All posts by Laura

Laura Mitchell is a medievalist whose main area of research focuses on charms and other forms of folk magic in later medieval England. Her research interests also include book history, manuscript culture, books of secrets and recipe collections, and their transmission. Laura manages the Facebook page and Twitter for The Recipes Project. She sometimes tweets about medieval things @medieval_laura.
CFP, Events, and Conferences, Early Modern, Experimentation, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Ingredients, Knowledge Transmission, Manuscripts, Material History, Medieval, Modern, Networks of Knowledge, Tools and Techniques, Women and Gender

A History of Science Spectacular in Manchester

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By Laura Mitchell

People standing in a museum at a reception, with a dinosaur skeleton behind them.
The opening night reception at the Museum of Manchester. All photos by the author.

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to present a paper at the 24th International Congress on History of Science, Technology and Medicine (iCHSTM), which was held at the University of Manchester from July 21st to 28th. The congress operates under the auspices of the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science (IUHPS/DHST) and the 24th congress was organized by the British Society for the History of Science. Held every four years, this year’s congress had the theme of “Knowledge at Work”. Because this was such a large conference with such a broad range, I am going to divide up my post thematically: Social Media, Sessions and Public  Events.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Well before the start of the conference, the organisers of the iCHSTM were dedicated to giving it a strong presence in social media. This can only be a good thing with the way that social media and academia seem to be joining up, especially in the blogosphere and on Twitter. First, the iCHSTM organisers have had a conference blog running since May. This began with select presenters offering brief descriptions of the papers they were to present, and evolved to include a daily “Congress Transmission” that provided summaries of the previous day’s events and any updates to the day’s program.

There is a conference Flickr page, updated as the conference progressed, that will give readers a glimpse of everything that was going on (and if you look carefully you may see your intrepid reporter in there somewhere).

For those who missed the conference–or even conference attendees who want to catch something again–there is a iCHSTM Youtube page, which has videos of many public events, including some great comedy bits from the Bright Club night.

The iCHSTM has a very active Twitter page and dedicated hashtags for the conference (#iCHSTM #histsci #histech #histmed). These were great resources for finding out the latest news and changes, as well as for following the livetweeting of sessions throughout the conference.

SESSIONS

Charles Burnett of the Warburg Institute presents on the works of Ptolemy in medieval Europe.

The number of sessions and presenters at the conference was impressive: nearly 1400 presenters in 411 sessions, according to the website. The topics ranged from ancient astrology to asbestos in 1940s Quebec. As a result, it is impossible to do justice to the sheer breadth and variety of papers that were given in Manchester. Here is a sampling…

In a session that I chaired, “Spaces and Practical Knowledge”, Anita Guerrini of Oregon State University discussed “The Ghastly Kitchen”. The early modern kitchen, she argued, was a site of life science, namely, dissection. It was an ideal place for conducting scientific experiments, being where instruments for dissection were kept and the cooking of animal parts occured. As well, senses such as taste and smell were important in discovering the properties of objects. Audio of her paper can be found, along with that of other iCHSTM bloggers, here.

In a session on “Geology and Literature”, Gowan Dawson (University of Leicester) spoke on “Dickens, Dinosaurs and Design”, comparing the harmony of Charles Dickens’s serialised novels with the perceived harmony and order of dinosaur skeletons. Dawson looked at the language used by both Dickens and his friend Richard Owen, a comparative anatomist. Dawson suggested that Dickens drew on the procedure and terminology that Owen used for the preparation of skeletons for display. Although the work of these two men may seem miles apart, both men wanted to bring about a similar harmony in their work, or a “fusing together” of vertebrae and chapters.

In the same session, Stephen M. Rowland (University of Nevada Las Vegas) examined “Mark Twain and Historical Sciences”. Twain wrote about science throughout his career (such as Paleontology in 1871 and Life on the Mississippi in 1883), and also interjected scientific remarks into his fiction works like Tom Sawyer. Rowland presented a number of examples from Twain’s prolific career, arguing that Twain followed scientific developments. Although Twain’s early works poked fun at new ideas and reflected contemporary American skepticism, Twain later used the respectability of science to argue against religious fundamentalism and Biblical literalism.

