The Legitimization of Domestic Science: Recipes, Rewrites, and the Rich

The history of science and medicine is a broad discipline whose records and analyses span thousands of years. While this field of study is well recorded and preserved, history has largely ignored women's important contributions to the advancement of Western science and medicine.[1] Since women were primarily banned from formally participating in science up until the past two centuries, the field has argued that their outside developments be excluded from the history of science. While patriarchal restrictions limited women's formal involvement in empirical experiments and scientific engagement, this "official" status should not limit the discipline from including and analyzing the unofficial developments women contributed across time. The importance of these unofficial contributions is clearly illustrated through the development of domestic science within 17^th and early 18^th century England. During this time, women created a realm of domestic science governed by rules and specific terminology as well as important impacts within their families and society. These women created their own scientific realm by acquiring knowledge through the development, revision, and distribution of recipes. These recipes called for their authors to follow a series of rules not only in experimentation but also in revisionary studies. Women were able to utilize this scientific field as well as their domestic role as healers to create medical advancements within their community by developing treatments for diseases and ailments. This systematic approach to domestic science made significant advances and allowed for more agency and development within medicine than the ladies who officially practiced science at this time. While the few women in science during this period were limited by men in what they could study and publish, domestic science was essentially free from male influence and open to all socioeconomic classes. By analyzing early modern English women's contributions to domestic science, it becomes apparent how they instituted a regulated scientific realm through recipes, developed medicinal treatments for their communities, and surpassed women of science at this time in terms of agency. By analyzing 17th and early 18th-century English women's engagement in science, their place within scientific history is legitimized.

In early modern England, women created their own form of empirical experimentation through their systematic development, revision, and distribution of recipes. Recipes served an important role within the early modern family since it was the means by which households developed knowledge that would be regularly used and eventually passed on to future generations.[2] While receipt books were a collaborative process between family members, women were the primary developers of these recipes.[3] The invention of new recipes arose for several reasons, whether it be a culinary experiment or a treatment for a family member.[4] Once an idea for a recipe was pursued, a basic description was written and subjected to numerous testing.[5] During this experimentation period, specific terminology was implemented in many receipt books to indicate whether a recipe was deemed successful or had failed. In addition to a checkmark or a notation in the margins, women would often write the Latin phrase "probatum est," meaning it has been tested or proved, to indicate a recipe's success.[6] In cases where the recipe did not succeed, the directions would be, instead, crossed out.[7] In either instance of success or failure, the reader was called to use these written directions as a baseline that should be re-tested and altered based upon the reader's judgment.[8] While these recipes were often written for domestic use, women worked to expand and share their knowledge by passing these discoveries within their social circles. These social circles not only allowed for women to collect knowledge and develop their receipt books, but it created a system by which recipes were judged and lent credibility. In Wendy Wall's essay on "Recipes and Experimental Cultures," she notes that by having a recipe circulate in numerous social circles it, in turn, detailed ". . .a recipe's collective acceptance and resilience . . ." and ". . .structured an accreted system of approval."[9] Women who received a recipe from their social circles and agreed with its effectiveness would often use the original author's name in their receipt books to provide the recipe further accreditation. An example of this practice is illustrated in an anonymous 18^th-century cookery book that included numerous recipes such as an "Excellent Mead Sauce," whose original author was a "Head Cook."[10] By including the author's title and status, the shared recipe is lent further credence as to its effectiveness and taste. Overall, women instituted a systematic procedure in developing, testing, and sharing recipes through their implementation of terminology, experimentation, and trust systems.

