The heterogeneous nature of manuscript recipe books in early modern England

by Kate Owen
Kate Owen has recently completed her MA in the English department at King’s College London. She has an interest in the medical humanities, the transmission of scientific knowledge in the early modern period, and is currently a volunteer at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Museum and Archive. 

In the second semester of my master’s programme, Early Modern English Literature: Text and Transmission, I took a module called ‘professing writing’. This module looks at a large range of literary and non-literary genres, such as poetry, devotional texts, travel writing and scientific writing. Through guest lecturers and trips to professional libraries, the module also introduced different approaches to academic research. It was on one of these trips to the Wellcome Library, that I first came across early modern women’s recipe books.

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Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes: American Telegraphic Literature

by Harriet Thompson, PhD candidate in the English department at King’s College London. 

William John Johnston’s Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes is a volume of late nineteenth-century American fiction comprised of ‘contributions from the pens of all the prominent writers in the ranks of telegraphic literature’. Johnston was himself a telegraph operator, as well as a publisher, and editor of the profession’s leading trade journal ‘The Operator’. He published a number of notable works of telegraphic literature by women telegraphers, including Ella Cheever Thayer’s novel Wired Love and short fictional works by Lida Churchill and Josie Schofield.

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