Category Archives: Education

Rhetoric and Recipes in the Composition Classroom

By Hillary Nunn

A composition class might seem an unlikely forum for discussing early modern recipes, and I have to admit I was wary to pencil them in. The class’s focus on the rhetoric of disease, however, made it hard for me to resist a quick foray into seventeenth-century ideas of health care – and in the end, I’m glad we took up the subject. My class’s brief consideration of early recipes for heart ailments helped students see the many ways metaphors influence perceptions of bodily health. By the end of our 50-minute class session, students could see that the terms associated with health conditions, both now and in earlier centuries, have an easily overlooked rhetorical power.

Before class, I asked students to read Natasha M. Wiggins’s editorial “Stop Using Military Metaphors for Disease” from the British Medical Journal. Wiggins argues that medical professionals rely too heavily on comparisons between disease and combat, ultimately leaving dying patients to look like “losers” who could not triumph in battle. My students were eager to debate this idea, some arguing that military language empowered patients while others countered that it could make weakened people feel even more hopeless and victimized. Students could see that such metaphors relied on images of conflict, and that the words strengthened the idea of competition between people and their own bodies.

From there, I asked students to consider the term “heart attack.” Is someone’s heart being attacked, I asked, or is it doing the attacking? As they debated, I handed out the Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition of the term, pointing out that it first appeared in 1836.[1]  It’s not like people didn’t have what we call heart attacks before then, I stressed. They just called them something else, described them in a different way. But how?

That’s where the recipes came in. We looked at two different seventeenth century recipes for dealing with heart ailments, both from Wellcome manuscripts. Not surprisingly, when students first read the recipe transcriptions, they joked about how little hope there was for the patients. I told them it wasn’t likely that either recipe treated what we would call a heart attack, but that their titles could show different attitudes attached to heart ailments.

The first recipe, “A fomentation to comfort the Heart,” lists herbal ingredients that promise to help the sufferer “find ease.”[2] The students immediately picked up on the emphasis on resting, some seeing that as a contrast to the idea of “fighting” while others argued that calmness actually worked toward the idea of accumulating strength for the battle.

But it was the unexpected turns that came with the second recipe — “For the passion of the heart” — that made me see the strength of the exercise.[3]

Heart2
Wellcome Library MS 8097, p. 63

I asked them what they thought of the term passion. First came associations with love; others saw hints of stress. Soon, students linked both states to symptoms like elevated heartbeat, sweating, and even paralysis. They talked about emotion’s ability to affect physical health, a few even laughing in recognition when I brought up the 1970s TV character Fred Sanford’s tendency to fake heart trauma in tense situations.

So, I asked, what do these recipes say about the way that early modern people thought about their hearts? What does it mean to suffer passion of the heart rather than a heart attack?

And that’s where the unexpected happened. One student observed that passion treated the ailment more like something internal, more natural than an attack that could be fended off. Then, another commented that this went along with the idea of “ease” from the first recipe – that you had to live with your disease, not just fight it. “Like hospice,” I said before I knew it. I hadn’t planned that as part of the conversation, but there it was.

“What’s the language of hospice like?” I asked, only to find two students willing to talk about recent experience with the process. They both stated that hospice tried to make death “peaceful,” which students immediately contrasted with the warrior ideas Wiggins condemned, and which many of them had earlier defended. Hospice emphasizes when to stop fighting, a student remarked. But it doesn’t call anyone a quitter, another said, and another noted that it’s about making people comfortable.

In the remaining minute of class, I pressed the students to see how we’d returned to the idea of “ease” that came up in the first recipe. Maybe, I suggested, our culture is still working to find the right way to talk about these health issues, and I asked them to think about what later centuries might think of our metaphors.

While I wouldn’t say this exercise helped students gain any greater respect for the recipes I study, the discussion left students more aware of how words shape our perceptions, and level judgment, about illness even when we think we’re using objective medical terms. Just as importantly, the activity helped them to see that science has a history, and that the words we use suggest something fundamental about the way we think about our own health.

[1] “Heart Attack,” The Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com.
[2] Wellcome Library MS 7818, p. 4.
[3] Wellcome Library MS 8097, p. 63.