In addition to creating an empirically driven scientific process, women were also able to utilize their domestic role as caretakers to develop medical treatments for both their families and their community. During the 17^th and early 18^th centuries, women had several domestic roles they were expected to fulfill. One of these many roles was to serve as caretakers and healers for their families.[11] This specific duty's importance is clearly illustrated in the number of women's handbooks dedicated to helping ladies assume and learn this role. The handbook titled "The English House-wife," by G. Markham devotes 46 pages and includes over a hundred medical recipes in order to instruct women about "basic" medical knowledge.[12] Markham emphasizes the importance of women's role in medicine by stating that "one of the most important virtues of the English housewife is to take care of their family's health."[13] This important role of caretaker and healer, in turn, permitted women to openly experiment with medicinal recipes and treatments with little resistance from men. Through this domestic role and women's own empirical research, ladies at this time were able to create applicable scientific and medicinal discoveries. When a family member got sick with a new disease or a standard treatment was not working, it was the woman's job to seek a new solution.[14] Oftentimes these women had to develop new treatments and cures themselves.[15] Women's experimentation not only impacted their family's health and lives but their community as well. During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, distilling was a common practice that eventually fell into disuse within the common household.[16] However, during the early 18^th century, it became quite customary for upper-class women to engage in the tedious and often dangerous task of distilling.[17] Distilling allowed for these upper-class women to engage with a chemical process also studied by the male scientists within the Royal Society at this time.[18] Through their experimentation with distilling, these women were able to create "cure-alls," often called poly-crest remedies.[19] The creation of these "cure-alls" served to treat a variety of ailments, and because of its perceived usefulness, these women used their creation as a form of charitable work. These women would create "cure-alls" for the newly formulated voluntary hospitals during this time in order to help their community and heal the needy.[20] While these scientific treatments' effectiveness is debatable by today's standards, these women were able to create a positive scientific impact upon their families and communities by utilizing their roles as healers to develop medicinal remedies and treatments.

Domestic science not only created a scientific realm for experimentation and advancement, but it also provided more scientific agency in contrast to the opportunities women who formally participated in this field received. During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the few and only women permitted to engage with science was the upper elite. While these women "officially" worked in science, they were not only limited in what they were able to do and publish but were constantly harassed and hindered by their male counterparts. One of the most famous female scientists from this time was Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Lady Cavendish was not only a well-published natural philosopher but also the first female to be permitted into the Royal Society.[21] While Lady Cavendish engaged in science in ways that were off-limits to most women at this time, she was also faced with more backlash and opposition than the average lady. Unlike domestic science, where women were able to engage with science and make discoveries openly, Lady Cavendish was not allowed into laboratories or able to perform experiments.[22] Lady Cavendish's writings instead came entirely from her own reasoning and understandings of the world.[23] In Lady Cavendish's publications, she would phrase her discoveries in the form of poems and couplets to diminish the amount of criticism she would face.[24] In Lady Cavendish's preface to her "Atomic Poems," she states to her readers that before writing these poems, she knew nothing about atoms "so if there be anything worthy of noting, it is a good Chance."[25] Despite Lady Cavendish's attempts to appease her male readers, she was constantly bombarded by criticisms and even named "Mad Madge."[26] During Lady Cavendish's one day visit to the Royal Society, a visit she had to request to be invited to, she was perceived to be a spectacle in her own right with the majority of attendees coming out in order to see the local laughing stock.[27] While Lady Cavendish was permitted to be one of the first female scientists, she and her fellow women scientists were limited in what they were truly able to discover and learn. These women had little to no agency in what they were able to experience within the scientific realm, and every time they tried to make a discovery, their efforts were subsequently dismissed.[28] While these few women are the current representatives of female scientific development within history, their experiences and advancements do not accurately reflect the average female engagement with science during this period.

During the 17^th and early 18^th centuries, women were able to develop their own means of scientific progress within the domestic sphere by systematically developing recipes, creating medical advancements within their communities, as well as surpassing the amount of agency women in science were afforded at this time. While domestic recipes and women's innovations in medicine have previously been studied independently from each other, this essay utilizes these two aspects of domestic science to prove the scientific importance of early modern women's contributions to this discipline. In previous historical analyses made by historians such as Elaine Leong, recipes were not analyzed as the process of women's engagement with science, instead, they were framed to portray familial knowledge and development.[29] Even in Wendy Wall's analysis, where she illustrates the similarities of recipes to scientific experiments, Wall does not further her argument by illustrating how these recipes contributed to science itself or how they created a positive impact within communities.[30] The historiography surrounding women's development of medicine, such as the analyses of Elaine Leong and Katherine Allen, focuses primarily on how women created these advancements, not why or for whom these medicinal recipes were intended. [31] By re-framing the development of domestic recipes in correlation with women's advancements in medicine, this essay works to expand upon the current interpretations of domestic science to display how it resembles the function of science during this time. By contrasting women's involvement in domestic science to elite women's experience in science, it becomes apparent that domestic science not only provides women more agency but provides a better representation of women's involvement within this field. While domestic science does not perfectly align with this time's scientific practices, the medicinal contributions women made to their families and communities should not be completely dismissed from the history of science. The history of science should work on reformulating their inclusion criteria so as not to dismiss early modern women's legitimate developments in science and forgo the exclusion of any other non-traditional developments from the historical record.

