Food Production and Gender across the Early Modern World (Food Culture, Food History before 1900)

Calaresu, Melissa (EDT)/ Manzanares Mileo, Marta (EDT)

Pallas Publications（2026/05発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 242 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9789048559411

Full Description

This collection of nine essays presents new research exploring the significance and forms of labour involved in food production across the early modern world from c. 1500 to 1800.

Ranging from the Netherlands to the Mediterranean basin and from the Pacific and Atlantic worlds, the volume opens up new directions in research on various activities which have received little attention such as preserving, grinding, curing, and frying. These essays uncover historical actors engaged in the processing of different foodstuffs, whose embodied knowledge and work are often obscured in the historical record, and rendered even less accessible when performed by women.

By interpreting genre paintings, revisiting well-known documents, and engaging in hands-on reconstruction research, the essays provide a more nuanced and fuller understanding of food production in and out of the kitchen, and advance long-standing historiographical debates on gender, food, and work in meaningful ways.

Contents

Introduction: Food Production and Gender across the Early Modern World

Melissa Calaresu and Marta Manzanares Mileo

Part I: Representation and Meanings

1. 'Cherchez la femme': Women's Dual Presence in Premodern Arab Cuisine‎

Limor Yungman

2. Aztec Paste Makers and Breakers: Ritual Tools for Crafting Food-Art, Empowering Water and Killing Mountains in Early-Modern Mexico

Joshua Fitzgerald

3. The Culinary Devotion of Sor Marianita de San José: Cooking, Writing and Spirituality in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Daniela Gutiérrez Flores

4. Vessels on a Vessel: Senauki, Water, and an Anti-Cattle Protest in Colonial Georgia

Rachel B. Herrmann

Part II: Practice and Skills

5. Cheesemaking, Knowledge and Authority: Reconstructing Work Practices of Women on Early Modern Dutch Dairy Farms

Maroesjka Verhagen and Danielle van den Heuvel

6. 'Beating the Biscuit Batter like the Nuns Do': Gender, Labour and Skill in Early Modern Spanish Convents

Marta Manzanares Mileo

7. More than Kitchenware: Colonial Foodways, Culinary Change and CHamoru Women in the Eighteenth-Century Mariana Islands

Verónica Peña Filiu

8. From Fields to Fritters: Trajectories of Food Production and Processing in eighteenth-century Naples

Melissa Calaresu

Index