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Around the Table Podcast: Cooking in the Archives with Marissa Nicosia

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

Sarah Kernan has a conversation with Marissa Nicosia, an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at Penn State Abington. She teaches, researches, and writes about early modern English literature, food studies, book history, and political theory. Marissa speaks about her work making and updating early modern English culinary recipes, especially for her public food history website, Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen. Follow Marissa on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and Facebook for updates.

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen

Folger Early Modern Measurements

The Sifter

John Locke’s pancakes recipe tested by Marissa

Sage Pudding recipe tested by Marissa at Pottsgrove Manor

Penn State University Libraries Eberly Family Special Collections Library

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

I am so excited to welcome Marissa Nicosia to Around the Table. Marissa is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at Penn State Abington. She teaches, researches, and writes about early modern English literature, food studies, book history, and political theory. In addition to a voluminous body of journal articles, book chapters, and essays, Marissa has also co-edited two collected volumes and in 2023 published her monograph, Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660. Today, though, we’ll be speaking about her work making and updating early modern English culinary recipes, especially for her public food history website launched in 2014, Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen. In it, Marissa curates, transcribes, and updates recipes from early modern English recipe books, including historical information alongside detailed step-by-step instructions and photos of the updated recipes. I’m thrilled to speak with Marissa today about her wide-ranging experiences cooking and writing about early modern recipes. Marissa, thank you so much for joining me today.

Marissa Nicosia 02:17

Thank you so much for having me, Sarah. I love talking about this work with other people.

Sarah Kernan 02:22

Can you share how Cooking in the Archives started and how it has evolved or changed over time?

Marissa Nicosia 02:29

So, Cooking in the Archives started with paleography, the practice of studying historical handwriting. I was a PhD student in English literature, and I was learning to read secretary hand, and also round hand and italic hand, the kind of dominant forms of sixteenth-, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century handwriting. And one thing that we read a lot to practice learning these letter forms that looped below the line in strange ways or had interesting abbreviations, we learned by transcribing, copying out each letter of recipes.

And recipes were great because you get excited about seeing sage or chicken, or you’d have, like, interesting verbs like mingle. And there were also numbers in there. So, they were really good for learning how to read handwriting that you would encounter doing archival research as a literary scholar, as a literary historian.

And me and my initial collaborator on the Cooking in the Archives project, Alyssa Connell, we kept saying, oh, this sounds tasty. Oh, maybe we could try to make this. So, we applied for an internal grant at the University of Pennsylvania where we were studying for interdisciplinary innovation. And we said we would like to innovate by actually cooking these historical recipes instead of just reading them to practice our handwriting skills and all of that.

So, we were awarded this grant, which was excellent because we needed a way to pay our rent in the summer of 2014. And we dove in. And at this point, my research had been in book history and manuscript studies and in thinking about Renaissance temporality and history. So, I felt like this recipe recreation was a different kind of time travel, but I wasn’t quite sure what. And, while I knew a lot about early modern manuscripts, I didn’t know that much about food studies, food history, or culinary manuscripts in particular, because that hadn’t been like one of my major fields of my research at that time.

So, we started feeling our way through what it was like to read and research and prepare these recipes, Alyssa and I initially. And now I’ve continued that practice by reading and learning so much for people in the broader community, of historical reenactment, of food studies, of chefs who practice, scholars who practice, about how to take historical recipes and make them today in all sorts of different ways.

Sarah Kernan 05:04

That’s a great segue into the next topic I’d love to talk about. How do you approach that process of identifying what recipes you actually want to prepare and then researching and cooking and updating them? What all goes into that for you?

Marissa Nicosia 05:20

The process always begins with me reading something and saying, ooh, that’s interesting. It might be that I want to taste it, or I’ve been reading a menu, or a household account book where a dish gets mentioned and now I’m like, oh, there are this is a recipe for smelts. It’s not just that that household was buying smelts.

So, there’s always something that piques my interest. And I’ve to date never done a project where I’ve cooked through an entire recipe book. I’ve always just kind of been more of a gadfly about it. I go with what is interesting to me. And that’s part of what’s enabled the project to last for eleven years and for me to not get bored with it or burn out on it. So, I start with something that’s interesting, either because I want to taste it or I want to know about it.

And at this point, eleven years into this work, I find that if there’s a recipe I’m curious about, I have to cook it. Even if I’m not going to be publishing a recipe for it in, say, the journal article I’m writing, I feel like I need to know about it through cooking. I need to use my embodied method, my practice as research method, to fully understand what it’s saying. Because I found that like I don’t exactly understand what the difference between peeling or not peeling the mushrooms are until I’ve tried it. Or, using sugar instead of honey. Or, white wine instead of red wine. All these kinds of variations that I’ve seen in recipes. I know what they mean a little bit more through the process of trying it. And I wanted to speak a little bit to updating as well. But I wonder if that gets into the question of historical accuracy too.

Sarah Kernan 07:06

Absolutely. Obviously, like anyone who tries preparing historic recipes of any kind, there are real challenges with translating that to the modern day. So how do you balance historical accuracy with the practicalities of modern kitchen and dining settings? I mean, it’s a very different environment than what was available the early modern period. So how do you handle that?

Marissa Nicosia 07:33

I begin from a position that what I make will not be authentic, but it will be in a open dialogue with that original recipe. So, if the recipe calls for flour, butter, sugar, and cloves, like a recipe for cakes that I’ve made before and that I’ve been writing about recently. The strains of wheat and the strains of sugar that are cultivated now are not the same as the sixteenth-century ones. The cloves have gone through different production processes. The climate is different. The milling and the processing is different. The butter is from a different breed of cow that’s also like fed in a different environment.

And, I’m also constantly dealing with the fact that I am based in Philadelphia and North America and my specific climate and foodways. And the recipes I’m talking about are English recipes most of the time. So, there’s also that removal. So very simple ingredients like butter, flour, sugar, and cloves raise all of these ways we already can’t get back to what they would have been like in 1616, or thereabouts. But we can still get something that is the modern equivalent of that thing.

And then I’m baking them in my oven. I’m baking these cakes in my oven. And that is quite different than the bread oven that’s described in the recipe. So, this particular recipe describes drawing your brown bread out of your bread oven, which could have been a kind of beehive bread oven, or it could have been one of the pocket bread ovens on the side of a hearth, but it would be some more enclosed baking space. So, the recipe has a lot of information about how to watch the cakes so they don’t over bake using that kind of radiating heat technology. And that’s something that they’re telling the cook to use instinct, but also use observational skills to do it.

And there, it’s a little different than me setting my oven to 350 in a timer. But, like as a historical recipe recreator, I’m using my like I’m like, is it getting too brown? Are they setting? Like, has the, am I seeing the signs that I was supposed to look for in the bread oven?

So that’s one way that these forms of attention translate across early modern cookery practices and my recipe recreation practices. So, in many ways, I see myself as a person in a long line of recipe users who is adapting what I’m doing to the current realities of my situation in a way that’s trying to honor the many people who prepared, compiled, circulated, and preserved these materials to bring them to us today.