Janine Rogers (Mount Allison University) combined two of my favourite things– codicology and museums–in “The Medieval Codex and Early Science Collections and Museums”. She argued that there is a connection between the medieval codex and its focus on ordinatio and compilatio and early collections and museums. Compilatio viewed the compiler of the medieval book as God’s editor; thus, the book was a mirror of the universe. It was tied to the idea of unio, a union of all knowledge. Similarly, ordinatio, the placement of texts and images on the page, was a theological activity. Even the grotesque marginal imagery served to discuss or critique the main text. Rogers contends there was a similar adherence in early science collections and museums to the idea of knowledge be all-encompassing. The ideal museum, particularly in Victorian architecture, mirrored the layout of the ideal manuscript page, enclosing all knowledge within its walls.

Constance Putnam delivered a fascinating paper on the practice of rural medicine in the mid-twentieth century and the acquisition of medical knowledge by those not formally trained (“Knowledge-making in a rural general practice in mid twentieth-century America). Putnam’s research drew on the archive of thousands of her mothers’ letters. Her mother was not formally trained in medicine, but worked for decades as a laboratory technician and medical assistant with her husband in rural New England. Putnam’s archive demonstrates that the role of wives working in unofficial capacities was necessary for a rural medical practice to succeed.

PUBLIC EVENTS

iCHSTM also included a number of excursions to introduce attendees to Manchester and its involvement in the history of science, and public events to engage the wider population. These events included a tour of the Old Trafford, historical tours of Manchester, an Alan Turing opera, a Victorian séance event, a beer festival, and several musical performances.

Mr. Selwyn (Tim Cockerill) demonstrates some explosive properties on an audience member.
Some of the authentic 19th-century equipment used in the Victorian Science Spectacular.

One of the most…explosive was the Victorian Science Spectacular. This was presented as a demonstration of Victorian science in the 1890s. Four presenters: Aileen Fyfe as Miss Ann Veronica Stanley, a learned scientific gentlewoman; Katy Price as Mr. George Wells, inventor and brother of H.G.; Iwan Rhys Morus as Professor Marmaduke Salt of the Royal Panopticon of Popular Science; and Tim Cockerill as Mr Selwyn, chemical conjuror and assistant to Professor Salt took turns to present their apparatus to the audience. The demonstration consisted of experiments involving electricity, such as telegraphy and Jacob’s ladders, and demonstrations of the latest magic lanterns and cinematographs. With a few exceptions they used authentic period pieces. This was a fascinating look into the kinds of experiments that were used in the public scientific demonstrations of the nineteenth century, and how they blended entertainment with education. The question period following brought up a number of questions about the reaction of contemporary audiences, the practicalities of transporting the apparatus, and how this presentation has been used to engage the public with the history of science.

James Sumner subjects an innocent pint of beer to suspicious looking chemicals.

One of the highlights of the conference was James Sumner’s talk “Chemists, brewers and beer-doctors”, given in the local pub on Wednesday night. Sumner, co-organiser of the Congress, gave a demonstration of the chemical changes that unscrupulous “beer-doctors” performed on beer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the price of malt dependent on the harvest, it became difficult to make a profit during the years of bad harvests. Thus, brewers turned to chemicals and science to turn a watered down pint into something indistinguishable from its full-powered brethren. Sumner subjected a pint of beer to many of the same chemicals that were used by these brewers, including innocuous substances like caramel colouring and vinegar. However, he refrained from the more dangerous substances like the metals that were used to give the impression of drunkenness (and which could lead to death in the wrong amounts). If this topic interests you be sure to check out Sumner’s new book, Brewing Science, Technology and Print, 1700-1880, which has just come out from Pickering & Chatto.

iCHSTM held a Bright Club comedy night following Sumner’s beer presentation, with five brave academics performing sets. This was a fun evening with a lot of great humour. Who knew that asbestos could be funny? All of the routines from the evening are online at the iCHSTM’s Youtube page so you don’t have to take my word for the quality, you can see for yourself.

