The Communal Basis of Distinctive Voice in 17th-Century Receipt Manuscripts Abstract

Peter Parolin, University of Wyoming

With the Baumfylde manuscript as its starting point, this essay investigates what early modern receipt manuscripts reveal of the people and social networks that created them. Engaging with the scholarship on the authorship of receipt manuscripts, the essay argues that we can most profitably understand the distinctive voices in the Baumfylde and other collections as signs of participants deeply embedded in systems of household meaning and belonging rather than as what we might call modern authors. The many hands that co-created the Baumfylde and other manuscripts indicate methods of composition that exceed the boundaries of modern notions of authorship. Instead, these many hands indicate succeeding generations of household members learning the rules, skills, and ways of being necessary to thrive in their communities. Amid the signs of induction into community, the many hands also indicate expressions of agency, personality, and varying degrees of self-awareness, leading to the essay’s conclusion that for their co-creators, receipt manuscripts offered the opportunity to play with identity and define distinctive selves within the larger household systems that contained them.