Lyn Bennett – författare

Describing how to pickle beef, make a low-cost substitution for sugar, waterproof a coat, or treat kidney stones, eighteenth-century settler recipes recorded a wide range of processes essential to daily life. Early Modern Maritime Recipes offers a compendium of culinary, medicinal, and domestic recipes from before 1800 that point to the many ways knowledge was preserved and circulated in the Atlantic world.Drawn from newspapers, letters, diaries, and notebooks held in archives of the northern Wabanaki territories – the region French settlers called Acadia and later named New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island – the collected recipes reflect the needs and practices of an eighteenth-century English-speaking population, revealing much about how settlers grew and prepared food, treated ailments, cared for animals, controlled pests, and maintained their households. Each recipe is Introduced with an explanation of its origins and followed by detailed analysis focusing on sources, ingredients, and techniques. Tracing the integration of Indigenous, African, and other non-European knowledge into settler cultures, the book highlights the many intersections of domestic life with social networks and political power.Richly detailed and historically grounded, Early Modern Maritime Recipes documents the cosmopolitan quality of settler household knowledge, revealing that the history of settler domesticity is never far from the history of colonialism.

How did physicians come to dominate the medical profession? Lyn Bennett challenges the seemingly self-evident belief that scientific competence accounts for physicians' dominance. Instead, she argues that the whole enterprise of learned medicine was, in large measure, facilitated by an intensely classical education that included extensive training in rhetoric, and that this rhetorical training is ultimately responsible for the achievement of professional dominance. Bennett examines previously unexplored connections among writers and genres as well as competing livelihoods and classes. Engaging the histories of rhetoric, medicine, literature, and culture throughout, she goes on to focus specifically on the work of women who professed as well as practiced medicine. Pointing to some of the ways women's writing shapes realities of body, mind, and spirit as it negotiates social, cultural, and professional ideologies of gender, this book offers an important corrective to some long-held beliefs about women's role in early modern discourse.