Helga Müllneritsch - Böcker

This collection represents a new and significant contribution to the study of recipe books from the early modern period (ca. 1500–1800) by situating them in a broader European context, traversing Catalonia, Finland, French and German-speaking regions, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and England. Ten essays, including a critical introduction to the genre, trace the materiality of the books and the use of the instructions therein, investigating patterns of recipe collection and their evolution over time; the international transmission of recipes, ingredients, and artisanal knowledge; and women’s manuscript culture. The authors explore how localised traditions of book production and domestic record-keeping shaped the physical forms of the books, and how stains, folds, marginalia, items pressed between pages, and pasted-in additions reveal their many uses. The inclusion of new ingredients and the integration of foreign recipes point to the many ways in which people, food, ideas, and books travelled the globe.

The question of what a manuscript cookery book is or can be is still far from settled. Based on detailed archival research, this book establishes a basic typology of manuscript cookery books, with a focus on the function they served in the life of their owners: memory aid, manual of practical instruction, book in its own right, and showpiece. The author also investigates the work situation of women through an analysis of the educational role of the manuscript cookery book and its function as a tool for the professional cook. It represents a substantial contribution towards closing gaps in knowledge and material relating to reading and writing in eighteenth-century Austria.

We think of the eighteenth century as the heyday of print culture, when the presses drove the ever more rapid circulation of information and argument among ever wider circles of the European population. But it remains the case that well into the nineteenth century all writing was done by hand. In fact the intensification of print culture with the rise of modern commercial society and state systems depended on an ever-increasing output of writing with pen and ink. At the same time, handwriting, and in particular the signature, came to be understood as an index of character ad authenticator if personal intent, whether it appeared on contracts, petitions or letters, or in the guest books and autograph books that recorded friendship. In acknowledgement of this, scholars have begun to focus on the interactions between print and manuscript forms. Studies of the ‘reading revolution’ have shone a light on marginalia – not simply evidence for reader reactions, but increasingly an object of study in themselves. And research in the history of authorship and publication between 1750 and 1850 is homing in on authorial practices that self-consciously combined manuscript and print forms. It is no longer possible to presume that print and manuscript practices and their persistence can help us to re-vision classical modernity, including the shifting border between the public and the private. This volume brings together new research by cultural historians and literary scholars that allows us to reflect on how a material approach to the uses of the pen might help us to understand the processes through which meaning and modernity were constructed in the long eighteenth century.