Aristocratic Women and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Early Modern England

Early modern medicinal recipe books have been of some interest to historians of medicine in recent years. These handwritten notebooks, often written by women, contain collections of recipes to cure diseases, heal wounds and treat various conditions. These studies have shown that aristocratic women  in early modern Europe were in some ways responsible for the medical well-being of themselves, their families and those associated with their estates, and that they collected and traded recipes in order to perform these duties.

The medical recipe books of Aristocratic Englishwomen do not merely contain information about medicinal practices in this period. They also often contain information or hints about the sources of particular recipes. On occasion they even contain information about previous cases in which a recipe was used successfully. This paper will use that kind of information to explore the ways in which this informal kind of medicinal knowledge travelled. Using the information available within the recipe books as well as correspondence, physicians’ notebooks and other sources, the paper will trace a network of medical knowledge that included aristocratic women, physicians, midwives and other participants. It will examine the differences in the content of recipes received from physicians, midwives and other men or women, in order to judge to what extent they differed in their relation to the learned medicine of the period. It will also discuss the ways in which associating a recipe with a particular person served to enhance its reputation for efficacy. In doing so, it will contribute to the understanding of how networks of medical knowledge functioned as well as the relations between “formal” and “informal” knowledge in this period.

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