Recipes and Book Culture in England, 1350-1600 (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

Recipes survive in huge numbers in manuscripts that circulated amongst a wide variety of readers in medieval and early modern England. This volume is the first collection of essays dedicated to recipes in this period. It brings together new critical perspectives from scholars working on different types of recipes, charms, and related short texts, highlighting in particular what fresh insights and provocations focused attention to recipes can bring to medieval and early modern studies. After all, many aspects of medieval recipe culture continued to be used and/or influential in the early modern period. Like recipes themselves, the chapters here range across a broad spectrum, but are unified by a concern with the complexity of these short texts, and with what recipes can reveal about a whole range of issues including literary practices and matters related to scribal culture and book materiality, questions that have been increasingly central to medieval and early modern studies in recent years. The thirteen essays explore topics including medical, culinary and domestic recipes, as well as how they relate to book history, art, astrology and society more broadly.