Helping Hands: Two Seventeenth Century Recipe Books and the Distillation of the Scientific Revolution

This study looks at two seventeenth-century medicinal recipe books, those of Anne Glyd and Lady Mary Dacres, that provide examples of how medical knowledge was recorded and used domestically after the revival of print recipe collections in the 1650s. The network evident in Anne Glyd’s book provides one example of how communal social and familial networks influenced recipe collection and how medical knowledge was distributed among women. The recipe book of Lady Mary Dacres offers an example of the how recipe books could be collaborative instead of being authored in isolation. Dacres’ work also reflects the domestic connection to the medicinal marketplace through its use of apothecaries. Because the study of recipe books is embryonic, my study provides two examples for future scholarship on the study of recipe book networks and connections to the medical marketplace.