The next congress will be held in the summer of 2017 in Rio de Janeiro, so keep an eye out if you want to catch this great conference the next time around.

Animals, Article Round-Ups, Early Modern, Experimentation, Magic, Medicine, Medieval, Posts

A Post-Summer Solstice Round-Up of Blog Posts

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This post does not fall within the strictest definition of “recipes”, but since it was just the summer solstice, the best time of year for magic and pagan celebrations, it seemed like an appropriate time and opportunity to offer a round-up of links to some of the more “magical” blog posts that may be of interest to readers of The Recipes Project.

The Societas Magica has recently revived its blog with a post by Damon Lycourinos on Ritual Magic and Conjured Bodies: A Philosophy and Methodology. He presents some thoughts on his current doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh – essentially his philosophical framework for his dissertation. Interesting stuff, indeed.

Other academics will appreciate Wouter Hanegraaff’s post on the problems with terminology in, Alt & Neumann on Hermetismus, which discusses how widely or how narrowly a term like “Hermetic” should be applied. In a thoughtful review of Peter-André Alt’s book, Imaginäres Geheimwissen: Untersuchungen zum Hermetismus in literarischen Texten der frühen Neuzeit, he also addresses that persistent problem among scholars of not reading secondary literature outside our native language – certainly something that should be discussed in this international, digital, age!

Praeludia Microcosmica is a very new blog started by Mike Zuber of the University of Amsterdam and his most recent post, Investigating the ‘Real Frankenstein Potential’ of Johann Conrad Dippel, Pt. 1, examines the real man behind the supposed inspiration for Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s a lively account of the man and his early life at the University of Gießen and whets the appetite for pt. 2.

The Heterodoxology blog alerts us to a new, open-access online journal on the history of Western esotericism. Even for readers uninterested in the subject matter, the growth of open-access peer-reviewed journals is an important subject in academia and it will be interesting to see how this journal fares.

Finally, the iCHSTM blog for the 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine (at which I’ll be presenting in a few weeks) has been posting some excellent entries. They are all worth checking out, but I will just note a couple. Anita Guerrini’s The Ghastly Kitchen: Animals, Cooking, and the Birth of Experimental Science gives a brief overview of the history of experimentation in the kitchen from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries and its role in modern science. Seb Falk’s post, How to Cast a Medieval Horoscope, provides a very informative introduction to the medieval equatoria, a device to model the motion of the planets, mainly for educational purposes (and to help medieval astrologers correctly construct horoscopes).

Early Modern, Knowledge Transmission, Manuscripts, Medieval, Modern, Posts, Series: Charms

Love and the Longevity of Charms

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By Laura Mitchell

For a long time I have been interested in the endurance/longevity of charms and recipes over extended periods of time, a topic which Alun Withey addressed in a recent post. The major tropes that make up medieval medical charms, for example, appear with relatively minor variations from the thirteenth through to the fifteenth centuries (at least in England, the area I focus on),[1] and of course there’s those herbal remedies discussed by Dr. Withey. A few years ago I encountered a somewhat surprising form of this longevity with a sixteenth-century love charm from Trinity College Cambridge MS O.1.57 (1081).[2]

This manuscript is a household notebook originally owned by the Haldenby family, members of the lower gentry in late medieval Isham, Northamptonshire. Largely written in the first half of the fifteenth century, it contains several later additions including a collection of (mostly) medical recipes written in the margins by a sixteenth-century hand. One of these later additions is a love charm on folio 20r:

To know who shalbe his wiffe or hir husband.