And it’s important to me that most of what I put on Cooking in the Archives can be prepared with ingredients from your local grocery store, plus rose water. Because I can’t eliminate rose water and be truthful to the foodways. But a lot of the other things I want you to be able to buy at your big box supermarket, because I think people have a right to be able to access this kind of material, that it shouldn’t just be for people who can buy specialty products or have immediate access to specialty products.

Sarah Kernan 10:51

Yeah, making these recipes more accessible to a broader audience, in addition to translating them for a modern audience, but making them accessible for anyone to be able to cook. Yeah, I think that’s really important and kind of helps you understand the historical moment a bit more and have a grasp on that, no matter your ability to go to all these specialty markets or order food online.

Marissa Nicosia 11:14

Yeah, I mean, maybe I could try roast swan, but that would be very difficult for me to arrange. So, it would be very difficult for most of the Cooking in the Archives readers to arrange, although perhaps maybe someone will write in and say, I have a line on roasting swan, give me a recipe.

Sarah Kernan 11:31

How do you go about researching and filling in some other aspects of recipes, some of the trickier parts? There’s always missing pieces and recipes. How do you figure out the things that are left unsaid, like the ingredients, quantities, or the timing? What are ways that you fill in those gaps?

Marissa Nicosia 11:52

Yeah, there’s variation or implied knowledge in amounts, in methods, in temperature, and in timing. So sometimes there’s something like a reference for using a porringer or something like that. And then I consult resources like the Folger’s amazing, like weight and measurement resources, to figure out like, well, maybe a porringer is about three, I think it’s about three quarters of a cup.

But porringers also vary wildly. So, a person’s porringer in their house might not be what a porringer is in another house. Or a posnet, like a little three-legged cooking pot that you would use to make a posset or something like that. So, for some of these, there’s a material culture of cookery implements that we can turn to for some information. And there are certain resources I now know to go to for that.

There’s also, spice prices sometimes become really important. So, I found some resources for deciphering spice price rates. There’s occasionally putting the spices on top of a coin, as well. So, it’s sometimes unclear if it’s the price or the coin that’s being called for in those situations. Those are a little tricky.

If I have a sense from when I’ve prepared the dish, if I’m like, oh, that actually is like a meringue, or that actually is like shortbread. Then I turn to modern recipes that tell me what’s a good temperature for a meringue to go into my oven, what’s good temperature for shortbread to go into my oven. And I look at the timings on those modern recipes. And I set a lot of timers. I set so many timers when I’m recipe testing. If I have something going on the stove, I always have a stopwatch going.

But it’s interesting how there are certain descriptions for preserves that you can kind of approximate to candy height or other kinds of things you might see on a modern candy thermometer. There are descriptors like a gentle fire or a soft fire. And there you’re putting your pot just over like a kind of low flame. And learning what that method vocabulary is like is interesting. I’ve spent a lot of time with the Oxford English Dictionary, not just looking up ingredient nouns, but also looking up some of the verbs, to think about what is this? Is there a sense here in this word that I’m not totally getting?

I’m trying to remember the name of this particular resource. Oh, The Sifter. The Sifter also is a place where I sometimes look up cooking implements and that sometimes has volumes on it as well. It’s a great resource.

Sarah Kernan 14:31

Could you talk about any surprising or interesting recipes you have found while working on Cooking in the Archives?

Marissa Nicosia 14:40

One of the most fun recipe recreations that I’ve done started with a social media post that a bunch of people sent me. So, a scholar who works in political philosophy, was doing research in the John Locke Papers at the Bodleian. And he posted to social media a recipe for John Locke’s pancakes from the Locke Papers.

And a bunch of people sent this to me. I was very excited to see it. And I prepared this recipe and they’re really luscious, crepe-like British pancakes with a lot of cream in them, and also orange blossom water, and butter, and half a nutmeg grated into the batter.

So they are extremely expensive pancakes because nutmegs were very expensive during Locke’s lifetime. And I did the recipe recreation. And after that, I had the opportunity to go to the Bodleian and look. And it looks like he’s actually working through a couple of different recipes, one of which he received from a social connection to develop this kind of peak recipe. And the recipe that I shared with half a nutmeg is his, like, edited, best version. So, it’s just such an interesting way to come at the life of this very important historical thinker who’s had a lot of impact in the modern world, to see that he also was interested in this negotiation of developing the best recipe in the kitchen for this kind of dish.

And there’s something funny about it being up pancake, right? It’s not like a roast beef. It’s not a celebration piece, but maybe it is a, it maybe it was a celebration piece being served at a special occasion, but it doesn’t have the grandeur of certain other historical recipes. It’s a pancake, but oh boy, is it delicious.

Sarah Kernan 16:34

Yeah, I’m really intrigued now. I saw those posts and I saw you working on that recipe a while back, but I haven’t recreated those. And the fact that it has half a nutmeg in it really piques my interest. That is probably a pretty intense flavor.

Marissa Nicosia 16:48

It’s also one of the few recipes I can say that I’ve actually cooked using slightly more historical materials. So, Anne Mumenthaler invited me to Pottsgrove Manor, and we prepared that recipe on a flat surface over a brazier of coals, which is likely how that kind of pancake would have been cooked because you can do more detailed work over a brazier of coals than you can with other kitchen heat setups. It was one that we got, I got to try using a more historical technology than I normally have because everything I do is for the modern kitchen.

So was fun to see this recipe that I’d updated for the modern kitchen taken back into a historical kitchen and used. And the people who came to that event at Pottsgrove Manor really enjoyed these pancakes cooked in that way. We were surrounded by wood smoke, so that changed the sort of ambiance of eating, which was nice. It was very delicious. I can’t say if they were more delicious in my kitchen or in that kitchen, but both were delicious.

Sarah Kernan 17:46

Well, I think we’ve kind of hinted at this in a couple of my questions and your responses. Could you talk a little bit about what role you think food and recipes, this historic food and recipes, plays in understanding or at least connecting to moments in the past, the history, cultures of a specific time and place. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Marissa Nicosia 18:11

People really care about food. Because it’s something that they have to deal with every day. It’s something which they already have a history with through their family, whether their family is a like robust food traditions family or not. Food isn’t so important, but they’ll have a memory, whether it’s like a highly advertised snack or a traditional family recipe that links them to time and place.

So, I love showing people recipes from a more distant history because there’s an immediate connection with like, yes, I also eat food every day. I also have to think about these things. I also have some sense of food traditions, right? Whether that is like a favorite mass-produced drink or a family dish.

I think with something like jumbles, or these kinds of historical cookies, or the historical hot chocolate that I’ve made from later seventeenth-century manuscripts, people are like, oh, that’s like a thing that I have consumed, but this is a very different version of it. And it makes sometimes the historical lessons go down a little bit more easily or people leave with something that they immediately want to go tell someone else.

I’ve had students in class where I’ve made historical hot chocolate, have all sorts of different connections to other hot chocolates that they’ve had in their lives and tell me, oh, I need to go tell X family member, X friend, that I had this recreation of a seventeenth-century hot chocolate in class.

So, it really gets people excited. And I think it’s an amazing touchstone for showing people why the study of the past is important and what purchase the past might have on what we do now, and how we think about food now and how we think about history today.

