Andrew Boorde was an author, physician, traveler, and scholar. He is now a neglected writer, but his works were popular during his lifetime and were reprinted frequently in the first few decades after his death. For modern scholars he is useful mainly as a source for medical and social history, but his verse and prose compositions are of interest to students of literature. His remarks on the inadequacies of the English language in his day explain in part the unwillingness of learned authors to write in the vernacular for a lay readership. Boorde, however, chose to write in English for the common good, displaying the spirit of the new humanism that saw virtue in educating the populace. His Dietary of Health (1542) and Breviary of Health (1547) were the first medical works composed in English for the ordinary man and woman.

Personal passages in all of Boorde's works, together with...