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Trilingual collections of medical recipes, c. 1320-1330, MS 388, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Winter 2025


NEW WORK

FORUM


INTRODUCTION

By Amanda E. Herbert

For our Winter Edition of the Recipes Project, we’re delighted to feature a New Work Forum on two recently-published books that will be of interest to our community: Sarah Kernan’s and Helga Müllneritsch’s Culinary Texts in Context, 1500–1800: Manuscript Recipe Books in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024) and Melissa Reynolds’ Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024). 

The New Work Forum is part of the RP’s ongoing project to support and amplify recipes scholars and writers, especially when they are emerging or early career colleagues. This particular edition is especially important to us, as Sarah Kernan and Melissa Reynolds are editors of the RP themselves.

This edition is designed to represent a virtual version of a conference roundtable or a book forum. The posts are not book reviews per se. Rather each contributor has designed their post around a key theme, source, or topic. This typically makes for more engaging reading, but it also fosters better senses of collaboration and conversation: hallmarks of what we do here at the RP.

The New Work Forum features three posts on Culinary Texts in Context, followed by three posts on Reading Practice. The series concludes with reflection posts by Sarah, Helga, and Melissa, where they think alongside these six readers to consider things like the process from idea to book, what makes a good history or a good collection of histories, and how their new works help to advance the field. 

Recipes scholarship and recipes writing are created within vibrant, thriving communities, and we welcome these two new books for all that they represent about our ongoing work.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Stretching the Boundaries

By Lino Mioni

Collating together in one single volume the medical and culinary knowledge and recipes, or any other form of instructions, of food preservation and fermentation, is an activity that has been performed by many social groups, regardless of size (be it family, estate, professional association, church, congregation). Usually in manuscript form, these recipe collections are the essence of shared culinary traditions and common knowledge and, ultimately, they are brought into existence by a desire to protect and preserve that knowledge and traditions for future generations. 

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Recipes in Cultural Flow

By Anil Paralkar

Understanding global exchanges has played a central role in food history research in recent decades. Recipes, as a type of source, present both challenges and opportunities when it comes to investigating cultural flows. Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800 offers a series of case studies on topics such as English-Iberian and Finnish-Swedish culinary interactions, as well as the introduction of ingredients from the Americas to the Iberian Peninsula. Beyond offering a number of case studies, the volume reminds us that recipe collections are “material and textual manifestations of familial, friendship, and professional networks” and that they “contain traces of the places that people, ingredients, and recipes travel.”

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Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800: My Five Cents

By Thomas Gloning

Reading Culinary Texts in Context, 1500-1800 was immensely enriching for me. Coming from linguistics with a focus on Medieval and Early Modern culinary and medical texts, the volume has reminded and shown me how much research perspectives have evolved during the last two decades and how much research has been done both on food texts and on medical literature in Latin and in the vernaculars. Here, I want to highlight five aspects of the edited volume or of some of its contributions.

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The Uses and Abuses of Medieval Manuscripts in Reformation England

By Nikianna Dinenis

A familiar image of the English Reformation is one of destruction, of Henry VIII dissolving nine hundred monasteries, scattering their rich manuscript collections to the four winds, and transforming the English landscape into a graveyard of Catholic belief and practice. In her new book Reading Practice, Melissa Reynolds presents us with a different sixteenth-century world, one in which medieval manuscripts, far from lost or obsolete, were part of the fabric of everyday life.

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Print and Continuity in Reading Practice

By Grace Murray

As the market for printed practical books in England expanded in the first half of the sixteenth century, a host of titles promised their readers something new. From herbals to husbandry manuals, these books advertised their novelty, promising not only ‘new matters’ but also new translations, additions, and corrections to previous editions. But as Melissa Reynolds shows in Reading Practice, with meticulous attention to multiple editions of long-running titles, these claims of novelty were initially much more about how old knowledge was organised for eager readers.

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On Medical Manuscripts in Reynolds’ Reading Practice

By Caleb Prus

In 1485, during London’s first epidemic of the sweating sickness, the physician Thomas Forestier complained to Henry VII about certain “false leeches” ⎯healers deceiving the public through “writing of the kind[s] of powders and of medicines.” These “unexpert men” were not university-educated physicians like Forestier but ordinary tradespeople⎯ “carpenters and mill keepers”⎯who boldly posted their medical writings on the city’s gates and church doors.

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Culinary Texts in Context: Continuing the Conversation

By Sarah Kernan and Helga Müllneritsch

Culinary Texts in Context began as an idea for collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were interested in working together, given our shared interests in early modern recipe books, and the new emphasis on Zoom calls and digital resources presented a great opportunity for us to easily collaborate, despite one of us residing, at the time, in Sweden and the other in the American Midwest. After several emails and Zoom calls, we excitedly began planning a collected volume from a decidedly international and collaborative perspective.

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Reading Practice: Continuing the Conversation

By Melissa Reynolds

As is so often the case with first academic books, the research and writing that became Reading Practice began many years ago when I was a graduate student. And, as is so often the case with projects of this duration, the research questions that animated my work changed over time. The book I imagined in 2013 is not the book that was published this past August. Yet somehow, the posts in this New Work Forum by Nikiana Dinenis, Grace Murray, and Caleb Prus each draw out a theme from the book that reflects a significant waypoint along the path to what would become Reading Practice.

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TALES FROM THE ARCHIVES


  • Writing Early Modern Medicine for Medical Readers

    By Alisha Rankin Years ago, in a recipe collection belonging to Countess Elisabeth of the Palatinate (1552-90), I found a fascinating entry: a copy of an official document that described trials of a poison antidote on dogs, which I described in a post on this blog. My interest in that document has expanded into an…

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  • When Medicine is a Sin: Sex and Heresy in Colonial Mexico

    Farren Yero Laboring in the Mexican mining district of Real del Monte, José Antonio de la Peña met Manuel Arroyo in the summer of 1775. The two young men struck up a secret relationship, sharing a bed, a blanket, and a provocative cure for syphilis. It was the latter that landed Arroyo in an inquisitorial…

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  • What’s In an Ancient Egyptian Makeup Bag?

    By Alana Martini, published as part of the Undergraduate Series I have been fascinated by the world of cosmetics for a very long time, and it appears that I am not the only one. Our love affair with cosmetics is almost as old as humanity itself. Large amounts of red ochre were found, dating roughly…

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  • Welcome to September! A Letter from the Editorial Team

    Dear friends and readers, We’re delighted to welcome you to the September relaunch of The Recipes Project! Over the past five months, the editorial team has been reflecting on our priorities, goals, and the RP community more generally. The site has grown considerably from its launch in 2012, including its vibrant community of contributors, visitors,…

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  • Thinking About 17th c. Potatoes (And Eating Them)

    Amanda E. Herbert [A version of this post appeared on the Folger’s Shakespeare & Beyond blog, a current, sometimes playful, and always lively resource on a wide range of Shakespeare topics. Shakespeare & Beyond is created for the great variety of Shakespeare enthusiasts—young and old, from across the US and around the world.  You can…

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  • Theatrical Cosmetics: Making Face, Making “Race”

    By Jessica Clark In the world of British theatre, nothing marks the holiday season like the annual pantomime. A traditional panto features all the requisite elements of family entertainment: a wicked villain, slapstick that delights both young and old, and, perhaps most importantly, the archetypal dame, a male actor in female costume. While all panto…

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Cover image: Trilingual collections of medical recipes, c. 1320-1330, MS 388, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Food, Magic, Art, Science, and Medicine