The Recipe from the XIIth to the XVIIth Centuries. Europe, Islam, Far East #750001

Between the XIIth and the XVIIth centuries, the recipe was one of the most usual ways to spread scientific and technical knowledge as medicine and cookery, alchemy and magic, dyeing, metallurgy and cosmetics in Western Europe as in Islamic and Eastern countries. A large number of recipe books are still preserved in libraries all around the world: for the only western medieval cookery, we can estimate the existing recipes at more than 15.000. One of the most important cultural centers of production was probably the court, as courts of England, France, Burgundy and Savoy and, of course, the papal court at Rome or Avignon. Inspite of some pioneering publications from the interwar and postwar period, this vast field of research has not been the subject of as many works as the importance of recipes in the cultural life of pre-contemporary societies might have led one to expect. The aim of the present volume is to propose a step forward in the scientific study of recipes by privileging the dialogue in a transcultural perspective in the different fields where they are of some importance.