1,720,982 research outputs found
A medicine for the Archduchess of Innsbruck
No full textBy Sietske Fransen, with Saskia Klerk. Two months ago Saskia Klerk discussed a recipe for the breaking of a bladder stone. It seems that the author of manuscript BPL3603 included this recipe into his collection because of the wonderful curative properties it proved to possess according to the eyewitness accounts documented in the text. On pages 117 and 118 of the same manuscript we find an ‘Excellent recipe against all ailments and diseases that have their origin in corrupt blood and bad humo..
Van Helmont on the Plague, Again!
No full textBy Sietske Fransen, with Saskia Klerk A few weeks ago Saskia Klerk introduced the Leiden manuscript BPL 3603 to the readers of this blog. This recently acquired manuscript has a pencil-written remark on the flyleaf by a modern cataloguer with the inscription 'Van Helmond's Recepten'. We can safely assume that this refers to the seventeenth-century physician Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644) and/or his son Franciscus Mercurius (1614-1698). Father and Son van Helmont, frontispiece in Dager..
Conference Report: Materia Medica on the Move, Leiden, 15-17 April 2015
No full textBy Sietske Fransen What happens if you put together historians of early modern science and medicine, ethnobotanists, historians of pharmacy, and art historians in the Dutch National Biodiversity Center in Leiden? Last month this resulted in an amazing conference where we discussed the (global) movements of early modern materia medica. The conference was jointly organized by the Descartes Centre (Utrecht University), Huygens ING, and Naturalis Biodiversity Centre. The conference was hosted by ..
Recipes in the archives of the early Royal Society
No full textBy Sietske Fransen ‘What is a recipe?’ was the simple opening question asked by the organizers of the virtual conversation hosted by The Recipes Project. This month-long online discussion has made me look at the archives of the Royal Society with different eyes. During my weekly visits to the Royal Society Archives in London I am usually searching for anything visual from the period 1660-1710. Once found, the particular page of archival material with something visual on it is added to the Mak..
The Order of Things
No full textBy Sietske Fransen, with Saskia Klerk Today I want to go back to the first post in my series with Saskia Klerk (last post here) to consider in more depth the order in which recipes were written down in manuscript BPL3603. We initially mentioned that the recipes are initially ordered in alphabetical sequence. That, combined with the limited open space left in the book, made us think that the manuscript was carefully designed as a more or less final record of recipes. After a closer look, howev..
How to Translate a Recipe
No full textBy Sietske Fransen Have you ever tried to use a recipe in another language, for example from a foreign language cookbook or the internet? If so, then you probably have struggled with identifying some of the ingredients. Personally, I seem to have an eternal problem with cumin, in other languages, that is. As it is ‘komijn’ in Dutch, and ‘cumin’ in English, it always traps me that the German ‘Kümmel’ is not the thing I am looking for. Even more confusingly, Kümmel seeds looks very similar to c..
How to Translate a Recipe
No full textBy Sietske Fransen Have you ever tried to use a recipe in another language, for example from a foreign language cookbook or the internet? If so, then you probably have struggled with identifying some of the ingredients. Personally, I seem to have an eternal problem with cumin, in other languages, that is. As it is ‘komijn’ in Dutch, and ‘cumin’ in English, it always traps me that the German ‘Kümmel’ is not the thing I am looking for. Even more confusingly, Kümmel seeds looks very similar to c..
Day 2: What is a Recipe?
No full textImage from Wikimedia.org Good morning everyone - got your coffee ready? Welcome to the second event day of our 'What is a Recipe?' virtual conversation. Join us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook today to further discuss all things recipes! We will be hearing from Sietske Fransen from the Making Visible Project (Twitter: @sietske_fransen and @MVCRASSH) Siobhan Carlson and her 'Spuddenly Farming' project (Instagram @SpuddenlyFarming; Twitter: @Spuddenly_Farm) Solveig Roervik's adventu..
Margaret DeLacy. <i>The Germ of an Idea: Contagionism, Religion, and Society in Britain, 1660–1730</i>. xviii + 305 pp., notes, bibl., index. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. £63 (cloth).
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