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