Sarah Kernan 20:14

Well, you just mentioned preparing some of this food for your classes, or students preparing it. Do you do that very regularly? Do you incorporate historical cooking and recipes into many of your classes? How do you put the process of making into your own teaching and your own research outside of the Cooking in the Archives project?

Marissa Nicosia 20:36

It’s grown and grown and grown. So, it started out with, I end up talking about food more when I’m teaching a Shakespeare play, or a Margaret Cavendish poem, or something like that. And then it became, well, why don’t I have my students transcribe a little bit in class? Or we’ll read something from a manuscript in the round so they can see the handwriting.

And then I’m like, well, I can get this little grant and I can buy goose quills and then we can write out the recipe together. And then, oh, I have this other little pot of funding that’s connected to some undergrads who I have now transcribing. I’ll buy a hot plate. I’ve made historical hot chocolate in the classroom a lot in literature classes. And I taught a Shakespeare in the Kitchen class about my book in progress where we made strawberry preserves on a hot plate in the classroom. That was a little more involved.

And I’m now teaching, most semesters, classes where students are transcribing from mostly eighteenth-century, later seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century, recipe manuscripts that are held in Penn State Libraries, Eberly Family Special Collections. That collection has grown over the ten years that I’ve been a faculty member at Penn State through long-term collaborations with special collections, with curators, with the people who work in the digital library, digital collections side of special collections.

So, at this point, I’m teaching out of my food history work and out of my Cooking in the Archives work every semester. But in the beginning, I wasn’t. I had to learn a lot more to be ready to teach like that.

Sarah Kernan 22:11

Do these practices go more into your research and writing as well as your teaching?  Do you find that all this has become very interconnected on that side of your professional life as well?

Marissa Nicosia 22:24

It really has. So, I think I said earlier that I don’t want to write about a recipe unless I’ve tested it, even if I’m not actually like publishing the recipe test as part of the article. Like if I write an article where I’ve tested a recipe, I’ll test the recipe and I’ll put that up on Cooking in the Archives when the article gets published to say, hey, I wrote this thing over here that maybe you want to read, maybe you don’t. But here’s the recipe recreation for anyone who wants it.

And all of this work over the last decade or so has led to me writing a book called Shakespeare in the Kitchen. So, I’ve been cooking the historical recipes for Cooking in the Archives, I’ve been writing these other pieces., and I’ve also been teaching Shakespeare pretty much every semester over that period of time. So, I have written a book that has ten recipes in it. And in the chapters, I use those recipe recreations to show that Shakespeare’s food metaphors are not just fun linguistic work, that they’re connected to this larger culinary culture and that preparing the recipes in the kitchen has a lot to teach us about these food references in Shakespeare’s poems and plays.

So that’s the project that I’m finishing right now. I never would have written a book like this if I hadn’t started Cooking in the Archives in 2014. And I’m really excited for this book to be material that I get to teach in the classroom because each chapter is written with the idea that I’d want to give it to undergraduates when I was teaching them the play.

Sarah Kernan 23:59

Do you want to tell us exactly when the Shakespeare book is coming out? Anything you want to plug?

Marissa Nicosia 24:05

I believe Shakespeare in the Kitchen will be coming out in 2026, but I will update you all with a fresh link and at a true date once I, once I’m clear with the press about exactly when that’s happening.

I’m also writing a number of different articles and book chapters that think about the seasons, and the way that seasons change, and how different literary works and different recipe works reference the changing of the seasons. So that’s something I’m very interested in, and it kind of links all my work about temporality into my work about recipes.

And I’d also note that Cooking in the Archives has been a little quieter over the last couple of years, in part because a lot of my recipe testing efforts have gone towards my Shakespeare in the Kitchen project But I have a lot of other ideas about food references in Shakespeare that I did not have a chance to deal with in Shakespeare in the Kitchen. So, I’m thinking about continuing a sort of complete works of Shakespeare in the Kitchen on Cooking in the Archives in the coming years, where I’ll get to share some of the recipes that that didn’t make it into the book and that were exciting to me in a shorter format than what I’m doing in my book chapters. So, there’ll be more material adjacent to that huge exploration I’ve done in Shakespeare in the Kitchen coming to Cooking in the Archives soon.

Sarah Kernan 25:40

Wonderful. Well, I can’t wait to see that, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be very excited to see that as well. Marissa, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Marissa Nicosia 25:48

Thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah Kernan 25:51

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

 

 

Around the Table Podcast: Early Medieval Embroidery with Alex Makin

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

Sarah Kernan talks to Alexandra Makin, a textile archaeologist specializing in early medieval embroidery. She is a professional embroiderer, trained at the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court Palace and also holds a PhD in Anglo-Saxon Studies. Alex is a Third Century Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic: Analysis, Interpretation, Re-creation (2024) and The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World: The Sacred and Secular Power of Embroidery (2019). In addition, Alex also runs a YouTube channel, Early Medieval Embroidery. Follow Alex on Instagram for updates.

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

Shrine of St. Cuthbert at Durham Cathedral

Bayeux Tapestry

Elizabeth Plenderleith’s study of the Cuthbert maniple: Plenderleith, Elizabeth, Hohler, Christopher and Freyhan, R., “The Stole and Maniples,” in Battiscombe, C. F., ed., The Relics of Saint Cuthbert (Oxford, 1956), 375–432.

Alex’s Cuthbert Maniple Recreation Project Videos

Early Medieval Embroidery YouTube channel

Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard Project

Woolen Strap from Female Burial Site in Iceland: See Michele Hayer Smith, Kevin P. Smith and Karin M Frei “‘Tangled up in Blue’: The Death, Dress and Identity of an Early Viking Age Female Settler from Ketilsstadir, Iceland,” Medieval Archaeology, 63(1), 2019.

EXARC 

The EXARC Journal

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Alex Makin, a textile archeologist specializing in early medieval embroidery. She is a professional embroiderer trained at the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court Palace and also holds a PhD in Anglo-Saxon studies. Alex is a Third Century Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, leading the project “Entangled Textiles: Senses, Connections, Power in the Early Medieval North Atlantic (450-1100 CE).” She has also published widely, including several articles and chapters, a 2024 co-edited collected volume titled Textiles of the Viking North Atlantic: Analysis, Interpretation, Re-creation, as well as a 2019 monograph, The Lost Art of the Anglo-Saxon World: The Sacred and Secular Power of Embroidery.

She regularly lectures and runs workshops for academic and public audiences. In addition, Alex also runs a YouTube channel, Early Medieval Embroidery, where she posts videos about different aspects of early medieval embroidery and her research. I am thrilled to speak to Alex today about her multitude of experiences studying and re-creating early medieval embroidery. Alex, thank you so much for joining me today.

Alex Makin 02:20

Oh, well, thank you for asking me.

Sarah Kernan 02:22

Your work requires such an interesting combination of skills. You are both a professional embroiderer and a textile archaeologist with a PhD. Could you tell us about your journey into medieval textile studies and what first inspired your fascination with embroidery from this period?