Say thus: “hempe seed, hempe I thee sow lede and vnlede. she that shalbe my worldes make come after one and rake sleepe sleepe and I her see, wake and her know.” this most be done on new yeares day at even taking alitle hempe seed in one hande and going thrise aboute the fire, sowing the hempe seede aboute the fier but not in the fyer. then go to bedde and lie downe vpon the right side speaking never a worde to no body but to say your pater noster and your Credo.

Imagine my surprise while watching an episode of the BBC show Victorian Farm where the presenter conducted a very similar Victorian ritual! The episode in question takes place at Midsummer’s Eve. The presenter, Ruth Goodman, and her daughter, Catherine, go out at midnight to the local churchyard. Catherine scatters hemp seed while saying:

Hemp seed I sow. Hemp seed should/will grow. He who will marry me, come after and mow.

According to Goodman, the future husband was supposed to appear in the churchyard, or possibly that night in a dream.

Obviously there are some differences between the sixteenth- and late nineteenth-century rituals. They take place on different dates: one on New Year’s Day; the other at Midsummer’s Eve. Only the first part of the ritual, spreading the hemp seed[3] and reciting the special words, appears in the nineteenth-century version – there is no fire and no prayers. Naturally, we must also keep in mind that aspects of the charm and ritual might have been changed for television – doing magic is not necessarily entertaining to watch after all! As well, a popular history show is not the best source for scholarly work. Nevertheless, I find this example very interesting and a good starting point to think about the traditions of charms over long periods of time. How did a charm get from the sixteenth century to the Victorian era and finally to a television show in the twenty-first century?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, medieval medical charms continued to be used throughout the period with little variation in the major tropes used. Owen Davies has also shown that medieval and early modern magical texts continued to be used by cunning-folk in England right into the modern period.[4] The long-term use and survival of these kinds of charms speaks to the ingrained belief among people that magic worked. Much like the Welsh herbal remedies, magic charms and rituals continued to appeal to people for a very long time.

[1] See Lea Olsan’s article “The Corpus of Charms in the Middle English Leechcraft Remedy Books,” in Charms, Charmers and Charming: International Research on Verbal Magic, ed. Jonathan Roper (Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 214-237; and Tony Hunt, Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England: Introduction and Texts (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990).

[2] Naturally, the charm may have earlier antecedents but I am not aware of any at the moment. As a medievalist and not an early modernist or Victorian historian, I do not know of later examples of this charm, but I would be very interested if any readers know of other examples of this charm.

[3] I am not aware of any special property of hemp seed that might explain its inclusion in those sort of charm, although it has been suggested to me that it might be drawn from the use of hemp to make rope and thus “tie” the two people together somehow. Presumably the growing of the seed is meant to parallel the growing of the love between the two people. I am, of course, open to other suggestions.

[4] See Davies’s book, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London: Hambledon and London, 2003).

Family and Household, Magic, Medieval, Series: Jokes and Humorous Recipes

Gunpowder, treason, and plot? Not quite.

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In keeping with the theme of my previous post, I wanted to look at another of the numerous trick recipes I’ve come across. The topic I’ve chosen for this post is rather less rude than the last one, however.

In late medieval books of secrets and recipe collections we can find a lot of recipes using dangerous substances like gunpowder (and its component parts) and mercury. The gunpowder recipes in particular are used for spectacular theatrical effects like propelling a dragon across a tether and making it breathe fire.[1] However, these ingredients often appears in recipes of a less spectacular nature – to play good-natured tricks on people or in children’s toys.[2] In many of these recipes the gunpowder and mercury are used to make a household object move about as if under its own strength.

