1st Edition
Food Production and Gender across the Early Modern World
Introduction: Food Production and Gender across the Early Modern World
Melissa Calaresu and Marta Manzanares Mileo
Part I: Representation and Meanings
1. ‘Cherchez la femme’: Women’s Dual Presence in Premodern Arab Cuisine
Limor Yungman
2. Aztec Paste Makers and Breakers: Ritual Tools for Crafting Food-Art, Empowering Water and Killing Mountains in Early-Modern Mexico
Joshua Fitzgerald
3. The Culinary Devotion of Sor Marianita de San José: Cooking, Writing and Spirituality in Eighteenth-Century Mexico
Daniela Gutiérrez Flores
4. Vessels on a Vessel: Senauki, Water, and an Anti-Cattle Protest in Colonial Georgia
Rachel B. Herrmann
Part II: Practice and Skills
5. Cheesemaking, Knowledge and Authority: Reconstructing Work Practices of Women on Early Modern Dutch Dairy Farms
Maroesjka Verhagen and Danielle van den Heuvel
6. ‘Beating the Biscuit Batter like the Nuns Do’: Gender, Labour and Skill in Early Modern Spanish Convents
Marta Manzanares Mileo
7. More than Kitchenware: Colonial Foodways, Culinary Change and CHamoru Women in the Eighteenth-Century Mariana Islands
Verónica Peña Filiu
8. From Fields to Fritters: Trajectories of Food Production and Processing in eighteenth-century Naples
Melissa Calaresu
Index
Biography
Melissa Calaresu is Professor of History and the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. She is a cultural historian whose research interests move between the history of food, the representation of urban space, and material culture in early modern Italy. Her recent publications have focused on selling food on the street, urban kitchens, and the Grand Tour of the eighteenth‑century Welsh painter, Thomas Jones. She was co‑curator with Victoria Avery of the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800 in 2019–2020. She is co‑editor of the journal Global Food History.
Marta Manzanares Mileo is a Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She holds a PhD from the University of Barcelona, where she examined the confectionery trade in early modern Catalonia. Her current research interests explore women’s roles in sugar‑related trades and consumption in early modern Hispanic cities.
