By Elaine Leong

Walking down the streets of Berlin, the signs of early summer are everywhere. The flower stalls are selling five different kinds of peonies, the asparagus season is beginning to wane and, my most favourite of all, little strawberry-shaped kiosks have popped up all over the city offering delicious, juicy fruits which have never seen the inside of a refrigerator. For those of us in academia, early summer means more than just the long-awaited strawberry season: the end of the academic year and a summer away from the bricks and mortar of our institutions in a far away archive. Long sunny days filled with reading and more reading… Before we all scatter for the summer, I wanted to write a post to celebrate and highlight the work of some of our contributors.  For the past two years, a wonderful group of graduate students have been sharing their ideas with us on the blog bringing us cutting-edge research and fresh ideas. Just in case you missed their posts, this is a handy round-up!

Katherine Allen (Oxford, History of Medicine), has been telling us about a diverse range of topics over the past two years from tobacco smoke enemas to how eighteenth-century English men and women fought off coughs and colds to distillation and alchemy. When not blogging, she is completing her thesis titled ‘Recipe Books and the Exchange of Medical Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century English Households’ (projected submission date: summer 2015). Her work deals with the material and social history of manuscript collections of medical recipes in eighteenth-century England, and their role in domestic medicine.

Colleen E. Kennedy (Ohio State University, English Literature) has enticed us with her posts about sweet (and not so sweet) smells, perfumes and poetry.  Her dissertation ‘Comparisons Are Odorous: The Early Modern English Olfactory and Literary Imagination’ enhances the vibrant critical conversation about early modern embodiment, affect theory, and sensory history by following different whiffs of the highly subjective past. By exploring the complexities of aromatic discourse in early modern literature, she recovers a lexicon of olfactory imagery and stereotypes, challenge modern assumptions about early modern stench and hygienic practices, and suggest new ways of gaining access to the early modern cultural imagination. You can also follow Colleen’s work at: http://colleenekennedy.wordpress.com/.

Tillmann Taape (Cambridge, HPS and MPIWG, History of Science) is a first-year PhD student writing a thesis titled ‘Hieronymus Brunschwig and the making of vernacular medicine in early modern Europe’.  His research investigates the intersection of learned and artisanal knowledge in Brunschwig’s writings on surgery and distillation.  In the last year, Tillmann has told us stories about an alchemical disaster (complete with an exploding still and knocked-out practitioner), ‘coded’ plague remedies and ‘distilling the essence of heaven’.

Ashley Buchanan (University of South Florida, History) has introduced us to the world of the last Medici Princess, Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici (1667-1743). Her posts on Anna Maria Luisa’s recipe collection has transported us to back to eighteenth-century Florence with virtual tours around the Medici Granducal Fonderia and an introduction to a miraculous powder purported to treat infant convulsions.  In the next couple of years, Ashley will spend much of her time in the Archivio di Stato in Florence.  Her dissertation aims to explore Anna Maria Luisa’s role in the in the collection and production of early eighteenth-century medicinal therapeutics and alchemical knowledge. In particular, Ashley is interested in tracing the networks through which Anna Maria Luisa procured and disseminated her exotic raw materials and “secret” remedies, as well as, to understand the desire for elite women to participate in such activities and the social capital they created for themselves in the process.

Rachel Snell’s (University of Maine, History) dissertation is provisionally titled: ‘“Mistress, Mother, Nurse and Maid”: Domesticity and Women’s Work in the Anglo-American World, 1828-1876’ (project completion date 2015/16). Her project is driven by the question – how did the ideaology of domesticity function in ordinary women’s lives? It focuses on printed and manuscript cookbooks through a comparative Atlantic history perspective on the cultural construction and the lived experience of domesticity in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. Over the last few months, Rachel has shared her experiences working with historical GIS and in her quantitative analysis of annotations in Maria Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery.

With the working title ‘Food Fit for a King? Dining Culture at the Rising Court of Brandenburg-Prussia under the ‘Great Elector’ Friedrich Wilhelm: 1640-1688’, Molly Taylor-Poleskey’s (Stanford, History) dissertation (planned completion date summer 2015) follows the rise of the House of Brandenburg-Prussia during the reign of Elector Friedrich Wilhelm through the cultural lens of food and dining at court. This angle allows her to zoom in to the minute rituals of everyday dining at court (which reified the court’s internal social structure) and also to look at matters of import on the wider European political stage (such as the acquisition of resources from territorial gains). The topic of food offers her the opportunity to connect political cultural history with medical, environmental and commercial history to understand the motivations of the people involved in the court’s rise. Since joining the project, Molly has shared with us the fascinating histories of our favourite Christmas treat the lebkuchen and the best (?) breakfast in the world – beer soup.

Sally Osborn (University of Roehampton, History) is currently in the final stages of completing her thesis ‘The role of domestic knowledge in an era of professionalisation: Eighteenth-century manuscript medical recipe collections’ (planned completion date 2015). Her project concentrates on exploring medical recipe books as a form of domestic record-keeping. In the last two years, Sally has regularly shared her ideas with readers on The Recipes Project including posts prompting us to ponder on ‘what is a recipe?’, 18^th century DIY and ingredient substitution. Sally blogs at http://18thcenturyrecipes.wordpress.com and can frequently be found on Twitter, @sallyosborn.