AMONG the least studied of Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86's wide-ranging contents is a compendium of utilitarian texts on fols. 1r–65r. This section of the trilingual household miscellany is concerned simultaneously with care for the soul and for the body, containing psalms, prayers, catechetic material, experimenta, medical recipes and guides for predicting the future by one's dreams or by the phases of the moon. Within this section, the scribe-compiler creates clusters of scientific, medical and prognosticatory material. Unlike the more literary sections of the manuscript, the scribe returns to these clusters to insert additional medical recipes and prognostications in the margins at several different points. Later hands also add to these texts, including an early fourteenth-century scribe who inserts marginal English translations of individual words in the medical recipes and scientific experiments. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, yet another scribe copies an eclectic collection of further medical recipes on a single unruled folio that was slipped inside and eventually bound into Digby 86 as folio 16. This sustained activity shows ongoing interest in Digby 86's practical texts over the course of more than a century.

Digby 86 is best characterised as a lay person's miscellany or encyclopedia of information and entertainment and, as such, provides insight into the interests and concerns of a late medieval English gentry family. Dating from near the end of the thirteenth century, Digby 86 was copied almost entirely by a single scribe (Scribe A), here referred to as the ‘Digby scribe’, who was apparently also its owner and compiler. Three obits in the Calendar (art. 25; fols. 68v–74r) link Scribe A to the Grimhill and Underhill families in south west Worcestershire, and Digby 86's contents reflect the interests and concerns of that kind of minor gentry household. In its earliest form, Digby 86 was not a single book but two separate collections of unbound quires, a division reflected by two distinct sets of quire signatures. The characters of the two collections are highly individual. As Judith Tschann and Malcolm Parkes observe, the first collection (arts. 1–20; fols. 1r–65r) is largely concerned with practical matters, gathering together essential prayers, medical recipes and reference texts to produce a handbook for the care of the soul, body and household.