Workshop: Recipes and Recipe Books Across Manuscript Cultures

The Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC)  in cooperation with the DFG-Emmy Noether Research Group ‘Patterns of Knowledge Circulation’ (FU Berlin) cordially invites you to a workshop on  Recipes and Recipe Books Across Manuscript Cultures.

Recipes are most generally associated with lists of ingredients, accompanied by a set of instruc- tions for their use. They have recently experienced a surge of scholarly interest, particularly in the context of the changing epistemes of early modern Europe. Transformations in the modes of knowledge transmission in the European late medieval and early modern periods prompted a rise in the popularity of recipes and recipe compilations. Therefore, recipes and recipe compila- tions may serve as indicators of the premodern world’s tendencies to record and transmit the experiential type of knowledge.

This workshop will zoom in on the handwritten recipes and recipe books as a textual and mate- rial format through which knowledge was made and often circulated across cultures. It considers recipes in a variety of knowledge contexts and with various foci: medicinal and pharmacological, artisanal and technical, alchemical, magical, culinary, and so forth. Furthermore, it will focus on the textual structure of recipes—understood both as generic formulas and specific prescrip- tions—in close connection with the materiality of the manuscripts in which they are contained, thus considering materiality as a crucial aspect in a cross-cultural analysis of practices of making and transmitting knowledge. The centre of our interest is the relation between the modes of knowledge transmission and the type of knowledge that is transmitted: what was the role of handwritten recipes in the epistemic shifts that occurred across various cultural milieus? Taking a comparative perspective, the workshop will look for possible common patterns in recipes and recipe collections across manuscript cultures.

Programme and abstracts

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