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Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England

Online ISBN:
9780226583525
Print ISBN:
9780226583495
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England

Elaine Leong
Elaine Leong
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
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Published online:
23 May 2019
Published in print:
19 November 2018
Online ISBN:
9780226583525
Print ISBN:
9780226583495
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Early modern English men and women were fascinated by recipes. Across the country, people of all ranks enthusiastically collected, exchanged, and experimented with medical and cookery instructions. They sent recipes in letters, borrowed handwritten books of family recipes, and consulted popular printed medical and culinary books. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is the first major study of knowledge production and transfer in early modern households. It places the production and circulation of recipes at the heart of “household science”—quotidian investigations of the natural world—and situates these practices in larger and current conversations in gender and cultural history, the history of the book and archives and the history of science, medicine and technology. Household recipe knowledge was made through continual, repeated, and collective trying, making, reading, and writing. And recipe trials were one of the main ways householders gained deeper understandings of sickness, health and the human body, and the natural and material worlds. Recipes were also social knowledge. Recipes and recipe books were gifted between friends, viewed as family treasures, and passed down from generation to generation. By recovering the knowledge activities of householders—masters, servants, husbands and wives—this project recasts current narratives of early modern science through elucidating the very spaces and contexts in which famous experimental philosophers worked and, crucially, by extending the parameters of natural inquiry.

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