Of recipes, collectors, compilers and contributors
By Karin Zimmermann In my recent First Monday Library Chat interview, I described the wonderful collections within the Bibliotheca Palatina at the Heidelberg University Library. As you might recall,...
View ArticleThe wrong trousers? Common folk in striped clothes as readers of early modern...
By Tillmann Taape When trying to make historical sense of printed medical recipe collections, one tricky but important question always recurs: who did the author and/or publisher think would be likely...
View ArticleOnce it proved effective for noble men and women
By Sietske Fransen, with Saskia Klerk First of all, I owe you the result of a question I posted in my previous blog about the Leiden manuscript BPL3603. I wondered whether anyone could help me find the...
View ArticleAn Early Modern DIY Guide to Making Paper
By Gabriella Szalay After about half an hour of working it over everything was already so small and delicate that I could scoop, or rather make fine sheets out of it. These sheets allowed themselves to...
View ArticleThe Fruits of Summer in the Dead of Winter
Molly Taylor-Poleskey In the seventeenth century, life ebbed and flowed with the seasons. In my research into the court household of Berlin, I noted seasonal shifts in livery, lighting, bedtimes, and,...
View Article‘Thus it prevails against its time’: distillation and cycles of nature in...
By Tillmann Taape In past centuries, devoid of freezers and heated greenhouses, the seasons affected medicines as well as foodstuffs. In addition to pickled vegetables and stored grain, early modern...
View Article‘This one is good’: Recipes, Testing and Lay Practitioners in Early German Print
By Tillmann Taape Having recently finished my doctoral thesis on the printed works of Hieronymus Brunschwig, which have previously featured on the Recipes Blog (here and here), I am delighted to...
View ArticleThe Live Chicken Treatment for Buboes: Trying a Plague Cure in Medieval and...
By Erik Heinrichs While researching German plague treatises I became fascinated by one odd treatment for buboes that appeared again and again, despite sounding so far-fetched. One sixteenth-century...
View ArticleChristmas Cookies in Series: Recipe Booklets and the Annual Reinvention of a...
By Reinhild Kreis One of the early indicators that Christmas is just around the corner in Germany is the publication of Christmas cookies recipe booklets. Once it gets cold outside, readers are invited...
View ArticleThe Fire and the Furnace: Making Recipes Work
By Thijs Hagendijk While working on the Ars Vitraria Experimentalis (1678), the principle book on seventeenth-century glass, I came a across a peculiar remark. The author of the book, the German...
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