Disease, Diet, and Decoction: Recipe Books and Medicinal Practice in Early Modern Transylvania (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In early modern Transylvania, providing family members with sanative care – from identifying ailments to preparing basic remedies to treat or prevent them – fell within the established practice of a woman running a household, one of the foremost sites of health-promoting activities. Healing and the maintenance of health were quotidian concerns entwined with culinary and other household activities. This study examines the salient characteristics of household recipe practices in the principality, drawing together sources that have not been previously considered in relation to one another. Attention is given in particular to seventeenth- through mid-eighteenth-century recipe collections of influential noblewomen whose writing, collecting, and exchange of medically-themed recipes comprised part of their activities of providing home-based sanative care. Household recipe collections, as a form of protracted thinking, also functioned as venues for intellectual practice and self-representation. Because recipes were an important part of the vernacular medical literature, their study offers indispensable insights into the period’s medical culture and the non-canonical actors who helped shape it.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Angela Gazda is a scholar of east central Europe whose current work focuses on the history of science, especially early modern medicine.