Cooking Up Canadian History

By Valerie J. Korinek

English-Language Advertisement for Molson Brewery (1924).  Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
English-Language Advertisement for Molson Brewery (1924). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

My area of research and teaching is modern Canadian history, with a specialization in culture, gender and histories of sexualities. My courses cover a wide-ranging swath of contemporary Canada, including one in which “recipes” figure prominently: Recipes for a Nation: Food History in Canada. This is a third year undergraduate class that enables students to approach the history of Canada through food. This class often highlights “heirloom” recipes for indigenous and European foods (pemmican’s role in the fur trade for example) or settlement (Red Fife wheat and various breads). We also look at food in commerce: various baked goods (Nanaimo Bars and Butter Tarts) and alcoholic beverages (Canadian whiskey, wine, and beer) that define and differentiate Canada, most famously Molson Canadian’s “I Am Canadian” beer adverts. It is a course that attracts students who are critically engaged in, and passionate about, food politics and are therefore able to think critically about food.

French-Language Advertisement for Molson Brewery (1924).  Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
French-Language Advertisement for Molson Brewery (1924). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

But today I want to talk about a research assignment that I designed for my 200 level Canadian women’s history students. Tired of the traditional ‘term paper,’ over the past two years I’ve assigned a project that required students to do oral interviews with family members (I imagined students would interview mothers and grandmothers, but many interviewed fathers as well) about “family recipes” or family and/or community cookbooks. They were encouraged to think about how recipes and the gendered nature of their production fostered heritage, intergenerational cultural transfers, food knowledge and constructions of ethnicity. I then asked that students situate their findings in historical context of food history; cultural histories of food production and consumption; or the gendered nature of unpaid domestic work in the home.

The first year many students wrote thoughtful papers about family hunting traditions (Saskatchewan has a large percentage of students from First Nations and Metis backgrounds for whom traditional foods are still important). Another student wrote a superlative paper about food scarcity, and of the contrast between her mother’s middle class background of family recipes and her father’s working class family where recipes were an incomprehensible luxury: her Dad’s family ate food, whatever they could buy, find, or what they were given, so their diet was largely potatoes, bread and grains. Hunger was persistent, thus her paper offered a classist analysis of poverty, privation, and want in the midst of North American plenty. Other students produced papers that highlighted recipes for Christmas or Thanksgiving (although a few were “harvest” recipes); many focused on ethnicity and the transmission of ethnic heritage. Given Canada’s lack of a “national” food heritage, embedded as we are in North American food culture, it wasn’t surprising that students believed that it was only “ethnic” recipes that merited history research papers.

The second iteration of this project had a different reception. Amongst this batch of students it was clear that they simply didn’t cook and neither did their families. This was best exemplified by a student who wrote a paper about a community cookbook (many of which are produced as fundraisers for hockey teams, or for school trips, or churches) in which all of the recipes were formerly corporate recipes. Many students pointed out that parent and grandparent deaths and/or family crisis had abruptly curtailed family recipe or cookbook traditions. By and large though, if students couldn’t find some sort of “ethnic” recipe to highlight they floundered. Ethnic difference, or novelty, were the only sort of recipes that seemed to provide students with a comprehensible format for discussing food history.  Perhaps this is because much of Saskatchewn history concerns settlement and immigration of European newcomers, and hence “ethnic” recipes fit that conventional provincial historical framework? Or perhaps because these tended to get transmitted from one generation to another and hence fit my criteria for “historic” recipes it made them worthy for commentary?  Either way, the stuff of daily eating was either so unexceptional or basic that they couldn’t grasp how to analyze the class, gendered, regional, or economic trends that were exemplified in those recipes or food products.

Despite the best efforts of the Mark Bittmans, Michael Pollans, or Jamie Olivers of this world, there is a vast group of North Americans who simply don’t cook. They purchase prepared foods, eat out or combine semi-prepared products, and thus such an assignment seemed anachronistic and out of touch with “real” Canadian university students and their families. It is as true, as Donna Gabbacia so wonderfully historicized many years ago, that We Are What We Eat, but utilizing recipes, family oral history projects, and gendered notions of food production, can, in some instances, be destabilizing and distressing in the classroom.

