Recipes Round-up: Research Presented at Scientiae and SSHM 2016
by Katherine Allen In early July I attended two conferences: Scientiae (on early modern science), and the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM) conference. Both had an impressive range of...
View ArticleTo break or not to break (Part 2): From Cairo to Dordrecht
By Saskia Klerk, with Sietske Fransen In the eleventh chapter of his Steen-Stuck (Treatise on the Stone, 1637), Johan van Beverwijck related a story of an encounter in Dordrecht, the Dutch city where...
View ArticleThe Heroine of the Cookbook Story
By Rachel Rich Every cookbook tells a story about itself, and the imagined reader it addresses is the heroine of that story. In the nineteenth century, following recipes meant embarking on a quest for...
View ArticleOn Paratext, Cookbooks, and No Useless Mouth
By Rachel Herrmann Before I entered the final stages of revising my first book, No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution, I had tried for reasons of sanity to...
View ArticleWhat We’re Reading This Fall
By Jess Clark The abundance of fantastic historical writing—from insightful social media and blog posts to traditional academic monographs to op eds—means that most of us aren’t lacking interesting...
View ArticleTeaching Recipes as Pattern Recognition
By Rob Wakeman, Mount Saint Mary College In the throes of research, we often compile so much information we don’t know what to do with it. It’s not our fault, really. Working with recipe books takes us...
View ArticleConstructing authentic student textual authority: Teach a text you don’t know
By Christina Riehman-Murphy, Marissa Nicosia, and Heather Froehlich Could a small recipe transcription project make space for student contributions to broader public knowledge? How could we facilitate...
View Article‘A Curious Book’: The Many Functions of Martha Hodges’ Manuscript Recipe Book
By Kate Owen On the inside cover of Martha Hodges’ recipe book (17-th-18th century), written in pencil, is a note that calls the manuscript ‘a curious book’. Although there is no further explanation...
View ArticleTo break or not to break (part 1): Reading Van Beverwijck´s Steen-stuck
By Saskia Klerk, with Sietske Fransen Johan van Beverwijck (1594-1647), who we introduced in our first post, was one of the most prominent medical authors of the Dutch seventeenth century. His...
View Article‘I Have Known’: Copying Personal Accounts in Early Modern Receipt Books
By Margaret Maurer Reading British Library Sloane MS 559, a seventeenth-century receipt book, I came upon a recipe with the following efficacy statement: “I have knowne a woman heale many blind people...
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