Preserving on Paper

Apricot wine and stewed calfs head, melancholy medicine and "ointment of roses." Welcome to the cookbook Shakespeare would have recognized. Preserving on Paper is a critical edition of three seventeenth-century receipt bookshandwritten manuals that included a combination of culinary recipes, medical remedies, and household tips which documented the work of women at home. Kristine Kowalchuk argues that receipt books served as a form of folk writing, where knowledge was shared and passed between generations. These texts played an important role in the history of womens writing and literacy and contributed greatly to issues of authorship, authority, and book history. Kowalchuks revelatory interdisciplinary study offers unique insights into early modern womens writings and the original sharing economy.