1. This book includes both English and North American recipes and manuscripts, concentrating on the Atlantic world rather than strictly on England. It considers how recipes were translated to new geographical areas, showing how recipe manuscripts adapted to new environments after arriving in new places. It treats recipes, not just ingredients, as subject to the effects of travel. 2. With an emphasis on medical recipes, the argument addresses not just new ingredients but the impact those ingredients were perceived to have on English bodies and their immediate health. 3. This book brings attention to a wide variety of manuscript recipe books that have not received extensive scholarly treatment, but which have recently been made available online. Using feminist and ecocritical approaches alongside recent historical work on early modern trade and commerce, this volume focuses on early modern manuscripts whose travels can be traced from one location to another. It illustrates how recipes came to blend newly encountered ingredients and practices with long-established healthcare methods. In the process, it offers attention to both the English countryside and the American colonies to expand what is often a London-centered view of English healthcare. Tracing the circulation of women's domestic knowledge and considering the availability of ingredients, this work shows how mobility brought new methods and materials to home healthcare, which in turn influenced how women and their families envisioned their relationships to their environment, their bodies, and their nation.
List of Figures, Acknowledgments, Introduction: Recipes on the Move,
Chapter 1: Local Waters and Notions of Home in Early Modern Recipe
Manuscripts,
Chapter 2: North and South and Middle Countries are Proud in
this Lady: Lady Grace Castleton's Recipes and Women's Mobility,
Chapter 3:
Considering the Starter Collection: Fanshawe, Family, and Imported Knowledge,
Chapter 4: Keeping English Bodies: Preserving, Seasoning, and Englishness in
Early Virginia Recipes,
Chapter 5: Traveling Diseases, Imported Cures:
Rheumatism and Sassafras in Home Medical Manuscripts, Epilogue: The Travels
of The Great Cordial, A Note on Conventions, Bibliography, Index.
Hillary M. Nunn is Professor of English at The University of Akron. With Madeline Bassnett, she edited the collection In the Kitchen, 15501800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). She is a co-founding member of the Early Modern Recipe Online Collective and author of Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Tragedy in the Early Stuart Era (Ashgate, 2005).
