Recipes and Book Culture in England, 1350-1600 - (Exeter Studies in Medieval Europe) by Carrie Griffin & Hannah Ryley (Hardcover)

About the Book

Thirteen essays providing new perspectives on medieval and early modern recipes - short instructional texts on a variety of topics including medicine and cooking. Recipes survive in large numbers in manuscripts, and can not only reveal information about what's in the recipes themselves, but also literary practices, book materiality, and society in general.

Book Synopsis

Recipes are not just instructions. They also embody culture, class, belief, linguistic and literary form, and even include celebrity endorsement. Medieval and early modern recipes can be short and simple but sometimes are not - sometimes they work, and sometimes they do not. They can also be remarkably performative, imaginative, and playful. These essays explore recipes 1350-1600 from a range of perspectives and are unified by an interest in the complexity and richness of these texts.

This volume is the first of its kind. It presents new critical perspectives on medieval and early modern recipes, moving beyond concerns with utility to reframe recipes as part of a dynamic textual and intellectual culture. Contributors build on the sustained scholarly interest in recipes and bring fresh approaches to them. The thirteen essays explore topics including medical, culinary and domestic recipes and charms, as well as how they relate more generally to, for instance, book history, art, astrology and social practices.

Collectively, the essays reveal a distinctive book culture by exploring the material forms, literary and scribal practices of recipe books. This book is a significant contribution to these areas of study, increasingly central to scholarship in recent years.

Open Access versions of the following chapters will be available on publication on the Liverpool University Press website: Hannah Bower, The Brickmaker, the Tavern Keeper, and the Knight: The Role of Obscurity and Imagination in Medieval Medical Recipes and Katherine Storm Hindley, Bodies in the Recipe Collection: Interacting with Manuscript Charms in Late Medieval England

Review Quotes

"The arguments are in general very well presented for the general and specialised readers of the book... it is the first of its kind considering the recipe text as the point of departure for the analysis of recipe culture, and will surely become a landmark and a compulsory primary source for future approaches to the topic." Professor Javier Calle-Martín

'"Ffor to cutte an egge of a feelde". These adventurous essays are at the cutting edge of their field. They recover the recipes for cooking, craft, astrology, medicine and magic, in English, French and Latin of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They turn in detail to their origins in manuscript 'material texts', to learn how recipes were read in late medieval England. At the same time, they challenge ways of reading today, for genres often dismissed as 'non-literary'. These essays find that recipes not only prompt other acts of creativity--domestic, scientific and artistic; they are themselves full of verbal craft and immaterial imaginings. As well as offering discoveries about the medieval recipes, the chapters themselves are like diverse recipes or models for making practical writing into something serious and delightful. This book joins the current effort to expand and explode the canon of writings from medieval England.' Professor Daniel Wakelin

About the Author

Carrie Griffin is Associate Professor in medieval & early modern literature, University of Limerick.

Hannah Ryley is Lecturer in English, University of Oxford.