The Dispersal of Domestic Scientia: An Epistemological Exploration of Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Book

This thesis dissects the handwritten seventeenth-century household recipe books of several women to delineate a domestic epistemology and situate such knowledge systems within the dominant intellectual trends of the Scientific Revolution in seventeenth-century England. Comparisons with contemporary chemical recipes highlights the "recipe" as an epistemic genre, practiced by female household practitioners and elite academics alike. The gradual displacement of Galen's theories by those of Vesalius and Paracelsus resulted in the untwining of the previously intertwined concepts of "medicine" and "food"; this was embodied in the organization of the household recipe books. Furthermore, this conceptual splintering facilitated the monopolization of medical knowledge by elite institutional actors, thus removing such knowledge from the home and its female practitioners. A recodification of gendered practices and places reified the boundaries between the domestic and the scientific, the kitchen and the laboratory, and the feminine and masculine in seventeenth-century England.