Alex Makin 02:41

Yes, it’s quite a long-winded story. I’ll try and keep it short for everybody. Over in England, which is where I’m based, I know the school system is different to in America. When I was at school, a long time ago, you could either leave at 18 and go to college or you could stay on at school and do A-levels. I mean, sorry, leave at 16 and go to college or stay on at school and do A-levels, which is what I did. And then after I completed my A-levels, I went down to, as you mentioned, the Royal School of Needlework and I did their, completed, the three-year apprenticeship in embroidery.

And I mean, I enjoyed it, but it was really intensive, much more intensive than people realize, I think. And when I left, I was thinking, that’s it. I never want to hold a needle, look at an embroidery ever again. That’s it. I’ve moved on. So, I went to university and I did an undergraduate degree in archaeology, which is my second love. And I was based in Newcastle upon Tyne, which is in the northeast of England.

And my brother, who’s a bit younger than me, was doing his degree in history at Durham Cathedral, which is literally just down the road. And I had a car, so we used to meet up and go out, and mainly to historical places. And one day we went to Durham Cathedral and there’s a tomb there, a shrine, from the early medieval period, which holds still the remains of St. Cuthbert, a very famous saint over here.

Alex Makin 04:12

And when that tomb was reopened in the, I think it was 1827, they discovered amongst lots of beautiful, beautiful objects, these amazing silk textiles and these fabulous embroideries, a stole and a maniple. A maniple is a narrow length of textile embroidery that a priest or a bishop would drape over one of his wrists during particular services.

And they were embroidered in silk threads and couch gold metal threads and I was looking at them. I can vividly remember it now looking through the glass in the display case thinking, this is unbelievable. The skill of these people is… It was, yeah, it was just an enlightening moment. And on the apprenticeship we had gone back as far as the twelfth century to Opus Anglicanum, but we’d never gone further. And at that point when I was looking at the Cuthbert embroideries, I was thinking to myself, well this came before Opus Anglicanum. How did this happen? Where, how did all this all develop? Why has nobody done anything about this? Have people done things about this? Why do I not know about it? All these questions were milling around in my head and that was the start, really. So it’s all my brother’s, Durham Cathedral’s, and St. Cuthbert’s fault.

So I went back to university, and I thought, right, I’m going to do my undergraduate dissertation on early medieval embroidery and I realized that nobody had actually done much about it. A wonderful lady, Dr. Elizabeth Coatsworth, she had done some work on embroideries from that period, but really nobody had done a detailed analysis looking at everything and that was the start of it really that sucked me into the black hole, and I’ve been at it ever since.

Sarah Kernan 06:04

That is really incredible. I love those sorts of stories where you have this real-world experience and it just ignites a passion for a topic. And you want to spend all your time working on it.

Since this was a field that you learned had not been explored very much, where are you finding your evidence and your research basis? Is it mainly material evidence? Is there any written evidence or images from the period? And how are you gathering that sort of evidence to re-create and make these items?

Alex Makin 06:43

So this is one of the really cool things about the early medieval period. It was an era of flux, really, particularly within the area we now call Britain, or the United Kingdom. So, the Romans had left in around 450, or just before, actually. And the native Britons, which included people who were in the population before the Romans came, but then people who’d come over through the Roman Empire as well, were calling on the Germanic tribes of continental Europe to come over and help them fight against the Picts who were in Scotland, the Scoti who were in Ireland, and other tribes who were coming down. So now the Romans had left, they thought it was easy pickings.

So you have this melee of people and cultural ideas coming together. And that’s resulted in a vibrant material culture, some of which survives today, some of which is embroidery. The majority of pieces really are what we would call archaeological pieces. So they’re very small. They look brown, nowadays, various shades of brown, and they survive in various conditions. So sometimes you will have the actual fibers, the threads surviving, but sometimes they’re what we call mineralized, where they’ve been placed in the ground, mainly burials, but other contexts too, and next to a metal object. And as the metal object has changed, the chemicals of that object have changed in the ground, they’ve leached into textiles and the embroidery. And while the fibers have disappeared, disintegrated, these chemicals have kind of a casing that show you what was there.

So, we have that type of material evidence. But then we have evidence from things like St. Cuthbert’s shrine, where you have these beautiful surviving pieces. But then you have the Bayeux Tapestry. Of course, that’s why I finish my period in 1100 and not 1066, which has survived, well, I mean, it’s just survived everything, really. It’s amazing that it’s come down to us the way it has. We don’t know how long it was originally, but it survived at just over 68 meters now. So it’s huge, really is.

So that’s your material evidence. But then you have documentary sources. And sometimes they are very specific and they will write about gold work or something else, in or they’ll be describing something. And that’s very much from the later period, items that are given to churches or ecclesiastical centers, things like that. But sometimes you can read between the lines and you can get hints of what was there.

You also have art historical sources as well. So, you get these lovely illustrations in manuscripts. And sometimes you get carvings that were crosses or other sculptures and monuments. And you can see things through those as well. And it’s, this is one of the things I love about my period and what I study, because it’s about putting all of that together and then reading between the lines and approaching it from so many different angles that you can uncover lots of different aspects to it.

And that’s also why archaeological theory is a good thing, because that gives you a way in. So, for example, the set, using what we call sensory archaeology, where you think about embroidery through the senses, or something called, oh gosh, it was there, it begins with E, it’s just gone.

Entanglement theory, where you look at all the different ways in which things can come together and mix up and then move on their journeys, and object biography theory, which tells you the story of an object. And that they all give you different ways into looking at these small surviving examples and of telling their stories, really.

Sarah Kernan 10:30

Do you think that your experience as an embroiderer kind of gives you some advantage over other scholars in the past in looking at these items, and your experiences actually knowing how to perform the craft and what stitches might have been used in certain places, or something along those lines?

Alex Makin 10:49

So, I wouldn’t say an advantage, being correct here. I would say it enables me to look at things differently. But yeah, definitely. Because sometimes people will look at something and they’ll say, oh it’s been made like this, because they know the theory of it. But actually, when you’re able to make it and then you re-create it, you realize, well, no, it can’t have been made like this because it doesn’t work. The practicalities of what is being suggested don’t work.

Or, the equipment isn’t right for making it in that way, both textiles and embroidery. There’s also things that you find where you think, oh, yes, this is this stitch. It’s definitely made that way. And then you analyze it on the actual piece and you realize, and then you do a bit, and you realize, no, it wasn’t made like that at all. They had a completely different way of making this stitch that we work in a certain way today. So it gives you, I think it gives you other openings and ways of looking at things that perhaps people who haven’t got that practical side wouldn’t do automatically, let’s put it that way.

Sarah Kernan 12:01

Are there other challenges that you face when you’re trying to re-create some of these historic embroidery items or methods, things like the types of fabric or thread or the dyes that are used? Is any of that a hurdle or just a challenge as you are working on these projects?

Alex Makin 12:22

So, yes, I’m hesitant to say a hurdle or a challenge in the sense that, for me, when I’m looking at creating a piece, I know that I need things that, materials, that are as closely related to the originals as possible. And when I say related, so the spin, and the dyes used, how it’s being woven and things like that. And that’s because when things are, let’s take, for example, dyes. When fibers are dyed with chemical dyes, the fibers react differently to how they’re dyed with natural pigments. And then the dyeing processes that are involved will alter the yarn, the finished yarn, et cetera, again on top of that.

