Tag Archives: Lady Ann Fanshawe

Spring 2022 Transcribathon: Grace Carteret’s Recipes

11-12 February 2022
The Carteret Collection at the PCDP Conference

Come join us to transcribe the manuscript recipe book of Grace Carteret, 1st Countess Granville (1654-1744), housed at the Wellcome Collection! 

This event brings together participants in The Ohio State University’s Popular Culture and the Deep Past conference, devoted to “The Experimental Archaeology of Medieval and Renaissance Food,” and transcribers from around the world joining in from their home and classroom computers.

We’ll be working to transcribe Lady Carteret’s recipe collection (Wellcome MS.8903) and its wide array of culinary and medical recipes. Participants in this event will be helping to make Carteret’s manuscript keyword searchable, and in that process they’ll help illustrate the overlap between Carteret’s book and that of Ann Fanshawe, whose recipe collection was part of last year’s EMROC transcribathon. 

Click Here to Start Transcribing

Drop in any time — before, during, or after the event — and transcribe as long as you like! NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY – our webpages will help you through the coding and offer pointers on the handwriting.

Events on Saturday, February 12

  • 9:30 EST: At the PCDP Conference? Come visit EMROC on Saturday in the Creative Arts Room at the Ohio Union. Chatting and questions welcome!
  • 10:00 EST: Paper Presentation on learning to transcribe from University of Akron students Jasmine Beaulieu and Hannah Curtis, “Early Modern Recipe Transcription: The ‘Each One Teach One’ Method.” Join in person in the Ohio Room, or via Zoom here.

For more on the Carteret manuscript, check out detailed catalog record from the Wellcome.

Interested in joining our Transcribathon virtually? Contact Hillary Nunn, at nunn@uakron.edu, or just sign up to transcribe a page and jump in. Keep up with our events here on the EMROC webpage, and on Twitter.

We are grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Library for providing a customised transcription platform on FromthePage for this event.  And we are so glad that OSU’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies has included us in the conference events.

Key links

Transcription FAQ and information about Getting Started with Transcription.

Sample transcription from the Cartet manuscript.

EMROC blog (for quick and dirty blog posts as things happen, as well as more thoughtful posts later)

Twitter (for those of us live-tweeting the event, at #EMROCtranscribes)

EMROC News from the Renaissance Society of America Conference

By Hillary Nunn

The Renaissance Society of American conference this spring showcased a fantastic series of presentations involving EMROC members and their research. Recipes were a real presence during the Chicago meeting, as were digital projects involving domestic texts.

First thing on April 1, The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women sponsored “Mobile Knowledge in Early Modern English Recipes.” Edith Snook (University of New Brunswick) detailed Lady Grace Mildmay’s access to plants – and cures – from the Americas, while and Madeline Bassnett (University of Western Ontario) traced Ann Fanshawe’s collection of Spanish recipes during her years as a diplomat’s wife. Lyn Bennett (Dalhousie University) offered a preview of her book Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Woman Writer, 1600-1700 (forthcoming from Cambridge later this year), detailing the ways that recipes helped women like the Countess of Exeter establish authority within a patriarchal world.

So, in short:

In the session that followed,
“Glimpsing Women’s Experience through Early Modern Recipe Manuscripts,”
Marissa Nicosia (Penn State Abington) helped audiences understand the complexity and appeal of a recipe for Portugal Eggs. After my own discussion of water in EMROC texts, Katie Walker from the University of North Carolina addressed recipe books as satire, concentrating on Cromwell’s allegedly overly homely wife as depicted in a recipe book attributed to – but most likely completely separate from – her household.

Later in the day, Maggie Simon (North Carolina State) offered a fantastic discussion of recipe transcription with the Dromio interface in The Phenomenality of Digital Transcription. In her panels, part of a series entitled New Technologies and Renaissance Studies, Maggie outlined her students’ experiences working with EMROC texts, highlighting the ways that transcription helped her students feel more at home with early modern texts.

Hillary Nunn is Professor of English at the University of Akron.