This Fall, EMROC is delighted to be partnering once again with Wellcome Collection and the Royal College of Physicians for its annual transcribathon, set for November 17. Come join us to explore early modern recipes of all kinds. Everyone is welcome — no experience necessary!

Beauty By the Books will be our theme this year. We’ll be paying special attention to the cosmetic recipes in two manuscripts, exploring what they can tell us about early modern ideas of how skin care and hair dressing overlapped with ideas of health. There will be plenty of culinary recipes along the way as well!

Manuscripts: This year, we’ll be transcribing two books without known owners: MS.4054, a Wellcome Collection manuscript dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and an eighteenth century collection MS.504,  from the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London. The Folger will be providing support via the FromthePage transcription interface. More details on how to transcribe will be available at our Transcribathon Central page are here!

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Events:

Friday, 17 November: Transcribing events all day, including: 

• 1pm GMT/ 8am EST/ 5am PST: Live transcribing, with conversations and questions in our live Zoom Room
• 3pm GMT/10am EST/ 7am PST: Zoom discussion facilitated by Gail Chapman from the Royal College of Physicians. The speakers will include: 
  • Professor Jill Burke, author of ‘How to be a Renaissance Woman’
  • Julia Nurse, a collections research specialist at Wellcome Collection
  • Pamela Forde, archive manager at the Royal College of Physicians.  
• 5pm-8 pm GMT/ 12-3 pm EST/ 9 am-noon PST: Conversations and questions in our live  North American Teams Room.

AVAILABLE ONLINE: Talks from Tuesday, 14 November:

A recording of the  online discussion, Recipes for Early Modern Beauty, hosted by Wellcome Collection can be accessed here.

Patricia Akhimie, Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, will facilitate a discussion featuring three scholars:

• Professor Jill Burke, author of ‘How to be a Renaissance Woman’
• Hayley O’Kell will talk about Iberian women’s addiction to eating fired clay, a beauty fad that captured the attention of some of the period’s most famous artists and writers.   
• Dr Romana Sammern will discuss the connections between early modern beauty, art and artefacts – reflecting on what objects like toilet boxes and ointment jars can tell us about beauty cultures.  

As incredible as it feels to be marking EMROC’s tenth year, it’s even more overwhelming to consider the many people who have come together to make this project of recipe transcription happen. Originally, we had planned to name these people in the Early Modern Studies Journal’s account of EMROC’s work, but it quickly became apparent that there was not nearly enough room for that. Instead, we’ve made a very, very long web page on which we can begin to record the names of those whose contributions have gotten EMROC off the ground, and kept it going.

Without the active cooperation of libraries, this project could never have actually started. Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has made so much of EMROC possible with her dedication to both teaching paleography and making manuscripts searchable. Folger folks past and present – especially Owen Williams, Mike Poston, Eric Johnson, Paul Dingman, Sarah Powell, and Emily Wahl – have stepped in time after time to make encoding smoother, before, during, and after Transcribathons. And the Folger’s docents have adopted recipe transcription as an ongoing project, much to EMROC’s benefit. More recently, we have been lucky to work with Julia Nurse, Elma Brenner, and Caroline Butten at the Wellcome Collection, as well as Pamela Forde and Gail Chapman at the Royal College of Physicians. And Kathryn Harvey at the McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph was among the first to host EMROC on the road.

EMROC has long thought of transcription as a project fit for students and multiple levels, and we have grown thanks to their work. We are particularly lucky to have had the following instructors and students involved in EMROC projects: Liza Blake and students at University of Toronto; David Goldstein and students at York University (Canada); Ian MacInnes and students at Albion College; Marissa Nicosia at Penn State Abington; Nancy Simpson-Younger and students at Pacific Lutheran University; Rob Wakeman and students at Mount Saint Mary College (especially Tori Kuhr) and The University of South Florida; Emma Marshall, Grace Murray and students at The Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at The University of York (UK). Along the way, there have been other satellite groups during our transcribathons at places like The Newberry Library, The Huntingdon Library, Stanford University, and more.

And of course the many students that have transcribed with Steering Committed members at The University of Texas Arlington, The UNC Charlotte, North Carolina State University, The University of Colorado Colorado Springs, The University of Akron, The University of Essex, and The University of Saskatchewan.

In particular, the Steering Committee would like to thank our Research Assistants and Placements Daniel Glombitza, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; Monterey Hall, University of Colorado Colorado Springs; Julia Jaegle, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; and Katrina Rutz, University of Colorado Colorado Springs; Catilin Walsh, University College London; Jessie Foreman, University of Essex; and Chiara Leon-Briones, University of Essex. And we would be remiss if we didn’t note the contributions of the following students (many now graduated!): Samantha Snively, Joul Smith, Brianne Weber, Erin Spinney, and Jennifer Caro-Barnes. 

Much appreciation, too, goes to our Advisory Board:

• Rebecca Bushnell, School of Arts and Sciences Board of Overseers Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania.
• Michelle DiMeo, Curator of Digital Collections, The Chemical Heritage Foundation.
• Patricia Fumerton, Professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, founder and director of the English Ballad Broadside Archive.
• Janelle Jenstad, Associate Professor of English, General Editor and Director of The Map of Early Modern London
• Stephen Schmidt, Food Historian, principal researcher and writer for The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey
• Anne Stobart, Clinical Herbal Practitioner, Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter
• Georgianna Ziegler, Associate Librarian and Head of Reference Emerita, Folger Shakespeare Library.

And of course, we’d like to think the three founding Steering Committee members who have since taken up different roles in EMROC: Michelle DiMeo, Rebecca Laroche, and Amy Tigner. 

EMROC is truly a crowd-sourced effort, with over a thousand transcribers contributing their time to transcription. None of EMROC’s work would be possible without the work of these people, and many others who have pitched in with transcription efforts. Who knows how many more might be involved in the years to come!