By the RP Editorial Team
We are delighted to share that Melissa Reynolds’ book, Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (University of Chicago Press, 2025) has won the John Ben Snow Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS).
Awarded to the best book by a North American scholar in any field of British Studies, and dealing with the period from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, Reynolds’ book represents the first time a work on recipes has won this prize. With our ongoing support for scholarship on recipes — any time period, any place in the world — the Recipes Project is thrilled by this news, which represents a significant achievement for our field. We are even more excited because Melissa Reynolds is part of our RP Editorial Team!
Reading Practice was described by the prize committee as “a remarkable exploration of the complex interaction between manuscript and print publications about ‘natural knowledge’—medical recipes, almanacs, herbals, and pictorial prognostications.” The committee particularly praised the ways that the book speaks to and engages with many different subfields, including book and reading history, manuscript studies, gender history, business history, and studies of nature and the environment. As anyone who studies recipes knows, this is one of the many reasons why they are such valuable resources to writers, scholars, food professionals, and students; recipes connect and speak to so many aspects of human life.
Want to learn more? (Of course you do, the book is fabulous.) You can order a copy of the book here. You can also look through our archives — the RP has featured Reading Practice in our New Work Forum, with contributions from Grace Murray writing about “Print and Continuity,” alongside Nikianna Dinenis reflecting on “The Uses and Abuses of Medieval Manuscripts,” and Caleb Prus discussing “Medical Manuscripts.” And Melissa herself wrote a response to these pieces, reflecting on her own process of writing the book in “Continuing the Conversation.” You can also get a glimpse of Melissa’s early thinking about the book in her very first post for the RP from 2019 — “But Does it Work? Playful Magic and the Question of a Recipe’s Purpose” — which shares a lighthearted look at recipes from medieval manuscripts that seem to promise silly, funny, or outright magical things…all while offering readers a real sense of the medieval mindset and a reflection on our own modern assumption that a good recipe is one that “works” the way we expect it to.
Congratulations to Melissa and to Reading Practice! Well deserved recognition for a shining piece of scholarship.






