Shrewsbury Cakes

Post on the authors\u27 use of 18th century recipe books to recreate historic dishes

Smelling Contagion: The Sensory Experience of Plague in Seventeenth-Century London and the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper came out of our reflections on the sensory experiences during the Covid-19 lockdowns in the US and UK, particularly around smell, or its absence. As early modernists, we wondered how seventeenth-century people experienced the plague: how did their smellscapes change? Miasma, or foul air, was thought to be a cause of plague outbreaks. But the urban smellscape also changed during an outbreak: vinegar to cleanse money, burned rosemary to purify the air, and bodily odors to indicate infection. Focusing on London, we consider the overlap between the sensory and emotional experiences during an outbreak. We argue that the smells of plague outbreaks shifted people’s ways of being within collective spaces by emphasizing the presence of disease, sharpening social class distinctions, increasing isolation and fear, and requiring specific types of essential labor

Historical futures in seventeenth-century literature

Historical Futures in Seventeenth-Century Literature investigates the uses of the future in seventeenth-century historical literature. While the primary concern of historical literature is, and always has been, the past, authors writing in this genre often instrumentalize the past to reflect on the unknown future. Writers like William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Fletcher, John Ford, Margaret Cavendish, John Milton, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, as well as their lesser known contemporaries, Samuel Sheppard, John Crouch, and Marchamont Nedham, experimented with literary temporality by both aligning past events to display the present as inevitable and creating speculative futures that imagined solutions to pressing issues of succession, justice, and providence. Chapters on the history play, romance, and epic engage with material from multiple eras within the seventeenth century to demonstrate that these literary appeals to posterity emerged with increasing frequency during the mid-seventeenth century when civil war, social instability, and regime change threatened the very future of the English polity. Responding to the volatile political climate, seventeenth-century writers increasingly depicted the future as if it were already past in order to translate aspiration into fact. I call these imagined futures embedded in historical literature historical futures to draw attention to their paradoxically mixed temporality: authors creating historical futures describe events that have not yet come to pass as if they have already happened, and they authorize their fictions with the documentary apparatus of history.

Historical futures in seventeenth-century literature

Historical Futures in Seventeenth-Century Literature investigates the uses of the future in seventeenth-century historical literature. While the primary concern of historical literature is, and always has been, the past, authors writing in this genre often instrumentalize the past to reflect on the unknown future. Writers like William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Fletcher, John Ford, Margaret Cavendish, John Milton, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, as well as their lesser known contemporaries, Samuel Sheppard, John Crouch, and Marchamont Nedham, experimented with literary temporality by both aligning past events to display the present as inevitable and creating speculative futures that imagined solutions to pressing issues of succession, justice, and providence. Chapters on the history play, romance, and epic engage with material from multiple eras within the seventeenth century to demonstrate that these literary appeals to posterity emerged with increasing frequency during the mid-seventeenth century when civil war, social instability, and regime change threatened the very future of the English polity. Responding to the volatile political climate, seventeenth-century writers increasingly depicted the future as if it were already past in order to translate aspiration into fact. I call these imagined futures embedded in historical literature historical futures to draw attention to their paradoxically mixed temporality: authors creating historical futures describe events that have not yet come to pass as if they have already happened, and they authorize their fictions with the documentary apparatus of history.