January: s-UH?-bbatical. Emphasis on the “uh.” A weary academic documents her quest.
JANUARY: s-UH?-bbatical. Emphasis on the “uh.” A weary academic documents her quest.
One month down. Really? Today’s blog is partly about the sabbatical process and partly about my research!
THE MECHANICS OF SUHBBATICAL:
So far, it is not what I envisioned regarding writing, timing, and wellness. I had this idea that I would wake up and write for 3 hours every weekday. This is really quite funny because I am not new to research. But, for some reason, for sabbatical I didn’t envision all the other parts of research. Reading. Emailing. Searching. Attending lectures. More reading. All the reading. Note taking. Printing. But I just had this image of waking up and writing. Don’t get me wrong. I have written, but I have invested far less time writing than doing the other aspects of research.
Also, timing is interesting. The waking up for 3 uninterrupted hours of research is not turning out to be realistic thus far. It works several mornings a week, but for others I have other life commitments AND wants. And I am indulging those, too. So sometimes I work in the afternoon. Sometimes I work an hour. Sometimes I-SKIP-A-DAY. And I am okay with all of that right now and we will see how this works as Gordon transitions to spring semester after Jterm.
Finally, of course, we had the setback of covid in our family. We were stuck for an extended period of time far from home. Also, as it turns out, covid is an insane energy zap! I am beginning to feel more “normal,” but the exhaustion was real.
RESEARCH:
So, what am I doing? My current project is a book chapter on domestic texts. I am trying to uncover women’s contributions to Mediterranean food culture. All printed cookbooks are anonymous or written by men, who, as best I have been able to deduce thus far, do not credit ANYONE, let alone a woman, as the source of any culinary recipes. However, that contravenes what the historiographic record tells us: women did most of the cooking. I seek to find women’s culinary voices outside of the traditionally referenced (male) sources.
I have been working lately the most with the Livro de receptas de pivetes, pastilhas e uvas perfumadas y conserbas. This is a handwritten 16th century manuscript described as being Portuguese. But, I think this manuscript deserves more attention.
First, I have discovered that the manuscript is written in formal text with black ink, reserving red ink for titles and special letters. And, it is written in Portuguese. At least, these two assertions hold true for the first 28 and ¼ pages. Then something interesting occurs. The handwriting changes and so does the language!
This was such an exciting find. Perhaps the first part is actually an unfinished manuscript scribed by a male. But then someone takes over the rest of the pages. In fact, not just someone, but various authors.
I have been analyzing it and I believe the handwriting actually changes 21 (approximately-see chart) times throughout the manuscript. Initially this led me to think that these were temporal switches-a marker of a manuscript handed down between generations and/or, perhaps, friends. However, after the handwriting switches, it appears that a previous author returns to the text to add more recipes. I have been able to match some of the scripts to one another, but there is more work to do there. The matching is not always an easy feat. Sometimes when a writer changes quills, it can look like different handwriting pressure, but an examination of the letters “y” and “d” have been particularly helpful in differentiating the writers.
What can we deduce if we see writers “taking turns” in this book? One, obviously the earlier writer does not appear to have handed this book down after their death. So, in the case where we see a writer returning to the text, it was more likely an exchange between acquaintances where the book’s owner asked a friend or family member to share his/her recipes by writing in the book itself and returning it. We see an interesting case of this with the seventh writer citing recipes from a countess later matching the handwriting of a recipe for soap from Naples. This leads us to the conclusion that writer 7 was either of some prestige or, at minimum, had access to several recipes of prestige.
Regarding the language, I need to consult with a medieval linguist to really define those borders. The differences between Castilian and Portuguese today are different than the differences between Old Spanish and Old Portuguese. In fact, historically they were pretty close to one another. But I am pretty confident that I am right about the fact that the language switches back and forth between Castilian and Portuguese throughout the text. In some recipes it even references “rosas castellanas” (Castilian roses) to be used in the recipe. This also tells us something interesting about biliteracy in Iberia.
The conclusion is that then, this text marks a network of exchange-dare I say-between women. The owner may have asked friends and acquaintances to share their best recipes and then return the book. It is not indexed or organized. The recipes are written in the organic order in which they were tasted or recommended. There are edits in the recipes where the original writer or a later cook revised cooking times or ingredient amounts. I argue that a book like this tells us much about cooking than a carefully crafted, organized, indexed cookbook. If, as I suspect, this is a woman’s text, it may reveal much about women’s lives and their exchanges of domestic recipes.
Reference the electronic edition: http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000039040&page=1
Where I have found matching handwriting, I use symbols after the numbers in the left hand column. Work in progress!
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