Though Bartolomeo Scappis Opera (1570); the first illustrated cookbook; is well known to historians of food; up to now there has been no study of its illustrations; unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy; Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappis cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations; including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples; connects Scappis Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. Krohn argues that with the increasing professionalization of many skills and trades; Scappi was at the vanguard of a new way of looking not just at the kitchen-as workshop or laboratory-but at the ways in which artisanal knowledge was visualized and disseminated by a range of craftsmen; from engineers to architects. The recipes in Scappis Opera belong on the one hand to a genre of cookery books; household manuals; and courtesy books that was well established by the middle of the sixteenth century; but the illustrations suggest connections to an entirely different and emergent world of knowledge. It is through study of the illustrations that these connections are discerned; explained; and interpreted. As one of the most important cookbooks for early modern Europe; the time is ripe for a focused study of Scappis Opera in the various contexts in which Krohn frames it: book history; antiquarianism; and visual studies.
2016-04-20 2016-04-20File Name: B01EMDKDJI
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