If it’s not just about re-creating something that looks the same, which is fine, in some circumstances that’s all you need. And I don’t know, say for example, you want something to hang in a museum exhibition so that people have a visual understanding of what an object looks like, then that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you are trying to understand the properties of the fibers and the materials you’re working with and how they worked with certain needles and equipment, and then how that affected the embroiderers and how they were working and thinking about things, then you need things to be as close to the originals as possible. And so that’s why I go down that route and commission fabric and threads and things.

Sarah Kernan 13:59

That’s an excellent segue into my next question. What are you learning from re-creating these items? What are you learning about the materials and the techniques and the cultural context and significance of these items from your re-creations?

Alex Makin 14:14

So, for me, it’s really interesting because when I first started this, it was about exploring really, how these things were created, and the processes involved in that. And it and it’s still that up to a point. But what I hadn’t anticipated was the fact that for people who don’t embroider, this is going to sound really weird, but for people who do craft or bake or things, they’ll know what I mean. When I sit there and I do these embroideries, you kind of get in the zone and you find yourself getting into the embroiderer’s mindset, obviously up to a point. Because I mean, I live in, you know, in a house with central heating and nice lighting and all of this kind of thing.

But you find yourself just, I’m thinking of when I did the Cuthbert maniple, the segment that I re-created from that, and I was doing this the gold work, the background couching. And you just really get into that, into the zone, where you don’t really need to think about that. And I was thinking, well, this is how the early medieval embroiderers would have been thinking about it. And they could have been doing this, and they would have known the materials worked this way. And that’s, oh, and that’s why they stitched it like this, and oh, and that’s why this has turned out like that.

And that’s what intrigues me more now, is the fact that I can sit down if I’m not disturbed and I’m in the right frame of mind. I can begin to think a little bit like the embroiderers themselves and understand the decisions they made and the fact that their fibers and threads and needles were working in this way. And that’s why they did it the way they did. And I love that, really more so, I shouldn’t say this, more so probably than just re-creating the piece.

Sarah Kernan 16:01

Could you share any particular moment, maybe, or a project where working directly with creating a textile or embroidery technique revealed something very unexpected to you?

Alex Makin 16:16

I think the one that sticks in my head and comes to mind most is that re-creation of part of the St. Cuthbert maniple. So, I went into that with a number of aims. So, the amazing Elizabeth Plenderleith had analyzed these embroideries and her report was published back in the 1950s in a huge volume. It’s famous among people who like Durham and St. Cuthbert and who study our period. It’s a volume edited by Battiscombe. And she didn’t make, she just analyzed. And I can’t, nobody really knows her background, really, apart from the fact that she was married to Harold Plenderleith, who set up and ran what was then the science lab at the British Museum.

And the embroideries had been sent down there for cleaning and she had the opportunity to analyze them. I mean, how cool is that, really? So she wrote this report. I mean, it’s an excellent report, but she wrote things, in particular, about the fact that the silk threads that were used for the filling, filling in the clothes and the faces of figures and things, were flat threads, they were floss. And then she says that the threads, the silk threads used to outline these areas, were slightly twisted and they were a completely different thread.

And you take that at face value and you think, yeah, okay, that makes total sense. But then when I was doing the embroidery, I was thinking, well, the measurements that she gives for that thread, the outline thread, are not really double the width of the single flat thread, which is what it would be, if it was two threads twisted together, which is what she’s saying it was. And the twist, the way the thread was spun, it wasn’t regular. And if it had been spun into a yarn like that, the spin and then the ply would be regular. Why is that the case?

And so I was working with this and I realized that it wasn’t a completely different thread at all. They were using the same type of thread that they had used for the filling, but double. And then they weren’t consciously twisting it and before they were working it. The irregular twists and ply that was happening, was happening because of the way as an embroiderer, you turn the needle. So, I’m sorry this is a podcast because you can’t see me. I’m actually mimicking, turning the needle as I talk. They regularly turn the needle as they’re making the stitches. And that created exactly the same thread that you see on the original pieces. And for me, that was just like, you just wouldn’t know that.

Alex Makin 19:05

You wouldn’t even think about that, would you, unless you were making it? So that was one thing. The other thing was, I said originally I had some specific aims and I never told you what they were, but one of those was, Plenderleith talked about the gold thread that was couched, that was stitched in place, for the background on the maniple and the stole.

And she said that it had this weird, the holding stitches, had this weird interlocking thing going on on the back, which isn’t normal. And so she did a sample with completely different threads, much larger scale. And she was saying, this is inevitable. It’s just the way it works. You know, there’s, they didn’t do it on purpose.

So, I was thinking, well, is that true? Because you’ve got to, for me, you’ve got to use materials that, as I said before, are close to the original as possible. And so, I was doing the stitching and she was right. It is just the way threads are worked. And it’s because you sew two gold threads to one strand of thread on the ground fabric. Whereas nowadays we don’t stitch, we only stitch, well, don’t stitch one gold thread to one thread on the ground fabric. You just put them up next to each other and then sew them down.

It was interesting that, yes, she was right. Her experiment was correct. And that was one of the things that I was looking at. But it was also, it told you so much more about the way the embroiderers were working and the ground fabric and how that was interacting with the gold threads and things like that, which I also found quite fascinating.

Sarah Kernan 20:41

Your work has been engaging both academic and public audiences, broader audiences, especially your work re-creating the embroidery, and I’m thinking of your YouTube videos here. You have produced both traditional scholarship on re-creation and analysis and peer-reviewed items, but you have these YouTube videos. And how do you approach making and this craft when you’re creating content for a wider audience that is not academic at all, as opposed to creating content for a solely academic audience?

I will put little note here. I know nothing about embroidery and I find your YouTube videos absolutely fascinating. I just started watching one and I just got so sucked in for quite a while watching all the stitching on both the back side and the front side. I mean, it’s just beautiful to watch you working and to see something come to life out of just some fabric and thread. You just have this image come to life. So how are you thinking about creating that content and engaging people like me who know nothing about that?

Alex Makin 21:58

So, it’s funny, really, because, you know, I’ve never really thought about it in detail before. And so, for me, I treat academic audiences and the general public the same, when it comes to the kind of content. It’s just that, I think that there are certain people around the world who are interested in this sort of thing, and they can’t access academic publications for lots of different reasons.

And the idea for the YouTube was to enable that access and to enable that people to engage with that without having all those barriers in place. And for it not to be dumbed down, but to have intelligence and discussions about it. And so, when I create those videos and I’m chatting over the top and things, a lot of that is a stream of consciousness coming out. And sometimes like when I’m there editing it afterwards, I say, oh my God, that is complete drivel. But you know, I leave it in and hope for the best. But it is about giving people that same information and data, but in, like I said, in an accessible way.

