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The event is free; advance registration is required.
About the Event
Recipes were a thriving form of knowledge in early modern Europe. Broadly defined as simultaneously physical - usually paper - objects and descriptions of how to make something, recipes carried information between people, and were transmitted between texts. Medical recipes in particular were collected avidly throughout the period and had a high value as a form of prestigious social currency; only partly tied to their immediate curative value to the recipient, they were a vital element of the gift-giving culture of early modern Europe. This talk will unpack the material features and contents of the rich collection of seventeenth-century manuscript and printed recipes at the NYAM Library. A close reading of these collections offers new insights into the transmission and iteration of recipe knowledge between people, between formats, and across time, as well as the integration of recipes into everyday material experience. In turn, it reveals a great deal about the wider and interlinking themes of mobility, materiality, and temporality in early modern European cultures of health and healing.
Click here more information on The Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship in the History of Medicine and Public Health.
About the Speaker
Sheryl Wombell is a doctoral student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and Wolfson College, Cambridge. Her research examines the production, management, and circulation of medical knowledge amongst exiled and mobile English elites in the mid-seventeenth century. In November 2024, she will take up a one-year Freer Prize Fellowship in the History of Science at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, supporting the completion of her thesis, entitled Navigating Health and Healing in a Seventeenth-Century Network of Displaced Elites.
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