Comments on: Review of Elaine Leong’s Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England

By: Kevin Twohig

Kevin Twohig — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 12:49:08 +0000

Hi Michelle, great review! Your emphasis on the use of archival material in the form of actual recipe books and manuscripts resonated with one of my big takeaways from the book. I think what is most fascinating and quite different from what we have read so far has been the way that this archival material has been utilized to draw larger conclusions about the practices and reality of early modern English households. Leong’s use of these manuscripts helps to widen the narrative beyond the everyday experimentation of English gentlemen to include women and servants and their roles in household sciences whereas other works we have read have usually used archival material to hone in on particular men of science, such as Kepler, Harriot, and Sloane, and/or specific aspects of “scientific” practice and the time in which it happened such as with Poison Trials. As your review notes, Leong’s efforts largely widened the scope and discussion of scientific practices and recordings from an everyday perspective to include other actors, particularly women, without compromising generalizations about women and the way they participated in these practices.

By: Alexa Shipes

Alexa Shipes — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 17:01:39 +0000

I really found this book interesting. The connections you make between the poison trials and the medical trials in the household caught my interest, especially seeing how the latter were more akin to modern clinical trials. I also found it interesting how veterinary remedies were included alongside remedies meant for humans, but early modern England was an agrarian society with few industrial areas. By the nineteenth century, England was an industrial society with few agricultural areas. The fact that remedies were included alongside culinary recipes also caught my attention. Were the authors of these recipes trying to make the remedies more palatable for patients? Or was it a simple case of the ingredients overlapping? I was interested in how many of the plants used in these medicines would be regarded as toxic nowadays. Conversely, how many of the plants used in the remedies are used in medicines today? If they are used in medicine today, that would prove their efficacy in treating the conditions prescribed by the recipes.