And when I write these things up for academic publications, writing is a different medium. So you don’t have those images and you can’t embed videos into a journal article or a book. So that makes a difference. So the way you write things is very different. I don’t write my videos. I know a lot of YouTubers will script their things out beforehand. I don’t do that because I don’t know what the embroidery is going to say, or so to speak. And I don’t know what my brain’s going to think when I’m actually doing the stitching.

So, it is more of a stream of consciousness. And I do sometimes use that to inform things that I’m then going to write about later on. So, it’s a two-way, I think it’s a two-way process, really. And it’s about, as I say, getting it out there to a wider audience, getting people interested in this sort of thing. And, and treating people like they’re intelligent. There’s no question that’s too silly.

So, I don’t mind, I mean, I am rubbish at replying at the moment because I’ve got a lot on, but I do try and answer questions. And I do say in the videos, you know, ask these questions. No question is too silly. That’s what it’s all about, really. That doesn’t answer your question, does it? Sorry.

Sarah Kernan 24:24

Well, it does. And I really like the idea that you are really trying to bring the same information to a broader audience and kind of remove some of those barriers and these videos are a really great way to do that. It is making a lot of what might be difficult to understand in writing very clear when you’ve seen it demonstrated right in front of you in a video. I certainly wouldn’t understand reading a description of some of these stitches and the output. But when I’m seeing it on the screen and you doing that, it makes total sense.

Alex Makin 25:00

You know, it’s funny you say that, actually, because I have had academic friends watch the videos and have actually said that it does complement the written descriptions and things that they perhaps they innately know because of their discipline, but actually seeing it does change their perspective on the way they perhaps understand what’s been on the written page, not just by me, but by other people as well.

Sarah Kernan 25:27

Yeah, I think reading something about the historical consequences of what you’re doing, or the context of what you’re doing, that that can make more sense in writing, but actually seeing the embroidery happen and seeing what you’re doing, it just comes to life in a very different way.

Could you talk a little bit about your current project that you’re working on, that you’re leading, “Entangled Textiles: Senses, Connections, Power in the Early Medieval North Atlantic (450-1100 CE).” The description on your university page, it sounds incredible. And I’d love for you to just briefly give us an overview. And I know you’ve only been working on it for around a year, or less than a year now. But if there’s anything that you have, any ideas or discoveries that are emerging at this point, I’d love to hear about it.

Alex Makin 26:20

Yeah, so well, I can give you the background to it. So, before I started at Man Met, Manchester Metropolitan University, I was a postdoctoral research associate. And that’s a step that once you’ve done a PhD, you can go on to do this, be a postdoctoral researcher, or you can go, if you’re able, you can get a job within a university. But most people now do this postdoc step.

So, I was ah a postdoc researcher on a Arts and Humanities Research Council-, that’s a big funding body over here in the UK, funded project called “Unwrapping the Galloway Hoard.” And this was hoard that was found in the area of Dumfries and Galloway in what’s now Scotland. But it was probably buried around 900 CE. And at that time, that area was part of the kingdom of early medieval Northumbria. And it’s a very special hoard because the contents of it, is very mixed and different to, let’s say, all other hoards, really, that we know about. And as part of that, there were different textiles within it. And that’s what I was doing in my, as my part of the project. I was analyzing and writing about these textiles. And one of them was a wool fabric and it went off to be radiocarbon dated.

And it came back as being around about 100 years older than when the hoard was buried. So, this is really exciting, obviously. But it got me thinking because it reminded me of another piece of textile that was probably an apron strap on like a pinafore-type dress that was found in a female burial in Iceland. Please don’t ask me to say the name because I would just ruin it. But I can give the link to the article.

Sarah Kernan 28:12

Absolutely, we’ll put it in the show notes, yes.

Alex Makin 28:15

Brilliant. And then people can read it properly. And this piece of wool was radiocarbon dated and it, too, was and around about 100 years old when it was put in the ground within this female burial.

And so, as the way my brain works with these things, I was like, well, what’s going on here? We know textiles were precious. They were one of the most expensive things that people owned because of the time involved and the effort involved in producing them. And we know that they were in circulation for a long time and that they would be recycled and reused and handed down until they were no longer of viable use.

But the fact that these were that old, 100 years old, so you’re looking at a good few generations, to me, pinged in my head, and made me think, well is there something else going on here at this time? Are there certain textiles out there that are in circulation and being held within female contexts? So let me explain that a bit more. Obviously the female burial in Iceland, obviously female gendered, but the Galloway hoard…The amazing Mary Davis, who was another person on the research project, she was doing a lot of research on different aspects of it. And she realized that quite a lot of, not all, but quite a lot of the objects within a certain part of the hoard, within which this wool textile was part, had female connotations and female gender linked to them.

In my head, I was thinking, well, is there something going on here where you have certain, probably wool, textiles that are being kept in circulation within the female community and have they got special meanings and things associated with them? So, I think the examples we all know are named swords. You know, you’ve got King Arthur’s Excalibur, you’ve got the swords in Beowulf, to name some of the famous ones. And they’re named and these swords have their own histories and biographies and powers. And they have to be given to the right person. And if they’re not given to the right person, disaster ensues, you know. But when the right person gets them, everything tends to go well and amazing feats of whatever occur.

And I was wondering, well, okay, could textiles, certain textiles, be a sort of female equivalent to what’s going on with these swords? And they are, they’re woven, they are gathering stories to them, and as they’re passed from one person and one generation to another, they’re gathering more mystique and supposed power around them. And, I mean, with the Galloway Hoard, for example… Other examples of this type of woven textile are found in different parts of what’s now England.

Alex Makin 31:23

And so this particular textile has travelled a long way. And you can imagine the further it travels away from where it was made, the more mystery and power and mythology can surround it. And so, therefore, I think, wondering, well, is this a form of soft power that’s being wielded, and how does this fit into early medieval society? And is this giving women a tangible way of controlling the world that they didn’t understand because they didn’t have the science that we have today?

Yeah, like I say, a soft form of power within a very masculine world. Well, as we view it today, a very masculine world. And so, that’s how the project started. And now I’m reading about different types of textile to see if I can find ones that I think, oh, that could be one.

If they’ve been radiocarbon dated and they give a nice date, that would be fantastic. If not, I’m hoping that maybe I will be able to talk the owners, the institutions who own these things into doing little radiocarbon dating. Always a bit of a discussion needed around that sort of thing. And a lot of the time they’ll say no for obvious reasons, but you never know. And to see if there’s any pattern. Obviously, we’ve got to work with the surviving textiles, which are very small in number.

Alex Makin 32:39

But I’m also going back across the sources, so primary sources from the period, reading, rereading them from this point of view to see if anything pops out. And I’m going back through work that people have published to see if there’s anything that that comes out from that as well.

I started last November. That’s when I started my job at Manchester Met. But as everyone knows, when you start a new job, lots of other things kind of crowd in the way. So, I’m not working on it all the time because of everything else that I’m doing. And then there was another, I don’t know what to call it really. Well, I’ll just tell you what happens and then you call it what you like.

So, at Christmas, an academic friend sent a Christmas card saying, oh, congratulations on your new job. Your new project sounds really exciting. But I had said that the women curate these textiles. And in my head, I kind of know what that means. But she said, I don’t believe women ever curated textiles. And I was like, oh, OK, that’s an interesting concept.

