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Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 282 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-58366-2 £68.00 (hb). & £22.50 (pb).
Renaissance Studies Pub Date : 2020-09-15 , DOI: 10.1111/rest.12681
Mark Jenner 1
Affiliation  

Not long after I started teaching in universities, a street-smart, course-weary colleague advised me that if you're leading a seminar on early modern medicine and discussion dries up because nobody has done the reading, you should distribute extracts from an early modern compilation of medical recipes and get the students to do an in-class exercise. Even the most disengaged or disenchanted group, she explained, generally responds when they learn that the best cure for sore heels was to flay a live mouse and apply its warm skin to the afflicted part, and that swigging a drink concocted from horse dung would sooth internal bruising. My colleague's advice to use these texts in order to shock, awe and provoke now seems distinctly unimaginative as well as faintly cynical. While some of the content of recipe collections can strike modern readers as weird, dangerous or cruel, their form is strangely familiar to twenty-first-century eyes. These anthologies of advice seem to prefigure all those YouTube videos telling you how to bleach eyebrows, cook quinoa, or fix a boiler, which are shared across contemporary social media. Moreover, in recent decades scholars have placed these manuscripts at the heart of innovative collective transcription projects and web-based palaeography courses, exploiting their rich potential for pedagogy and public engagement.

Elaine Leong's densely documented and clearly-written monograph, the distillation of many years of archival and library-based research, demonstrates how far recipe books and recipe collections, so long the Cinderellas of the stacks, can enrich our understanding of early modern household management and medicine and illuminate the economies of knowledge in Stuart England. Examining the passages which Historic Manuscripts Commission calendars skip over, it reveals how gentlemen and women discussed best practice in turkey fattening, eye wash preparation and beer production, sending each other numerous suggestions for improvement, and reporting regularly on the success or otherwise of these experiments. Leong documents how medical advice was garnered from friends, family, neighbours and experts, and reconstructs a world in which the maintenance of familial health was closely entwined with more general household management. Crucially, she stresses that the evaluation of practical experience – testing and trying out, seeing if this additional ingredient improved the efficacy of a salve or if boiling the wort made the beer better – were at the heart of this activity. She draws out parallels between this kind of collaborative empirical labour and the work of men like Robert Boyle and their invisible technicians. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge further pays close attention to the varied inscription practices by which these manuscript recipe books came into being. It shows that writing and recording, compilation, transcription and annotation were all essential to the ways in which the makers of recipe collections perfected natural knowledge. Having elaborated the affinities between ‘recipe trials’ and ‘early modern experimental histories’, the book also demonstrates how they were not synonymous: a thought-provoking chapter reveals how some of these manuscripts were a kind of family history, passed on and expanded across generations. And it concludes by tracking the constant dialogue between manuscript and print collections of remedies and recipes – in this period the former were neither supplanted by the latter nor autonomous from them.

Recipes and Everyday Knowledge is an extremely impressive piece of scholarship. Chicago University Press has produced it well, including legible illustrations, and has priced it accessibly. However, it is also curiously self-contained. Although it describes itself as a book which ‘builds on and extends current conversations in … important historiographical movements’ (5), and fulsomely acknowledges authors who have developed the paradigms in which it is working, it rarely considers, let alone confronts, alternative accounts of science or medicine in early modern England. For example, Leong's analysis is largely synchronic. Nowhere does she explain how she sees her work in relation to studies like Ian Mortimer's, which argue that seventeenth-century England witnessed the triumph of commercial healthcare, or to authors like Hal Cook who present the spread of non-European materia medica as the era's leitmotif. Only readers who are really well versed in the previous historiography would recognise the distance between this account of recipes and Mary Fissell's loosely Foucauldian discussion in Patients, Power and the Poor (1991). Moreover, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge makes little mention of politics, piety or patronage. Puritanism, Roman Catholicism, Latitudianism, the Civil War, the public sphere – all the politico-religious themes and movements which so many scholars have suggested shaped the content of natural knowledge and the patterns of medical practice – feature in neither the index nor the analysis. As there is documentation about the religious beliefs and political opinions of at least some families and individuals who make up Leong's case studies, it is a little frustrating that the book so often brackets off these other parts of their lives. Consequently, it says less than it could about the political implications of those little commonwealths, the households which these manuscripts helped to regulate. However, such cavils and reservations should not obscure the significance of this study. Early modern specialists will learn much from this book; it can also serve as an excellent primer for advanced undergraduates and masters students wanting to do research in this field.



