Why recipes?
Medicine, alchemy, magic, food or ink recipes are transversal to cultural fields. Identified most generally with lists of ingredients accompanied by a set of instructions for their use, recipes have recently experienced a surge of scholarly interest, particularly in the context of the changing epistemes of early modern Europe.
Transformations in the modes of knowledge transmission in the European late medieval and early modern periods prompted rise in popularity of recipes and recipe compilations. However, as noted by scholars, the textual genre of recipes had already been well-employed in a variety of material formats in various ancient textual cultures, from Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian to Indian and Chinese.
Dubbed an epistemic genre, recipes—and compilations of them in multiple-text manuscripts—may serve thus as an indicator of the premodern world’s tendencies to record and transmit the experiential type of knowledge, often associated with a range of embodied practices, tests, and trials.
What do we do?
This album centres on presenting the corpus of Jewish handwritten recipes, in a variety of their material formats, made and copied after the year 1500. It focuses both on the textual structure of recipes, understood as generic formulas and specific prescriptions, and on the physical aspects of manuscripts in which recipes are contained, with an eye on situating materially further cross-cultural comparisons.
Based on select examples, the album will survey general features of Jewish scripts in which recipes were inscribed and of codicological formats in which recipes were contained. It is so designed to allow you to learn how to read cursive and non-square scripts, which are represented most widely in recipe books in the post-medieval periods. Scripts of Central and Eastern Europe, Italy, North Africa and West Asia follow a chronological order. You will be able to search our site using tags which encode codicological formats, size, writing support, type of script, and provenance.
How to use this site?
Each entry focuses on one teachable manuscript feature, exemplified by one manuscript item or a fragment thereof. It contains a transcription exercise that you can carry out via MultiPal — an online palaeography tutorial — so that you can try your hand (and eyes) in deciphering and transcribing texts in various scripts. Each entry will be subsequently linked to a full scientific description of palaeographical and codicological features of the manuscript in the EPHE-based database.
Enjoy your time with the recipes!