I don’t agree with it. And we’ve had a laugh about it since. But was like, I don’t agree with that statement. But actually, what do we mean by curate? Because this individual is coming more from a museum kind of background, really. And I assumed that’s what she meant, but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was thinking about curate a different way.

Alex Makin 33:57

So I’ve actually gone off on a massive tangent to try and find out, well, what do I mean by curate? Because I now think I need to add a whole chapter about the idea of curation. And I’ve discovered that from an archaeological perspective, the word curate is not a good word. And it’s avoided quite a lot. Or they use it in italics and then skip on to the next bit, but don’t explain why they’ve put it in italics. But I’m hoping to get back on course very soon. So I think it’s a case of watch this space. And I haven’t really got any results to tell you. I’m so sorry.

Sarah Kernan 34:29

No, no. I think the detour sounds very interesting to explore the word curate in this particular context and the implications for archaeological research and methodology. I think that’s really interesting.

Alex Makin 34:45

Yeah, yeah, it is, because there’s a whole thing that goes on about how things can be heirlooms. And things can be relics. And the word curate is used more often with things that are relics, that people seem quite comfortable with that sort of thing. And obviously the word is used within museum contexts and things like that.

But the idea of curating something just generally within everyday life seems to cause a bit of, let’s say, a bit of a stumbling block within people the way people think about things. So, we’ll see. I’ve kind of gone with the Oxford Dictionary’s very broad definition of what curate is for now, and then if something pops up or if I can come up with a different explanation then that will send off on another tangent. But at the moment let’s hope we’re going back to the main road now.

Sarah Kernan 35:35

Well, if I could end with one final question. What advice would you give anyone, but particularly students and researchers, interested and incorporating hands-on craft and making into their research practices?

Alex Makin 35:53

Just do it. Just, yeah, just, yeah, just get on with it, and do it. Because, there is a lot of theory out there about experimental archaeology. It doesn’t really talk about embroidery, though sometimes it includes weaving. A lot of it is aimed at ceramics or lithics or building structures and things like that. That’s really useful background and important, as well, because you need to embed your work within a theory, even if, say, on YouTube, I don’t talk about the theory because I don’t think people are interested. But if they are, then I will do an episode on theory.

But for me, it depends what your research questions are. So if it’s something about how do the materials work, how did they react when they’re being manipulated, the kind of things I’m interested in, you need to be using research. I mean, it took me a year to find the right threads and materials and somebody who could weave the fabric for the Cuthbert maniple project. And that was a lot longer than I anticipated. But, in the end, I got the right materials. And I hope that the results that have come through that project now are as accurate as they can be as a result of that.

I know there’s a cost implication in that. So, look up small funding bodies who will give you grants to help you with these things. There are these groups out there who will give small grants to help fund it for you to get the right materials and the right equipment. Join groups like EXARC, exarc.net. That has a lot of practicing experimental archaeologists and historians in there. Talk to people about their approaches and why they do things the way they do, as well. But overall, it’s be brave and just dive in there because you never know where it’s going to end. And you might take some steps back and go, oh, that one was rubbish, I’m going to rework it, or that didn’t turn out how I expected. That’s, well, that’s not a bad thing. And it’s all about that learning experience and building up confidence.

Sarah Kernan 38:01

That is such a great way to end today. Alex, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Alex Makin 38:07

Well, thank you for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Sarah Kernan 38:10

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

Recipes to Remember: Coriander, Gallyngale, and the Legacies of the Lost

By Lucy Mookerjee

Originally composed for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Beyond Shakespeare blog, this primary source highlight from Lucy Mookerjee, a Research Fellow at the Folger, invites the reader to think beyond the study the recipe as a set of instructions to be performed, and to consider the recipe itself as a generative composition with much to tell us about origin and loss, remembrance and ignorance, revival and rebirth.

A detail of a painting of Ophelia semi-submerged in water with flowers around her.

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies,

that’s for thoughts.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV Scene 5

On learning of her father’s death, Ophelia, the heartbroken heroine of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, falls into a “weeping brook” and quietly allows herself to drown (4.7).  While modern scholarship has tended to construe Ophelia as ‘feminist heroine; critics in the Victorian period perceived Ophelia as a deranged ‘madwoman’; not only has she lost her father and her lover, but she has also lost her mind. In the words of Hamlet’s mother, she is “incapable of her own distress” which is to say: she has forgotten her ‘self’ (4.7). It is curious, then, that the “sweet flowers” – pansies, forget-me-nots, rosemary sprigs –which surround her in the famous Pre-Raphaelite painting, and which are frequently referenced in the play, should have a long history as symbols not of loss, but of memory.

The term pansy comes from the French pensée, meaning “thought” or “remembrance”. Legend has it that forget-me-nots are named after a medieval knight who died while picking the delicate flower for his lover and spent his last breath crying out: “Forget me not!” In Ancient Greece, students wore circlets of rosemary to school to increase their capacity to remember their lessons.

While memory-enhancing herbs have a rich legacy in symbolism, the evidence of herbal consumption – though less studied – is well represented in the historical record. Recipes for memory-boosters surface in early modern manuscripts in the form of charms, spells, and medical treatises. Hundreds of these recipe books — digitized and transcribed into Modern English — can be found here.

The Receipt Book of Margaret Baker (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.619), compiled in 1675, contains a recipe for a memory-potion called “Confect of Coriander Seed” and provides step-by-step instructions for a brew to “helpe the memorie … by comforting of the braine.”

Manuscript receipt book.
The Receipt Book of Margaret Baker. Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.619.
To read more of Lucy’s post about remembrance and recipes, visit the Folger Library’s Shakespeare & Beyond blog.

My Charming Ancestor: Lost Spells and Sick Cattle

By Catherine Flood

My 6x great grandfather, Timothy Butt, was a charmer. I discovered this recently when I came across a copy of a manuscript he wrote in a box of family papers.[i] Mostly a day book of accounts for his farm in Tillington, Sussex, it also contains a collection of thirty veterinary recipes, dated 1768.[ii] Amongst these, are two verbal charms, one for restoring a bullock that is ‘sprung’ (meaning poisoned in Sussex dialect) and the other for a bullock bitten by an adder.

Searching for some local context to this find brought me to an account of charmers and charming in the village of Fittleworth – just five miles from where Timothy Butt farmed – published by the folklorist Charlotte Latham in 1878. This includes a description of “an ancient dame” who had inherited a verbal charm for snakebite and another for curing giddiness in cattle from her mother, but had lost them both in later years when she moved houses (presumably they were written down). “Much did she grieve,” we are told, “over the loss of her viper charm; it had done such a power of good.”[iii]

Charm ‘For a Bullock that is Stung with an Adder’ in Timothy Butt’s book, 1768. Reproduced with permission of West Sussex Record Office.

