ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Women in Tech: Mothers and Housekeepers in Premodern Arabic Technical Compendia

• In Event: Burying the Torch: Illuminating Diverse Actors in the Making of Premodern Knowledge

English Abstract

For Arabic sources in particular, modern scholarship has long focused on established authorities, often resorting to ‘great man histories’ of scientific achievements and traditions. While such views have been productively challenged in some fields, they continue to obscure investigations of knowledge production and transmission within the histories of Arabic medicine and technology.

Recipes and recipe collections have, happily, seen a surge of scholarly interest in recent decades, with researchers highlighting their unique potential for exploring past actors' social and material conditions alongside their understandings of nature, the human body, or specific substances and processes.

In this talk, I will thus focus on several technical handbooks and recipe collections written in Arabic between c. 850–1600 CE, ranging from manuals for scribes to alchemical treatises. By attending to the plurality of actors involved in the creation of such collections, I will highlight marginal and marginalised voices—particularly women—who inform, contest, and co-establish recipe knowledge. Such inquiries open up new methodological approaches to exploring questions of epistemic authorities and directions of knowledge transmission, revealing the often surprising ways in which actors achieved desired outcomes and engaged with their natural and social environments.

Author

• Leonie Böttiger, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science