Global Recipes in the Early Modern World: Ingredients, Actors, Exotica

Day 1: 29 May, Spaces and Sources

9:00-9.30: Introduction and Greetings, Lavinia Gambini (Cambridge) and Lucy Havard (Cambridge)

9:30-11:00: Domestic Spaces, Chair: Mary Laven (Cambridge)

Olin Moctezuma-Burns (Cambridge)
Interwoven Scripts of Healing: Maya and European Textual Traditions in the Yucatec Household

Lucy Havard (Cambridge)
‘To make Ginger bread’: Exotic Recipes in the Early Modern English Kitchen

11:30-13:00: Substances in the Microcosm, Chair: Joshua Nall (Cambridge)

Antonia Belli (UCL)
Dis-Assembling Recipes in the Giustiniani Medicine Chest

Amelia Hutchinson (Cambridge)
Philipp Hainhofer’s Networks of Medical Knowledge (c.1600-1630)

14:30-17:30: Writing and Transmitting Recipes, Chair: Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin (Cardiff)

Sheryl Wombell (Cambridge)
The Global and the Local in William Cavendish's 'booke of rare minerall receipts', c.1647-54

Chloe Fairbanks (Oxford/Warwick)
‘Traffic and travel’ in Early Modern Culinary Writing

Leonie Rau (MPIWG Berlin)
Soaps, Salts, and Stains: Collecting Recipes for Stain Removal in the Pre- and Early Modern Arab Mediterranean

Giorgia Maffioli Brigatti (Cambridge)
Poetics and Politics of Perfumery: Ghāliya’s Global Relevance

17:30-18:30: Keynote: Dror Weil (Cambridge)
Moving an Episteme – Some Insights into Cross-Cultural Movement of Recipes in Early Modern Eurasia
Respondents: Federica Gigante (Cambridge) and Gastón Javier Basile (I Tatti/MAP)

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Day 2: 30 May, Movements

10:00-12:00: Travelling Substances, Chair: Gastón Javier Basile (Harvard I Tatti/Medici Archive Project)

Serin Quinn (Warwick)
Transferring Tomatoes: Early Modern Spanish Recipes and the Incorporation of Indigenous American Knowledge and Practices

Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh (Cambridge)
Ginseng or Kanna? Cross-Contextualising Archives, Naturalising the Globe, and Globalising Natures

Francesca Richards (Kent)
The Transfer, Transformation, and Incorporation of Mediterranean Coral in early modern English Recipes

13:30-15:30: Travelling Recipes, Chair: Philippa Carter (Cambridge)

Bethan Davies (Roehampton)
Syrups, Salves, and Ships: A Domestic and Global Recipe

Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore (ISI, Florence/Bologna)
Recipes of Theriac as a Domestication Technology

Fikri Cicek (Minnesota)
Potable Gold for a Shared Disease: Transferring Chemical Medical Recipes from Renaissance Europe to the Ottoman Empire (on Zoom)

15:30-16:30: Final Remarks

Organisers: Lavinia Gambini (Cambridge) and Lucy Havard (Cambridge)

Contact: globalrecipes2024@gmail.com

The organisers thank the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM), the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS), the Society for Renaissance Studies (SRS), and the George Macaulay Trevelyan Fund (Faculty of History, Cambridge) for their generous support.

Image: Egbert van Heemskerck (1634/5-1704), Operators letting blood from the arm of a woman in a room crowded with pharmacy jars (detail), date unknown, London, Wellcome Collection, 44757i (Public Domain Mark).