Elaine Leong - Böcker

Across early modern Europe, men and women from all ranks gathered medical, culinary, and food preservation recipes from family and friends, experts and practitioners, and a wide array of printed materials. Recipes were tested, assessed, and modified by teams of householders, including masters and servants, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons. This much-sought know-how was written into notebooks of various shapes and sizes forming “treasuries for health,” each personalized to suit the whims and needs of individual communities.  In Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Elaine Leong situates recipe knowledge and practices among larger questions of gender and cultural history, the history of the printed word, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. The production of recipes and recipe books, she argues, were at the heart of quotidian investigations of the natural world or “household science”. She shows how English homes acted as vibrant spaces for knowledge making and transmission, and explores how recipe trials allowed householders to gain deeper understandings of sickness and health, of the human body, and of natural and human-built processes. By recovering this story, Leong extends the parameters of natural inquiry and productively widens the cast of historical characters participating in and contributing to early modern science.

Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period.This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief.Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.

Secrets played a central role in transformations in medical and scientific knowledge in early modern Europe. As a new fascination with novelty began to take hold from the late fifteenth century, Europeans thirsted for previously unknown details about the natural world: new plants, animals, and other objects from nature, new recipes for medical and alchemical procedures, new knowledge about the human body, and new facts about the way nature worked. These 'secrets' became popular items of commerce and trade, as the quest for new and exclusive bits of information met the vibrant early modern marketplace. Whether disclosed widely in print or kept more circumspect in manuscripts, secrets helped drive an expanding interest in acquiring knowledge throughout early modern Europe. Bringing together international scholars, this volume provides a pan-European and interdisciplinary overview on the topic. Each essay offers significant new interpretations of the role played by secrets in their area of specialization. Chapters address key themes in early modern history and the history of medicine, science and technology including: the possession, circulation and exchange of secret knowledge across Europe; alchemical secrets and laboratory processes; patronage and the upper-class market for secrets; medical secrets and the emerging market for proprietary medicines; secrets and cosmetics; secrets and the body and finally gender and secrets.

Working with Paper builds on a growing interest in the materials of science by exploring the gendered uses and meanings of paper tools and technologies, considering how notions of gender impacted paper practices and in turn how paper may have structured knowledge about gender. Through a series of dynamic investigations covering Europe and North America and spanning the early modern period to the twentieth century, this volume breaks new ground by examining material histories of paper and the gendered worlds that made them. Contributors explore diverse uses of paper—from healing to phrenological analysis to model making to data processing—which often occurred in highly gendered, yet seemingly divergent spaces, such as laboratories and kitchens, court rooms and boutiques, ladies’ chambers and artisanal workshops, foundling houses and colonial hospitals, and college gymnasiums and state office buildings. Together, they reveal how notions of masculinity and femininity became embedded in and expressed through the materials of daily life. Working with Paper uncovers the intricate negotiations of power and difference underlying epistemic practices, forging a material history of knowledge in which quotidian and scholarly practices are intimately linked.

Secrets played a central role in transformations in medical and scientific knowledge in early modern Europe. As a new fascination with novelty began to take hold from the late fifteenth century, Europeans thirsted for previously unknown details about the natural world: new plants, animals, and other objects from nature, new recipes for medical and alchemical procedures, new knowledge about the human body, and new facts about the way nature worked. These 'secrets' became popular items of commerce and trade, as the quest for new and exclusive bits of information met the vibrant early modern marketplace. Whether disclosed widely in print or kept more circumspect in manuscripts, secrets helped drive an expanding interest in acquiring knowledge throughout early modern Europe. Bringing together international scholars, this volume provides a pan-European and interdisciplinary overview on the topic. Each essay offers significant new interpretations of the role played by secrets in their area of specialization. Chapters address key themes in early modern history and the history of medicine, science and technology including: the possession, circulation and exchange of secret knowledge across Europe; alchemical secrets and laboratory processes; patronage and the upper-class market for secrets; medical secrets and the emerging market for proprietary medicines; secrets and cosmetics; secrets and the body and finally gender and secrets.

Since the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s the history of Renaissance medicine has been radically transformed, with older narratives stood on their head as concepts and categories for research have been re-thought. At the core of this change – for the period now familiarly referred to (not insignificantly) as ‘early modern’ – stands an epistemological reconsideration of the production of natural knowledge, and of power in relation to the core of medicine’s subject, the human body. Additionally, at issue are the origins of modernity itself. Building on the foundations of this historiographical transformation, the essays in this volume elaborate, refine and challenge what are now standard interpretations in the study of medicine and the body in the early modern period. They broaden the scope of study through exploration of the contact zones between European knowledges and practices with other indigenous cultures. They draw attention to the riches of early modern material and visual culture as they take stock of how key epistemological notions for the study and practice of medicine, such as ‘experience’ and ‘authority’, were shaped and redefined. Moreover, essays on such topics as food, animals, environment, and mind and brain demonstrate how the cultural turn has revived and given new urgency to themes long central to the study of sickness and health. Wetting appetites and distilling the recent past, these essays work collectively to remind readers that the ‘cultural turn’ is far from over.

Top the TOEFL is a TOEFL book like no other. It recognizes an essential key to the problem: students who struggle with the TOEFL have problems mastering English. Hence, while other TOEFL books teach strategies with long wordy explanations that hardly make sense to the average student, Top the TOEFL focuses on teaching students in the most intuitive way possible: examples.Each unit is systematically broken down to make it simple for any student to Top the TOEFL. First, "Simple Steps" are condensed at the outset for easy reference. Next begins "Elaboration with Examples" — a section where the "Simple Steps" are put into practice. The unit concludes with the "TOEFL Trainer" which divides exercises according to the "Simple Steps", allowing students a chance to directly put the strategies to practice rather than just throwing students into the deep end by providing a full set of TOEFL practice tests.

Top the TOEFL is a TOEFL book like no other. It recognizes an essential key to the problem: students who struggle with the TOEFL have problems mastering English. Hence, while other TOEFL books teach strategies with long wordy explanations that hardly make sense to the average student, Top the TOEFL focuses on teaching students in the most intuitive way possible: examples.Each unit is systematically broken down to make it simple for any student to Top the TOEFL. First, "Simple Steps" are condensed at the outset for easy reference. Next begins "Elaboration with Examples" — a section where the "Simple Steps" are put into practice. The unit concludes with the "TOEFL Trainer" which divides exercises according to the "Simple Steps", allowing students a chance to directly put the strategies to practice rather than just throwing students into the deep end by providing a full set of TOEFL practice tests.

Top the IELTS is an IELTS book like no other. It recognizes an essential key to the problem: students who struggle with the IELTS have problems mastering English. Hence, while other IELTS books teach strategies with long wordy explanations that hardly make sense to the average student, Top the IELTS focuses on teaching students in the most intuitive way possible: examples.Each unit is systematically broken down to make it simple for any student to Top the IELTS. First, "Simple Steps" are condensed at the outset for easy reference. Next begins "Elaboration with Examples" — a section where the "Simple Steps" are put into practice. As an added bonus, actual student work is included in the elaboration section to reveal the common mistakes made by IELTS-takers. The unit concludes with the "IELTS Trainer" which allows students a chance to directly put the strategies to practice rather than just throwing students into the deep end by providing a full set of IELTS practice tests.