Amanda E. Herbert, Associate Professor, History, and Member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University
Authorship, Authenticity, Erasure: British Atlantic Women’s Recipe Books, 1600–1850
The annual Robert K. Webb Lecture, organized by the Department of History
This event is part of the Fall 2024 Humanities Forum.

British Atlantic women’s recipe books are crucial historical sources, offering evidence of the consumer and scientific revolutions, the rise of the city, female alliances, networks of knowledge and inquiry, and, perhaps most importantly, women’s authoritative voice. These same books also offer evidence of Black and Indigenous erasure. In this talk, Amanda Herbert demonstrates how free white women worked to deliberately erase Black food-workers from their practices of recipe writing, collection, and record-keeping; close reading of ingredients, techniques, and adaptations, however, can help us to recover Black culinary innovations and contributions.

Amanda E. Herbert is Associate Professor of Early Modern Americas in the History Department at Durham University. She is an historian of the body: gender and sexuality; health and wellness; food, drink, and appetite. She holds the Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Spa Medicine and Body Politics in the British Atlantic (under contract with Penn), as well as Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (Yale, 2014) winner of the Best Book Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. She’s an editor for The Recipes Project, an e-journal devoted to the study of historical recipes of all kinds. Her grant-funded collaborative projects have been supported by the AHRC, SSHRC, and the Mellon Foundation, and include the $1.5 million collaborative research initiative at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures. She writes for all audiences, and has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Aeon, and Gastro Obscura.

Admission is free.

The Robert K. Webb Lecture is organized by the Department of History. and is co-sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities.

Photo: Natalie Elder.