Footnotes:

[1] Katherine Allen, “Hobby and Craft: Distilling Household Medicine in Eighteenth-Century England,” Early Modern Women Vol. 11 No. 1 (Fall 2016): 90.

[2] Elaine Leong, “Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household,” Centaurus 55 (2013): 94.

[3] Ibid, 90.

[4] Elaine Leong “Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine Vol. 82 No. 1 (Spring, 2008): 158.

[5] Wendy Wall, “Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern Kitchen,” University of Pennsylvania Press (2015): 227.

[6]Wall, “Recipes for Thought,” 213.

[7] Ibid, 216.

[8] Ibid, 227.

[9] Ibid, 230.

[10] Anonymous, “Cookery-books: 18^th cent.,” Wellcome Library: picture 77.

[11] Allen, “Hobby and Craft,” 90.

[12] G. Markham, “The English House-wife, Containing the Inward and Outward Vertues Which Ought to be in a Compleat Woman,” The Sign of the Bible at Ludgate-Hill (1683): IIII-IV.

[13] Ibid, 4.

[14] Leong, “Making Medicines,” 158.

[15] Ibid, 158.

[16] Allen, “Hobby and Craft,” 98.

[17] Ibid, 92.

[18] Allen, “Hobby and Craft,” 97.

[19] Ibid, 101.

[20] Ibid, 96.

[21] Eve Keller, “Producing Petty gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” ELH Vol. 64 No. 2 (Summer, 1997): 448.

[22] Keller, “Making Petty,” 449.

[23] Ibid, 449.

[24] Wiesner-Hanks, Source 5.17.

[25] Ibid, Source 5.17.

[26] Samuel Mintz, “The Duchess of Newcastle’s Visit to the Royal Society,” The Journal of English and German Philology Vol. 51 No.2 (April, 1952): 169.

[27] Ibid, 171.

[28] Keller, “Making Petty,” 448.

[29] Leong, “Collecting Knowledge,”94.

[30] Wall, “Recipes for Thought,” 213-230.

[31] Allen, “Hobby and Craft,” 90. Leong, “Making Medicines,” 158.

Bibliography:

Allen, Katherine. "Hobby and Craft: Distilling Household Medicine in Eighteenth-Century England.” Early Modern Women Vol. 11 No. 1 (Fall 2016): 98.

Anonymous. “Cookery-books: 18^th cent.” Wellcome Library: picture 77.

Keller, Eve. “Producing Petty gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science.” ELH Vol. 64 No. 2 (Summer, 1997): 448-449.

Leong, Elaine. “Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household.” Centaurus 55 (2013): 90-94.

Leong, Elaine. “Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine Vol. 82 No. 1 (Spring, 2008): 158.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.” In Wikipedia, December 2, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Margaret_Cavendish,_Duchess_of_Newcastle-upon-Tyne&oldid=991995308.

Markham, G. "The English House-wife, Containing the Inward and Outward Vertues Which Ought to be in a Compleat Woman.” The Sign of the Bible at Ludgate-Hill (1683): IIII-4.

Mintz, Samuel, “The Duchess of Newcastle’s Visit to the Royal Society.” The Journal of English and German Philology Vol. 51 No.2 (April, 1952): 169.

Wall, Wendy. “Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern Kitchen,” University of Pennsylvania Press (2015): 213-230.

Wiesner-Hanks, Source 5.17