Try your hand at transcribing early modern recipes!
Join us at the Newberry as we participate in the annual Transcribathon organized by the Early Modern Recipe Online Collective (EMROC). Using the Folger Shakespeare Library’s online transcription platform Dromio, we’ll collaborate with students, scholars, and enthusiasts from around the globe to transcribe Folger Manuscript V.b.400, an anonymous seventeenth-century recipe book containing over 600 medical recipes for curing ailments like “For wind in the stomach,” consumption, “Scurvie,” “Jandise,” “Chollerick,” “Plurisie,” and the plague.
Upon completion, the manuscript transcription will be freely-accessible and completely searchable alongside thousands of other contemporary recipes in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s LUNA collection, furthering scholarship in fields as diverse as the history of science, culinary history, and manuscript studies, as well as improving knowledge of daily life in the early modern world.
Participants can stop by anytime between 2 and 6 pm to transcribe. Please bring your own laptop or device. No experience necessary!
Newberry staff and Chicago-area scholars of early modern food, culture, literature, and medicine will be available to walk participants through the coding and handwriting. Attendees will be treated to early modern themed refreshments and brief presentations by Sarah Kernan, independent culinary historian and instructor in the Newberry's Adult Education Seminars program; Megan Heffernan, Assistant Professor of English at DePaul University; and staff from the Newberry's Center for Renaissance Studies. Jen Wolfe, Digital Initiatives, will present on opportunities to transcribe the Newberry's Modern Manuscripts.
Participants affiliated with member institutions of the Center for Renaissance Studies Consortium may be eligible to receive Newberry Renaissance Consortium Grants to support travel to this event. For more information, participants should contact the CRS Consortium Representative at their home institution.
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