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The Wonders of Unicorn Horns: Preventions and Cures for Poisoning
Johanna St John’s Book, Credit: Wellcome Library, London In Johanna St. John’s recipe book, the mysterious “Banister’s Powder by Dr Bates” lay nestled between the equally intriguing “Mrs Archers way of...
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Some “Fishy” Remedies for Madness and Melancholy
By Pamela Deagle Johanna St. John’s recipe book contains many interesting and unusual recipes on the treatment of madness, melancholy, and fits of the mother early modern. These recipes offer clues to...
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A Bag of Worms: Treating the Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720
By Hannah Newton Parents today are all too familiar with the problem of worms in children. Tiny, threadlike creatures, they cause terrible itching. How did parents in the past respond to this common...
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The Recipe Collection of the Last Medici Princess
By Ashley Buchanan Two summers ago in the state archive of Florence I discovered, filed under the heading of “miscellaneous Medici,” a simple sleeve which held a collection of over 200 recipes that...
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Oral Testimony and Remedies Over Time
By Alun Withey When studying the history of recipes, the longevity of certain remedies, ingredients or substances in healing is often striking. In terms of the early modern period, it is often remarked...
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Wot’s fer dinna luv? Yer favrit, stuffed dormouse!
By Thony Christie The British Museum has a new exhibition on Pompeii and Cambridge classicist and current media star Mary Beard has been doing the rounds of the English press writing entertaining...
View ArticleTo Make Muske Cakes
By Casey Mitchell From a cultural perspective, odd foods are a common occurrence in the world today. Individuals from America might be horrified to eat something as foreign as monkey brains–a delicacy...
View ArticleCurdled Milk in the Breast: Take II
I was so intrigued by Jennifer Park’s post on curdled milk and Shakespeare that I decided to look whether there were Greek and Roman precedents. As I read Jennifer’s post, I could not recall any...
View ArticleA Post-Summer Solstice Round-Up of Blog Posts
This post does not fall within the strictest definition of “recipes”, but since it was just the summer solstice, the best time of year for magic and pagan celebrations, it seemed like an appropriate...
View ArticleEating of curds and whey: rennet in ancient medicine
Last month, I examined the issue of ‘curdled milk in the breast’ in Greek and Roman medicine. The texts I quoted all used the words ‘cheesy’ (turōdēs) or ‘to make cheesy’ (turoō) – they did not refer...
View ArticleThe Recipe Collection of the Last Medici Princess
By Ashley Buchanan Two summers ago in the state archive of Florence I discovered, filed under the heading of “miscellaneous Medici,” a simple sleeve which held a collection of over 200 recipes that...
View ArticleOral Testimony and Remedies Over Time
By Alun Withey When studying the history of recipes, the longevity of certain remedies, ingredients or substances in healing is often striking. In terms of the early modern period, it is often remarked...
View ArticleRecipes for the Dogs in the Eighteenth Century
By Lisa Smith Dog-owners: ever wonder about the care of your faithful companions in times past? You’ll be glad to know that animal health recipes regularly appeared in early modern recipe books. Animal...
View ArticleGender Testing in Antiquity
By Laurence Totelin In my last post for this blog, I examined the role of rennet (in particular, seal’s rennet) in Greek and Roman medicine. As it often happens in research – or at least in mine – once...
View ArticleCivet and Rose: (Early) Modern Perfume Ingredients Fit for a King
By Colleen Kennedy Civet was one of the most exotic luxury ingredients in early modern perfumes. This odoriferous secretion comes from the perineal glands of the civet cat of Asia and Africa to mark...
View ArticleHydrophobia and madness: eighteenth-century recipes against Rabies
Recently, I came across an eighteenth-century ‘cure’ for rabies in a Dutch medical handbook, consisting of onion boiled with salt and honey.[1] As I had recently been vaccinated against rabies for a...
View ArticleCold, dry and bald
By Laurence Totelin A few months ago, I read with fascination – and surprise – a post by Jennifer Evans on the treatment of baldness in the early modern period. According to one of her sources (William...
View ArticleCock Ale: “A Homely Aphrodisiac”
By Joel A. Klein In a stanza from, “The Young Gallants Tutor, Or, An Invitation to Mirth,” an especially lusty song from the 1670s, the anonymous author praised several particular beverages: “With love...
View ArticleHorse love pills
By Laurence Totelin In the seventh century BCE, Semonides of Amorgos wrote his now infamous poem on the races of women, each one worse than the next. The mare-woman is perhaps my favourite, the...
View ArticleCharms on Twitter
By Laura Mitchell I decided to do something a little different for this post. Rather than write about what I find interesting about charms, I asked Twitter what people wanted to know about medieval...
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