I’m going to think more critically about how to reformulate this assignment to better reflect the realities of Saskatchewan student demographics, and to better enable the students to analyze “food” in a more holistic, inclusive fashion, less of an “Ethnicity 101” and more of an examination on the gendered nature of domestic, unpaid work and of what the evolution in food practices tell us about Canadian women’s, social and cultural histories.

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Valerie Korinek is one of the co-authors (along with Franca Iacovetta and Marlene Epp) of Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History (Toronto ON: University of Toronto Press, 2012).

Teaching Recipes Online: Building Community and Purpose

By Rebecca Laroche

Screen Shot 2014-09-02 at 12.17.58 PMI started teaching an early modern survey of women writers online in 2002.  My reasons were many, not the least of which were feminist.  Serving a largely military community, the University of Colorado Colorado Springs had more than its share of military spouses, mainly women, who had suddenly found themselves single parents as their husbands were deployed in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and online courses provided the means to continue their education in a flexible manner. The fact that extensive research in early modern women coincided with the establishment of online databases meant that the course’s content was also in line with its form.  Our primary “textbook” was Women Writers Online, then recently released by Brown University. My position at a rapidly growing research university serving a large geographic region meant there were resources for teaching online, and we were in many ways ahead of the national trend. I was able to experiment with different discussion formats and social media manipulations that spoke to the need for intellectual community and deep inquiry within the format.

It wasn’t until a necessary hiatus from online teaching while chairing the department and a sabbatical in 2012 that I came to a profound realization about this aspect of my teaching self, however. Many professors who are teaching online, including myslef, have gone about it all wrong.  The online environment is not simply an update of the classroom to which one translates what you’ve already taught, approximating in the virtual that which we’d come to value in the real. Rather it is its own sphere with its own pedagogical aims and outcomes.  And in this realization, I have developed Early Modern Women Writers Point Two.

You see, during 2012, I also became a founding member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), an international group of scholars committed to creating a database of English recipe manuscripts 1550 to 1850, transcribed and searchable. With hundreds of these manuscripts extant, the task was huge, yet we had all come to recognize the importance and richness of the work.  And with women’s key roles in the genre, it was feminist work, clearly. In our first meetings, it became apparent that this work could sustain generations of scholarship, but it also became certain that it could sustain teaching.

Before becoming chair, I had begun to incorporate “online edition” assignments into ENGL 3200, as one challenge to having Women Writers Online as one’s textbook was the lack of editorial mediation for students.  They could not understand the texts, not because they were incomprehensible, but because they were early modern and had not been “Nortonized.” I wanted students to see that, in line with the theorization of Margaret Ezell, the problem of women writers in the Renaissance was not that there were so few but that there were so few made accessible to modern readers.[1]  Having students make their own edition not only helped to make the works more accessible to students it also made them to realize the work of making things accessible, work from which the male canon had benefited for a century and which still remained to be done for many early modern texts.

From this assignment, recipes were an easy leap, and in the last two manifestations of the course I have made EMROC’s mission the work of the second half of the course.  In these months, students learned to transcribe (currently I use the Cambridge University transcription site and various handouts from Textual Communities), read entries from the Recipes Project blog (to learn about the extensive scholarship at play), performed group work in transcription, transcribed a page of the text themselves, took on the basics of XML, and submitted the document either directly to the database (making them a contributing member) or to me to be submitted with a note to their work. It is difficult scholarship, and at first quite daunting, but the group support meant that the task that first seemed impossible suddenly (often magically) became recognizable.  With the help of the OED (introduced during the online edition portion of the course), they were developing early modern vocabulary and became enmeshed with early modern concerns.  The early modern period, and the labor women did in that time, was alive to them in ways never before experienced.

