Editor: Stefan Laube (Humboldt University Berlin)
Publisher: Brill, 2024
This volume offers the user a guide to the neglected field of how-to books. How do I make soap? How do I dye textiles? What ingredients do I need for an effective remedy? Practical information of this kind, on distillation, medicine, dyeing, cosmetics, glassmaking, ceramics, metallurgy and many other subjects flooded the book market in the first centuries of printing. As varied as these subjects may be, they provoke a number of research questions: How does one learn practical skills from a book? Why were these books so popular, who used them and how, and can they even be considered a clearly defined genre? The aim of this volume is to establish which patterns characterise the genre of how-to books. It also aims to contribute to the clarification of terms for a genre that operates under labels such as “books of secrets” and “recipe books.”
Some key issues addressed in this volume are traces of book use, the media shift from manuscript to print, the interaction between text and image, and the praxeological dimension of practical books. Self-help literature made it possible for interested laypersons to obtain information from all possible fields of knowledge, largely independent of institutional and educational environments. As “tracts for action,” they differed from other genres in that they were consistently oriented towards implementation.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: How-to Books – the Birth and Development of an Understudied Genre – Stefan Laube
1 Can There Ever Be Clueless Advice Books? Remarks on Plague Tracts – Stefan Laube
2 ‘Take’, ‘Do’, ‘Check’: Readers and Uses of Early Modern How-to Books in the Collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek – Petra Feuerstein-Herz
3 Who Owned the Margarita Philosophica and How Was It Read? A Survey of the Sixteenth-Century Copies in the University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections – Robert MacLean
4 Text – Medium – Recording System: Recipes in Books – Sven Limbeck
5 A Commerce of Secrets: Digital and Performative Approaches to an Early Modern How-to Manuscript at the Making and Knowing Project – Tillmann Taape
6 Compilation Networks: Making Early Modern Books of Secrets – Simone Zweifel
7 How to Fly? Some Thoughts on a Windy Skill – Laurence Grove and Stefan Laube
8 Playing with Recipe Conventions in Den sack der consten – Andrea van Leerdam
9 ‘That’s How You Do It!’ or Better not? Early Modern Recipes and Their Readers – Laura Balbiani
10 Smelling Good While Conjuring the Spirits: Use of ‘Perfumes’ in Medieval and Early Modern Magic Books – Sergei Zotov
11 The Duchess’s Medicine Chest: Prescriptions and Medicines for Sophia of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1522–1575) – Britta-Juliane Kruse
Index