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Event

Food History- Joint Session: Richard II’s Recipes & Medicinal Past of Vodka

Event information>

Dates
Time
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Location

Online- via Zoom

Institute

Institute of Historical Research

Event type

Seminar

Event series

Food History

Speakers

Andrea Hugill (Independent Scholar/Researcher)

Contact

Email only

Andrea Hugill - The Elizabethan Reception of Richard II’s Recipes
This paper explores the reception history of Richard II’s book of recipes, beginning from its writing in the 1390s.  The paper argues that the royal palace expressed its identity with food, tracing the influence of 14th century collection of recipes on the royal court of Elizabeth I.  Moreover, this reception history of the cookery book shows how the Medieval English royal household of Richard II, who was famous for lavish entertainment and notoriously extravagant, was the cultural context of the handwritten original book of recipes, composed by the chief cook of Richard II’s palace.  A comparison of the Elizabethan reception with the original writing context of Richard’s royal palace illuminates changes in the character of the Medieval versus the Early Modern royal household.  The paper considers the reception history with reference to the Elizabethan mind and attempts to reconstruct the queen’s own culinary sensibilities.  Richard II’s original copy was dedicated to Elizabeth I, who was notoriously frugal, having inherited a debt upon her accession to the throne in 1558.    After an examination of the content of Richard II’s recipes, the paper assesses the accuracy of depictions of Richard and his household in the Elizabethan era, comparing the queen’s better-informed understanding of Richard with other cultural imaginings.


Alexandr Gorokhovskiy - The Origins and Medicinal Past of Vodka
The earliest written references to vodka as a distilled spirit in Poland and Russia not only pertain to the same time period, but were made within less than one year from each other. In Poland, it is found in a herbal O ziołach y o moczy gich, which was compiled by Stefan Falimirz and printed in Cracow in 1534. This Polish adaptation of a Latin natural history encyclopaedia, Hortus Sanitatis (1491), includes recipes of seventy or so types of vodka and a list of illnesses remedied by them. The first mention of vodka in a Russian chronicle relates to December of 1533, when Vasiliy III’s associate Mikhail Yuryevich Zakharyin was said to have proposed to cure the abscess in the dying Grand Prince’s hip by cleansing the wound with it. Five months later, another attendant at the deathbed of Muscovy’s ruler, Lübeck-born professor of medicine and Vasiliy III’s court physician Nicholas Bülow, finished the translation into Russian of De genochlichke Gharde der suntheit, a Low German edition of Hortus Sanitatis published in Lübeck in 1492. Some historians attribute also to Bülow the authorship of Skazanie o propuschenii vod – the Russian translation of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi, a popular German manual on distilling which is very likely to have inspired the vodka section in Falimirz’ book. My paper attempts to establish a link between these early modern medical texts and looks at how following the invention of the printing press the proliferation of vernacular pharmaceutical literature and its diffusion from Central to Eastern Europe played a crucial role in the creation in the sixteenth century of a new category of compound alcoholic beverages collectively known as ‘vodkas’.


All welcome - This event is free, but booking is required.

This page was last updated on 20 January 2025