rather technical. The description of the original copy that was used for the facsimile can be downloaded as PDF (Dutch). An English translation will follow shortly.