This digital annotated edition is based on the copy of The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly called Joan Cromwel, the Wife of the Late Usurper (1664) held by the John. J. Burns Library at Boston College. The edition boasts several unique features, including high resolution IIIF images of each page of the original book; a searchable and faithful transcription of the text; prefatory historical material; thoroughly researched annotations; a detailed glossary of terms covering food history and political history; a detailed index with cross-references to primary and secondary bibliographic resources; and adaptable pedagogical tools. We have aimed to make the digital resources easy to read, navigate, and search, with a three-column facsimile/transcription/annotation design and integrated, clickable glossary capabilities for exploring unfamiliar terms.
This digital project has been purposefully designed to invite its users to consider the experience of reading a printed text as opposed to a digital one. With this goal in mind, we have attempted to replicate as closely as possible the experience of flipping pages in a book and to eliminate the need to do much digital scrolling. Each new digital page corresponds to a physical page in the material book, preserving the integrity of the pagination while translating the reading experience for a modern digital audience. The high-resolution scans can be read on their own (column one), or the transcriptions can be consulted for easy cross-referencing or to aid in digitized searches (column two).
Our transcription maintains page numbers and foliation as printed, spelling, capitalization, ampersands, punctuation, italics, and lineation, except when a word was broken up over two lines, in which case we have included the full word on the first line in which it appears (or on the first page, if it is broken up over two pages). We have aligned all text along the left margin except if indenting the text as it appeared seemed like it would help with reading. We have not changed font sizes as the text sometimes does, nor have we included catch words. We have standardized spacing within lines of text, have not included ornaments or lines, have replaced long s with modern s, and have changed diphthongs such as Æ to “Ae.”
In designing the annotations and the glossary, we have differentiated these two apparatuses to align the annotations with the text for easy supplementation when desired (column three). The glossary appears on a separate page in alphabetical format, but individual glossary terms highlighted within the transcription can be clicked to open a separate page, which sends the reader directly to the corresponding glossary entry. This separation of annotations and glossary helps to avoid redundant definitions of ingredients and cooking terms (in column three) that appear more than once on the page and throughout the book.
We have included a working bibliography for further reference as well. The bibliography features primary sources from the early modern period that are directly associated with this text, either as reference points, content sources, or further related reading. We have also included a variety of relevant secondary critical sources. Of particular note are Katherine Gillespie (2001), Joan Thirsk (2006), Laura Lunger Knoppers (2007, 2011), Claire Saffitz (2013), and Andy Crow (2022), who have directly considered The Court & Kitchin in their previous research.
The end result is an openly accessible resource, not available in digitized form elsewhere, with a number of useful tools. We see this edition as a contribution to the growing body of other scholarly endeavors in the area of early modern recipes and food studies intended for researchers and students alike, such as the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Recipes Project. While our annotations shed light on this particular cookbook, we hope that features such as the Glossary will prove useful more generally for those interested in the cuisine and culinary practices of seventeenth century England. We hope that this edition will aid in the teaching and research of those interested in a wide range of areas including but not limited to early modern recipes, food studies, book history, seventeenth century political and social thought, and gender studies.