Dr. Jennifer Munroe, associate professor at UNC-C, will give a talk entitled, “Science in the Kitchen?: Using Nature and Making Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Women's Recipes” on April 26 at 6 PM in the Table Rock Room of the Plemmons Student Union.
Dr. Munroe is author of Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature (Ashgate Press, 2007), editor of Making Gardens of Their Own: Gardening Manuals For Women, 1500-1750 (Ashgate Press, 2006), and co-editor with Rebecca Laroche of Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity.
Abstract: "Science in the Kitchen?: Using Nature and Making Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Women's Recipes"
The seventeenth century in England may have been a time of “Scientific Revolution,” but the extent to which this “revolution” included women (or why they were excluded) is very much still under debate. Scholars have pointed to evidence of women “scientists” from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which provides one way to think about this question. At the same time, only trying to locate women who participated in conventional ways in the burgeoning scientific community means continuing to devalue the sort of work most women did with plants in this period every day. This paper argues that if we look at women’s manuscript and print recipes from the period as indicative of “situated knowledges,” we might instead shift the parameters of the broader conversation to what I would argue are ultimately more productive avenues of inquiry for ecofeminist, ecocritical, and feminist scholars.