Welcome to our exhibition website.

The Baker Project is the result of our three term interaction with Margaret Baker, an early modern woman who wrote a recipe book. Or that is what we first thought.

Since collaboratively transcribing, discussing, exploring and reconstructing what we have found within the pages of this extraordinary manuscript we now have a better understanding of the chemical, medicinal, alchemical, social and familial workings of the early modern household. We still cannot however, give a definitive answer to the questions most scholars still ask, that of 'What actually is a recipe?'

Our HR650 university module, The Digital Recipe Book has also seen us interact with EMROC the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective where scholars are now recognising recipe books and manuals of household management as a valuable untapped resource.

We have taken part in 'blogging' - new to some of us, and been able to participate in the flourishing community of scholars who write online about the history of recipes—and an even larger community of non-academics who are just interested in reading about the topic. This has given us, through our module an excellent opportunity to participate in conversations with the wider scholarly community and the general public. It also offered us the opportunity to experiment with a different writing form and develop our own voices in new ways.

We have also been transcribing Baker's manuscript and it has proved to be a useful research skill and transcribing live, online forced us to read even more closely than we would otherwise. For an insight into what it was like for some of us to take part in a virtual transcribathon see Abbie and Tracey's blog post.

We have also had access to the following links to help with our exploration of Baker:

Transcribe Baker - Our private Facebook group where we can chat with students at UTA and PSA.

Digital Recipe Books Project - Our module blog!

Dromio - where we did our transcribing.

Oxford English Dictionary Online - a great resource in trying to identify a historical usage of a word! Accessed through academic portals or, often, through your UK Library.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online first stop in trying to identify a historical person in Britain and Ireland, although there are fewer women listed. This was accessed through academic portals and through your UK Library.

Historical Texts - access to thousands of early modern primary sources through the Sloman Library. Contemporary pharmacopoeia, herbals, medical treatises and recipe books (among other things) all useful in tracking down references to foodstuffs, herbs and medical practices.

Wellcome Library Digital Recipes - great for images and digitized early modern recipe books.

Wellcome Library Images - a large collection of copyright-clear images that can be useful for the study of food and medicine. (There are many other institutions that have made their images copyright-clear, as well.)

Folger Shakespeare Library - The Folger has digitized a large collection of early modern recipe books.

All contributions to this website have been the students own work and the result of group and virtual group collaboration.

Abbie Burnett - Web administrator/Design

Abbie Burnett/ Meriel Morgan - Technical Advisors

Alex Boon - Contributor/Editor

Tracey Cornish - Contributor/Editor

Felix Wills - Contributor/Editor

Faye Glover - Contributor/Editor

Florence Hearn - Contributor/Editor

Meriel Morgan - Contributor/Editor

Sarah Osho -Contributor/Editor

Karen Bowman - Project Manager/Web Design/Final Editor

(Images: The Welcome Library)

Karen Bowman.