After two semesters of teaching the course this way, I have had several students catch fire with this mission and with their roles as undergraduate researchers. In October, you will be able to read the research done by two students who continued their coursework on Catchmay in an independent study. One of these young women is even looking into her MLS degree so she can continue to work in the archive.  As they contribute to the database a year after their coursework, I will be teaching two sections of the course in the Spring of 2015.  As my students are transcribing in tandem with other face-to-face courses across the country (see Amy Tigner and Jen Munroe later this month), the online medium underlines the future of collaboration.  You see, to this day, the steering committee of EMROC continues to meet bimonthly on Google+.

[1]. Margaret Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

Pen, Ink, and Pedagogy

By Amanda E. Herbert

Pen and Ink Lab in HIST 488 at Christopher Newport University.  Photo by the author.
Pen and Ink Lab in HIST 488 at Christopher Newport University. Photo by the author.

I teach an undergraduate seminar on gender in early modern Britain, and throughout the semester, students learn about the ways that people in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries worked to differentiate women from men.  We talk about early modern ideas on the human body: Galen’s four humors, the two-seed versus the one-seed model of conception, and “reversible” reproductive systems.  We also talk about the ways that early modern people mapped gender onto the workings of the human brain, ascribing mental acuity to men, and emotional intensity to women.  All of these lessons help to show students that gender is a social construct, and that it is historically variable.  But the exercise that truly brings these concepts home is one on education.  After providing an overview of the topics that were taught to early modern children, I divide the classroom:  half learn to write like girls, and half learn to write like boys.

I tell the students that they are going to learn about early modern education and material culture by writing with quill and ink.  The students think that they are being given identical materials for this “hands-on” exercise.  I distribute goose quills and powdered ink packets (both of which are available for sale via the Colonial Williamsburg website), and I pass out model alphabets from the seventeenth century, so that the students can form their letters in the style used by early modern people.  But what they don’t realize is that they have received separate models: one alphabet comes from a guidebook for young boys, and another alphabet comes from a guidebook for young girls.

With their alphabets in hand, the students are then set a task: they are asked to copy a recipe for early modern ink.  This receipt, which I transcribed from a commonplace book held at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is entitled “To make Inke Verie Good.”  It was created by Anne (Granville) Dewes in the seventeenth century:

Take a quart of snow or raine water and a quart of Beere vinegre, a pound of galls bruised halfe a pound of coperis [protosulphates of copper, iron, and zinc], and 4 ounces of gum bruised; first mix your water and vinegre together, and putt itt into an earthen Jug, (then put in the galls) stirring itt 2 or 3 times a day letting it stand 8 or 9 daies and then put in your coperas and Gumme as you use it straine itt. &c.

As the students mix their ink, shape their quills, and start copying their recipes in “early modern style” handwriting, we talk about the ingredients contained in the recipe, as well as their cost and accessibility to people of both high and low status.  We talk about the time and labor that must have been involved in the production of ink.  We discuss the ways that ink was used in the home, and the gallons of ink that must have been consumed by early modern print shops.  We consider who made ink (both women and men) and who used ink (both women and men).  Ink was a ubiquitous part of life for early modern Britons, as essential to communication as are our own smartphones and tablets today.

About fifteen minutes before class ends, I ask the students to compare their transcriptions, and they are always surprised at the differences: half the class has written in one style, and half in another.  That’s because in early modern Britain, girls were encouraged to learn “Italic hand,” a style of writing with clearly defined, beautifully sculpted, decorative letters.  But boys were taught “Secretary hand,” a flowing, connected style intended for those who, it was implied, wrote with urgency, volume, and haste.  Realizing the ramifications of this – that although women and men used the same tools and the same recipes to communicate, early modern men’s words were seen as authoritative, while early modern women’s were viewed as window-dressing – brings our lesson on gender and education to a powerful close.

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Interested in early modern ink, or early modern education and handwriting?  The Folger Shakespeare Library has some excellent resources:

[1] Anne (Granville) Dewes, Cookery and Medicinal Recipes, ca. 1640-1750, V.a.430 f. 42, Folger Shakespeare Library.  You can access Dewes’ ink recipe via the Folger’s Digital Image Collection: http://luna.folger.edu

[2] Dr. Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts for the Folger, has written a great piece on education and early modern handwriting for the Folger’s Collation blog: http://collation.folger.edu/2013/05/learning-to-write-the-alphabet