中文翻译:

Elaine Leong,食谱和日常知识:现代早期英格兰的医学、科学和家庭。芝加哥和伦敦:芝加哥大学出版社,2018 年。282 页。 ISBN 978-0-226-58366-2 £68.00 (hb)。& 22.50 英镑 (pb)。

在我开始在大学任教后不久,一位学识渊博、厌倦课程的同事告诉我,如果你正在主持一个关于早期现代医学的研讨会并且讨论因没有人阅读而枯竭,你应该分发早期的摘录现代医学食谱汇编,并让学生进行课堂练习。她解释说,即使是最不投入或心灰意冷的群体,当他们了解到治疗脚后跟痛的最佳方法是剥活老鼠的皮并将其温暖的皮肤涂抹在患处时,通常也会做出反应,而喝一杯从马粪中调制的饮料会缓解疼痛内部瘀伤。我的同事建议使用这些文本来震惊、敬畏和挑衅,现在看来显然缺乏想象力,而且有点愤世嫉俗。虽然食谱集的某些内容可能会让现代读者觉得奇怪、危险或残忍,但它们的形式却出奇地为 21 世纪的人所熟悉。这些建议选集似乎预示着所有那些告诉你如何漂白眉毛、烹饪藜麦或修理锅炉的 YouTube 视频,这些视频在当代社交媒体上共享。此外,近几十年来,学者们将这些手稿置于创新的集体转录项目和基于网络的古文字学课程的核心,利用它们在教学和公众参与方面的丰富潜力。在当代社交媒体上共享。此外,近几十年来,学者们将这些手稿置于创新的集体转录项目和基于网络的古文字学课程的核心,利用它们在教学和公众参与方面的丰富潜力。在当代社交媒体上共享。此外,近几十年来,学者们将这些手稿置于创新的集体转录项目和基于网络的古文字学课程的核心,利用它们在教学和公众参与方面的丰富潜力。

Elaine Leong 的详细记录和清晰的专着,是多年档案和图书馆研究的精华,展示了食谱书籍和食谱收藏品,如此长的灰姑娘堆栈,可以丰富我们对早期现代家庭管理的理解和医学并阐明斯图尔特英格兰的知识经济。检查历史手稿委员会的段落日历跳过,它揭示了绅士和女性如何讨论火鸡育肥、洗眼液准备和啤酒生产的最佳实践,互相发送大量改进建议,并定期报告这些实验的成功与否。Leong 记录了如何从朋友、家人、邻居和专家那里获得医疗建议,并重建了一个维持家庭健康与更一般的家庭管理密切相关的世界。至关重要的是,她强调实际经验的评估——测试和尝试,看看这种额外的成分是否提高了药膏的功效,或者煮沸麦汁是否使啤酒更好——是这项活动的核心。食谱和日常知识进一步密切关注这些手稿食谱书产生的各种铭文做法。它表明,编写和记录、编辑、转录和注释对于食谱收藏的制作者完善自然知识的方式都是必不可少的。这本书详细阐述了“食谱试验”和“早期现代实验历史”之间的相似性,还展示了它们如何不是同义词:一个发人深省的章节揭示了这些手稿中的一些是一种家族史,在世代。它通过跟踪手稿和印刷品和食谱的手稿之间的不断对话来结束——在这个时期,前者既没有被后者取代,也没有独立于它们。

食谱和日常知识是一项非常令人印象深刻的奖学金。芝加哥大学出版社制作精良,包括清晰易读的插图,并且定价合理。然而,奇怪的是,它也是自成一体的。尽管它自称是一本“建立在……重要的史学运动中的当前对话之上并对其进行扩展”的书(5),并充分承认开发了其工作范式的作者,但它很少考虑,更不用说面对,替代性叙述现代早期英国的科学或医学。例如,梁的分析在很大程度上是同步的。她无处解释她如何看待与伊恩·莫蒂默 (Ian Mortimer) 之类的研究相关的工作,这些研究认为 17 世纪的英格兰见证了商业医疗保健的胜利,也没有解释像哈尔·库克 (Hal Cook) 这样呈现非欧洲医疗保健传播的作者本草作为时代的主旋律。只有真正精通以前的历史编纂的读者才会认识到这种食谱描述与玛丽·菲塞尔在《病人、权力和穷人》(1991)中松散的福柯式讨论之间的距离。此外,食谱和日常知识很少提及政治、虔诚或赞助。清教、罗马天主教、纬度主义、内战、公共领域——许多学者提出的所有政治宗教主题和运动塑造了自然知识的内容和医疗实践的模式——既没有出现在索引中,也没有出现在分析中. 由于至少有一些构成梁的案例研究的家庭和个人的宗教信仰和政治观点的文件,因此这本书经常将他们生活的其他部分置之不理,这有点令人沮丧。因此,它对那些小联邦的政治影响说得很少,这些手稿帮助规范了这些家庭。然而,这样的批评和保留不应掩盖这项研究的意义。早期的现代专家将从本书中学到很多东西;它还可以作为想要在该领域进行研究的高级本科生和硕士生的优秀入门读物。

更新日期:2020-09-15
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