Receipt books and the politics of food in early modern English women's writing
Abstract
In this discussion of printed and manuscript receipt books and women's literary writings,
I show that a political discourse of food existed in early modem England, and that women
were participants in this discourse. Over the course of the seventeenth century, receipt
books communicated increasingly identifiable political perspectives, supporting or
detracting from current regimes in prefatory material and even in recipes themselves.
Frequently gendered, with the promotion of receipt books to women, and the
establishment of women as integral to hospitable entertainment, the food discourse of
receipt books is simultaneously adopted and developed by women writers of the period.
The puritan advocacy of maternal nursing provided by Dorothy Leigh and Elizabeth
Clinton, Countess of Lincoln, Lady Mary Wrath' s promotion of a Protestant plain-style
dining practice in her romance the Urania, the use of food and fasting in the pamphlets of
sectarian women Sarah Wight and Anna Trapnel, and the focus on hospitality in the
diaries and memoir of Lady Anne Clifford and Ann, Lady Fanshawe reveal that food
discourse is complexly integrated with numerous other cultural, social, and political
concerns. The performance of the court, the practice and guidelines of hospitality and
religious belief, the influx of foreign and novel foods, interpretations of health and
physiological function, and visions of national identity all come into play as women turn
to food to express their own dissatisfactions with current regimes, from James I to
Charles II. Although rooted in domesticity, food and its rituals become important
rhetorical indicators of women's critical engagement with the political sphere