Reading Riviére in early modern England
By Elaine Leong I recently started work on a case study for my second book project Reading for Cures in Early Modern England. We all encounter and obsess about particular historical curiosities. For a...
View ArticleRecipe [book] studies: an editor’s postscript
By Sara Pennell As some of you may already be aware, I and another contributor to this blog, Michelle DiMeo, have finally seen the publication of the volume Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550-1800...
View ArticleNever Too Many Cooks: Female Alliances in Early Modern Recipes
By Amanda E. Herbert Too many cooks spoil the broth? Not in early modern England. We know that early modern women were charged with the feeding and care of their family and friends and that...
View ArticleNever Too Many Cooks: Female Alliances in Early Modern Recipes (Part II)
By Amanda E. Herbert In this blog post and in my previous post, I’m presenting material from my forthcoming book: Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven:...
View ArticleNavigating a New Domesticity: Women, Marginalia, and Cookbooks
By Rachel A. Snell During the first half of the nineteenth-century, as domesticity was increasingly redefined as a skill demanding instruction and experience, the geographical mobility of the...
View ArticlePimples, Corns, and Correspondence: Remedying Victorian Beauty Dilemmas
By Jessica P. Clark As we’ve seen in previous posts, eighteenth-century English newspapers were important sites for exchanging recipes and knowledge. This tradition flourished in the nineteenth century...
View ArticleMaking Scents in the Victorian Home
By Jessica P. Clark In 1864, London perfumer Eugène Rimmel (of modern Rimmel Cosmetics fame) published The Book of Perfumes. Compiled from a series of articles he wrote for science-minded readers of...
View ArticleDyeing to Impress: Hair Products and Beauty Culture in Nineteenth-Century...
Sean Trainor Readers of a certain age will surely recall their first gray hair. Perhaps they can even relate to the panic that absorbed the nameless protagonist of an April 1831 story in The Ladies’...
View ArticleSeiseinyū and secrets: problems of recipe attribution in early modern Japan
In my last post, I looked at the problems faced by early modern Japanese doctors trying to figure out how to manufacture a new mercurial drug called seiseinyū, which had first appeared in the Chinese...
View ArticleExploring CPP 10a214: The Place of Devotion
By Rebecca Laroche with Hillary Nunn Since we last posted in 2014, Hillary Nunn and I have been able to meet in Philadelphia and look at the College of Physicians manuscript together. This was an...
View ArticleWhat Recipes Can Teach Us About Reading
By Jennifer Munroe When I teach recipes, I often focus on what they might tell us about women’s domestic work, questions of amateur versus professional labor, and the historical context of early modern...
View ArticleVan Helmont´s Recipes
By Saskia Klerk, with Sietske Fransen Five years ago the Special collections of the University Library Leiden acquired the book and manuscript collection from the estate of J.M.H. van de Sande (d....
View ArticleA Recipe for a Gothic Novel
By Katherine Bowers “Terrorist Novel Writing,” an anonymous essay that appeared in The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797 (Volume 1), closes with the following recipe for creating a gothic novel in...
View ArticleOn Close Reading and Teamwork
Say the word ‘crowdsourcing’ and people automatically think of large-scale projects. Talk about ‘digital humanities’ and we think mining large sources of data. The online world is a vast and busy...
View ArticleA medicine for the Archduchess of Innsbruck
By Sietske Fransen, with Saskia Klerk. Two months ago Saskia Klerk discussed a recipe for the breaking of a bladder stone. It seems that the author of manuscript BPL3603 included this recipe into his...
View ArticleTo break or not to break: Reading Van Beverwijck´s Steen-stuck (part 1)
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 ArticleRecipes 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 ArticleWhat is your favourite recipe? Reflections on Day 2
Post by Laurence Totelin; Storify by Tallulah Maait Pepperell The second day of our Virtual Conversation ‘What is a recipe?’ has been very busy indeed, with contributions on Instagram and Twitter. Some...
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