It is not impossible that this lost charm was one and the same as my ancestor’s spell for snakebite, or a version of it. If this ancient dame was born around 1800, her mother could easily have known him.[iv] More pertinently, the old woman’s regret at losing it demonstrates that charms were important possessions. While they were commonly practiced for the benefit of the community as a whole, only a few knew and performed the words and restrictions applied to how they were transmitted.[v] It also demonstrates the ease with which such folk texts, carried in the memory or written on ephemeral materials, could disappear. According to Jonathan Roper, Timothy Butt’s book is one of only five known examples of a charmer’s book in English to survive, making it a significant document for the study of English verbal charms.[vi]

The snakebite charm itself appears to be a highly abbreviated, perhaps corrupted, example of a narrative charm that relates a micro-story (or ‘historiola’) in which a powerful protagonist confronts a snake that has bitten his servant and obtains a cure.[vii] The flesh and blood patient is healed by implication. While there is no space in this post to analyse the texts in detail, I reproduce them here in full since neither charm has been published in the last hundred years.[viii] I recommend muttering them aloud to appreciate their ‘incantatory force’ achieved through alliteration and repetition (especially the sibilant s’s used for addressing the snake).[ix]

For a Bulluck that is Sprung say these Words
Our Blesed Saviour for his Sons Sake Pray Down the Bladder
Blow that he may break In the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Blessed Trinetey Saved may this Black
Bulluck be— or let the Coller be what it will, Name it
Then say the Lords Prayer and so Say it three times

For a Bullock that is Stung with an Adder
take Salt and fresh Grees & anoint the Beast from the heart
then say these Words — Simon Joan Hunt Why Wouldest
Thou thy Sarvant thou Stungest thou my man. I wish it
was thy man. Take Salt and Smare and lay to the Speer
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Gost. Amen

As well as being a rare example of a charmer’s book, Timothy Butt’s manuscript is also notable for its veterinary focus.[x] Only one recipe for ‘eye water’ is noted as being adaptable for ‘a Christian.’ The charms are interspersed with the physical remedies and, on the basis of the collection as a whole, we should probably consider Timothy Butt as much a cow doctor as charmer; one whose medical arsenal evidently included powerful words together with kitchen physic, exotic spices, and strong chemicals.

The charm for a ‘sprung’ bullock is probably intended for curing ‘the blain,’ an often fatal cattle disease in which small black blisters or ‘bladders’ appeared at the root of the animal’s tongue. Early modern veterinary books are ambivalent about the cause of this disorder, but it was generally thought to be the result of ingesting ‘some poisonous thing.’[xi] The remedy they recommend is to ‘break’ the bladders between finger and thumb, or lance them with a sharp knife. This was a risky operation and the charm offered a less invasive method of ‘praying down’ the dangerous blisters.

Two of the recipes are attributed to neighbours, which suggests the others probably derived from family tradition. Timothy Butt hailed from a long line of yeoman farmers. Born in 1743, he was 25 years old and establishing a family of his own at the time he wrote down the recipes (he and his wife Jane went on to have at least 19 children). It seems likely that the creation of this collection represents a passing on of knowledge from one generation of animal caretakers to the next.

Inula Helenium, Elecampane, paper collage by Mary Delany, 1778. Elecampane, also known as horse-heal, was a herb widely grown in Sussex gardens for medicinal and veterinary purposes. Following the logic that like cures like, it appears in one of Timothy Butt’s recipes for the ‘yellows’ (jaundice) along with other yellow flowers and spices (celandine, turmeric, and saffron).
British Museum (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1897-0505-466). Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum.

Furthermore, the recipes are concerned entirely with the larger and more valuable farm animals: oxen (or ‘bullocks’), horses and occasionally pigs. This probably reflects a gendered division of labour whereby the farmer’s wife would have been responsible for the medical care of the family, the dairy cows and the smaller animals around the farmyard, while the farmer tended to the animals who worked alongside him in the fields and forests in plough teams and timber tugs.[xii] Oxen remained the most important source of draught power in Sussex in the late 18th century and are named in over half of Timothy Butt’s recipes. The fact that one third of the recipes are also for strains and injuries is suggestive of the physical toll this labour could exact.

Sussex Oxen, hand coloured etching, 1808. Oxen often worked in the same pair for life. A team of six to eight pairs was used to pull a plough in Sussex. 
Wellcome Collection (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/uztak924)

The animals themselves remain mute in these recipes. Only in one instruction to apply a plaster of pitch, tar, and clay ‘hot as the bullock can abide,’ do we get a hint of the animal as a responsive agent in the healing process. When it comes to charming, it can be even trickier to account for the animal, since the verbal nature of the medium tends to focus attention on the thought-world of the human participants. And yet the performance of a charm could involve sounds, substances, and touch, becoming an embodied experience for both charmer and non-human charmee. The snakebite charm, for instance, calls for ritually anointing the beast ‘from the heart’ with salt and fat. It is not impossible to imagine that intentional touch and the whispering of words may have comforted both the charmer and his beast during a medical crisis. Charming, indeed, could provide rich ground for the study of human-animal relations in the early modern period.


Notes:

[i] The original is held in West Sussex Record Office, Add Mss 1593.

[ii] Timothy Butt was the tenant farmer at Grittenham Farm, just over a mile to the west of Tillington village.

[iii] Charlotte Latham, ‘Some West Sussex Superstitions Lingering in 1868,’ Folk-Lore Record,1 1878: pp. 36-37.

[iv] Jonathan Roper notes that charms in the English cultural tradition sometimes show a greater continuity over the years than from place to place in the same period of time; Jonathan Roper, ‘Towards a Poetics, Rhetorics and Proxemics of Verbal Charms,’ Folkore, 24, 2003: pp. 27.

[v] See for example Owen Davies, ‘Charmers and Charming in England and Wales from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century,’ Folklore, 109, 1998: pp. 42-43.

[vi] Jonathan Roper, English Verbal Charms, Helsinki, 2005: pp. 174.

[vii] I have found two other variations of this charm-type, both recorded in the nineteenth century, which shed more light on the narrative. See Henry George Nicholls, The Personalities of the Forest of Dean, 1863. The Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature, 17, 1885: pp. 121. The cryptic words ‘Simon Joan Hunt’ in Timothy Butt’s charm may represent an extreme abbreviation/corruption of the scenario of the historiola in which someone goes hunting/into the woods.

[viii] Timothy Butts charms were published in Sussex Archeological Collections, 52, 1908: pp. 187-9, and Notes and Queries, 1922 twelfth series, 11: pp. 147.

[ix] ‘Incantatory force’ is a phrase used by John Miles Foley in ‘Epic and Charm in Old English and Serbo-Croatian Oral Tradition,’ Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook 2. Cambridge: 1980: pp. 82.  

[x] In a study of seventy-five seventeenth and early eighteenth century recipe books in the Wellcome Collection, Louse Hill Curth found only 11 containing veterinary recipes. Louise Hill Curth A Plaine and Easie Waie to Remedie a Horse: Equine Medicine in Early Modern England, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013, pp. 191.

[xi] Michael Harward, The Herdsman’s Mate, Dublin, 1673: pp. 33-4.

[xii] See for example Louise Hill Curth, The Care of Brute Beasts: A Social and Cultural Study of Veterinary Medicine in Early Modern England, Leiden, 2009, pp. 69.