Category Archives: Article Round-Ups

History Carnival #139

We are very pleased to be hosting History Carnival #139 at the Recipes Project this month! We have a wealth of interesting posts to show you this month.

Education and the teaching of history has been a hot topic recently. Sean Creighton at History Matters reflected on how Black History Month has evolved and what constitutes the study of British Black History today. Our own Recipes Project blog devoted the month of September to the teaching of recipes, which ranged from early modern to Canadian history. In a related vein, Richard Blakemore offers his thoughts and criticisms on The History Manifesto, Cambridge University Press’s first open access book.

West End London Air Raid Shelter. Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
WWII; England; “West End London Air Raid Shelter” in Aldwych tube station. Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library

Bridget Lockyer at the FWSA Blog presented the results of a workshop on teaching women’s history in the UK’s new curriculum that was run with students and teachers at three schools in York.

Women in history also featured in several fascinating posts this month. The writers at All Things Georgian brought to our attention the 1737 book, “The Whole Duty of a Woman”, and its recipes for just about every day of the year. Maritime historian Joan Druett has provided us with a glimpse at Mrs. Alexander’s maiden voyage on the James Craig in 1874, including giving birth!

Kathryn Robinson, also at History Matters, looks at the legacy of the London Tube during the Blitz in the Second World War.

Medical historians have been producing some excellent posts recently. At the Notches blog Katherine Harvey has been looking at medieval views on masturbation and the idea that prolonged celibacy could be a risk to a man’s health! Yikes. Lesley Hulonce has written a fascinating post on the earliest institutions for disabled children in Victorian and Edwardian Britain and the assumptions society placed on its inhabitants in terms of their education and livelihoods.

Leather doctor's bag with contents, English, 1890-1930. Wellcome Images.
Leather doctor’s bag with contents, English, 1890-1930. Wellcome Images.

Åsa Jansson tackled the thorny and ever popular topic of retrospective diagnosis with her reflections on the recent conference, Gloom Goes Global: Towards a Transcultural History of Melancholy since 1850” held at the Univeristät Heidelberg this past October. Ed Darrell has been looking at the use of DDT to fight malaria. Jacqueline Antonovich at Nursing Clio, wrote of her experience in the archives and surprising insights that can be gained from material culture. Suzie Grogan has written a really interesting guest post for The Quack Doctor on home remedies for shell-shock after the First World War.

Alun Withey put the beard and masculinity in its historical context as beards have becoming increasingly popular over the past few years.

Joanne Major at All Things Georgian tackled a grim mystery from the 18th century – that of Oliver Cromwell’s missing head.

October provided a number of posts on one of my favourite topics – historical food! The Sloane Letters blog returned after a brief hiatus with a post determining once and for all that Hans Sloane did not invent milk chocolate (alas).  Liz Adams at the Rubenstein Library tested an 1899 recipe for a dairy free ice-cream made from nut butter. While she concluded it may not be ice cream by modern standards, it was delicious! Over at Not Just Dormice, Lisa Lodwick explored the enduring use of coriander and its immense popularity in ancient Rome.

Rochester Bestiary (England, c. 1230): London, British Library, Royal MS 12 F XIII, f. 45r. Source: British Library.
Rochester Bestiary (England, c. 1230): London, British Library, Royal MS 12 F XIII, f. 45r. Source: British Library.

As a medievalist I would be remiss if I didn’t include some more posts from that quarter of the internet. Jonathan Jarrett tells us how to start a saint’s cult. Julian Harrison at the British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts blog, meanwhile, tells us how to be a hedgehog. And Erik Kwakkel gives us the skinny on bad parchment in medieval books.

Finally, what better post to end October’s Carnival on than Donna Seger’s post on the image of the dancing witch!

We hope you have enjoyed the posts in this month’s History Carnival! The next History Carnival will be hosted at the Imperial and Global Forum on December 1st.

An early summer round-up…

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?’, 18th century DIY and ingredient substitution. Sally blogs at http://18thcenturyrecipes.wordpress.com and can frequently be found on Twitter, @sallyosborn.

A Halloween Round-Up

By Lisa Smith

I went a little wild with our Twitter account (@historecipes) on Halloween and ended up tweeting links to stories about magic, supernatural creatures, food and death all day. It was fun–and I learned a lot! If you fancy taking a peek at the dark side of history, here is the round-up of all the links. There’s something here for everyone to enjoy…

Just click here to go to our Storify page.

The witch of Endor conjures up the ghost of Samuel at the request of Saul, who lies petrified on the ground. Engraving by W. Raddon, 1811, after B. West. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
The witch of Endor conjures up the ghost of Samuel at the request of Saul, who lies petrified on the ground. Engraving by W. Raddon, 1811, after B. West. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

The Politics of Food: Food in History at the Anglo-American Conference 2013

Editors’ note: This is our second conference report on the Anglo-American Conference 2013. Sally Osborn’s post considers the domestic and institutional spaces of food.

By Rachel Rich

I started working on food history in 1996. People often smirked when I mentioned it. It seemed like a little topic, something that wouldn’t help answer the big questions about human identity and experience. Yet eating is one of the few universals: thinking about how differently it has been organised across time and space provides amazing insights into class, gender and ethnic identities. With the choice of ‘Food in History’ as the theme for this year’s Anglo-American Conference, food history has finally come of age. A wide range of periods were covered, from classical antiquity to the Arab spring, and everything in between. Some people discussed a particular food, such as milk or bread. One intriguing paper (by Rebecca Ford, University of Nottingham) was even more specific, focusing on the social and cultural geography of watercress in nineteenth-century England. But ‘Food in History’ was given a wide scope, going far beyond discussions of food and recipes, in ways that showed the possibility for telling all sorts of cultural and political stories by understanding what we eat, with whom, how we shop for it, and the routes it has had to travel to reach us.

Read the rest of this post (complete with some of the Twitter discussion!) on Storify: http://storify.com/historecipes/the-politics-of-food-thinking-of-the-food-history/.