Making a loaf of bread jump about is a common goal. I have come across numerous examples that all employ similar means. This example comes from Oxford, Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 1436, page 26:

In order to make a loaf run round about the house, take one hot loaf and put a little mercury on a penny and stamp the end with a little wax and put it in the loaf and it shall be done, it is proven.[3]

There’s a similar principle at play with this recipe from London, British Library Sloane MS 121, folio 91r to make a ring jump about:

To make a ring dance and run throughout the whole house by itself. Make a hollowed out oval ring out of whatever metal you like and fill it with saltpetre (potassium nitrate), sulphur, and quicksilver and then solder it well and firmly so that nothing can come out. And after a while when it is placed in the fire and it is warmed enough it will dance through the house.[4]

With the exception of the example with the ring, these recipes seem to focus on food. Joke recipes like this using food and chemical reactions were one of two kinds of joke cooking recipes (the other kind being parody recipes that created humour by using absurd or disgusting ingredients). They were entertaining while at the same time giving the performer the appearance of having magic powers, but without the threat of performing real magic. This final example comes from San Marino, Huntington Library, HM 1336, folio 5r:

In order to make a stew slip out of the pot. Take vitriol and saltpetre and Spanish soap and grind it all into a powder and throw it in the pot and all the stew in the pot shall run out, [I] guarantee.[5]

Unfortunately, we don’t know how these kinds of tricks went over in the medieval household. We can certainly imagine people’s delight, especially children’s, at seeing an innocuous loaf of bread suddenly start jumping around under its own steam. Gunpowder, quicksilver, and its various ingredients became popular in medieval recipe collections because they could turn ordinary household items like rings, bread, or even stew into fantastic and quasi-magical objects.

[1] Philip Butterworth discusses this use of gunpowder in early modern stage productions and includes a number of recipes similar to what can be found in the medieval sources. Theatre of Fire: Special Effects in Early English and Scottish Theatre (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1998).

[2] For example, one of the earliest mentions of gunpowder in medieval Europe is believed to come from Roger Bacon describing its use in Chinese firecrackers. There are similar recipes in the c. 1300 Liber ignium of Marcus Grecus. See Pierre Berthelot‟s edition of the Liber ignium in La chimie au moyen âge, vol. I (Paris 1893; repr., Osnabrück: Otto Zeller and Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1967), 100-135; on Bacon see Joseph Needham, Gwei-Djen Lu, and Ling Wang. Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 5, Part 7. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 48–50.

[3] “for to make a lowfe to renne roun a bowte þe house take one hote lofe and put a lytyl quicsyluer on a penne et stape (sic) þe hende with a lytyl wax and put hyt in þe lofe and yt schal be doun ut probatum”

[4] “Ad faciendum Anulum saltare et currere per totam domum per se ipsum. Fac anulum de quocumque metallo quod tibi placuerit et quod sit ouum  modo concauus et imple illum de salpeter sulphure viuo et viuo argento et deinde soldatur (sic) bene et firmiter ita quod nichil queat exire. Et postmodum cum ponatur prope ignem et parum calefacietur saltabit per domum”

[5] “For to make potage slippinn out of þe potte. Take arnement and salt peter and spaynis sope and grynd it alle in poudire and caste it in þe potte and alle þe potage in þe potte xalt rene out a warentise.”
A variation of this recipe can be found in the Liber cure cocorum, a mid-fifteenth century cookery book in verse. The book begins with three trick recipes: two recipes to make cooked food appear raw and to make it appear full of worms and the recipe to make food leap out of the pot. The Liber cure recipe is designed as a trick to play on the cook: “Yf þe coke be croked or soward mane / Take sope, cast in hys potage; / Þenne wylle þe pot begyn to rage / And welle on alle, and lepe in / þat licoure is made, noþer thykke ne thynne.” [If the cook is a crooked or froward man, / Take soap, cast [it] in his potage, / Then will the pot begin to rage / And well above all, and leap in. / That liquid is made, neither thick nor thin.] Text and translation from Melitta Weiss Adamson,  “The Games Cooks Play: Non-sense Recipes and Practical Jokes in Medieval Literature,” in Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Melitta Weiss Adamson (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1995), 184.  The De mirabilius mundi contains a version to make “a chicken or other thing leap in the dish” using a combination of quicksilver and zinc carbonate. Best and Brightman, Book of Secrets, 98 and Adamson, “The Games Cooks Play,” 177-178, 183-185.