• 1 Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances : Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, Ne (...)
• 2 “Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures”, Folger Shakespeare Library, https:// (...)

Amanda Herbert: I’m a historian of the early modern body: how it was imagined, what poisoned or nourished it, how it got sick or well, what it thought and felt. My past work has addressed constructions of gender and feeling (my first book, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain,1 was on the histories of femininity and emotion); I’ve written on sexuality and queer theory; I’m finishing up a book on mineral spring spas as sites of early public health. Food studies has been incorporated into all of my work, from studying lower—and higher—status women laboring together in kitchens, to sourcing ingredients in medicines. When I started to work at the Folger, I was delighted in no small part because the library has the world’s largest collection of early modern manuscript recipe books in English. We built on those collection strengths in designing the Before “Farm to Table” project.2 

• 3 ThinkFoodGroup: Changing The World Through The Power of Food, https://thinkfoodgroup.com/ (2021/04 (...)
• 4 Third Rail Projects, https://thirdrailprojects.com/ (2021/04/29).
• 5 “Confection”, Third Rail Projects, https://thirdrailprojects.com/confection#confection-page (2021/ (...)

A. Herbert: It is a truly unique project. We believe that the humanities matter to all people, and that our skills as humanists help us to communicate and collaborate with people from many different fields. Our team members study literature, religion, medicine, and history. We are curators and professors, scholars and administrators. But we are all humanists. We have worked closely with food professionals throughout the project: we joined forces with humanitarian and chef José Andrés and his ThinkFoodGroup team to design a menu for one of his restaurants that was inspired by four-hundred-year-old recipes in our collection.3 We have also had incredible partnerships with artists: we worked alongside Third Rail Projects,4 one of New York’s foremost companies creating site-specific, immersive, and experiential performance, to design a work of performance art called “Confection.”5 It was performed in the Folger’s historic reading rooms, and explored the culture of sugar, past and present: what happens when an entire nation becomes addicted to sugar? What were its physical pleasures and human costs?

• 6 “Food and the Book: 1300-1800”, Newberry, https://www.newberry.org/10022020-food-and-book-1300-180 (...)
• 7 See https://afroculinaria.com/about/, https://sioux-chef.com/about/ and http://www.tamareadler.com (...)

A. Herbert: There is a full list of the events we’ve undertaken here—as you can see, we’ve done a lot! We’ve taught courses, curated exhibitions, built a corpus of reading copies of manuscript recipe books, organized conferences, given lectures, analysed food and film. We’re currently developing a website which will allow people to learn about our projects, what we accomplished, and how the project continues to evolve. It should be available sometime in 2021. And we are continuing our activities despite the pandemic. At the start of October we’re co-sponsoring a conference with the Newberry Library in Chicago, called “Food and the Book”,6 which will be held virtually over the course of two weeks. It’s free and open to the public, with special appearances by celebrity chefs and food-writers like Michael Twitty, Sean Sherman, and Tamar E. Adler.7 I can’t wait. It will be fabulous.

• 8 The Recipes Project: Food, Magic, Art, Science, and Medicine, https://recipes.hypotheses.org/ (202 (...)
• 9 “#WoolleyWeek: New Discoveries in the Life and Work of a 17th-century”, Facebook Live, 21st May 20 (...)

A. Herbert: Two of our postdoctoral fellows, Michael Walkden and Neha Vermani, are historians of medicine, and they have helped us to see all of these connections! Early modern people believed that what you consumed – whether you took it as a medicine or enjoyed it as a meal—influenced the way that your body functioned. The early modern worlds of food and medicine are inextricable. And yes, as one of the co-editors of The Recipes Project,8 I am always on the lookout for ways that the projects can inform each other. One of these events was “Woolley Week”: a week of online programming dedicated to Hannah Woolley, the first woman to publish a cookbook in English. We live-tweeted a visit to the Folger Conservation Lab, held a transcribathon, and hosted a live chat on the Recipe Project’s Facebook page.9