Divine Drudgery: The Spiritual Logic of Housework

Abstract

In 1616 the Hanmer family of Wales began to compile an intriguing assortment of domestic documents that now reside in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Folger MS V.a. 347, best described as a manuscript commonplace and receipt book, seems to have served a wide variety of practical and spiritual purposes for the Hanmer family. The manuscript is labeled “A Sermon booke” on the flyleaf and begins, appropriately enough, with twenty-two pages of sermon notes, concluding with notes from a sermon on Romans 7:21. A mere turn of the page, however, brings the reader to a very different set of notes: a recipe entitled “to pot hare” (fo. 23r), one of several recipes that fill the manuscript’s next five pages. This juxtaposition of sermon notes, recipes, and other personal records continues throughout the manuscript.’ The Folger collection also includes a late seventeenth-century manuscript (MS V.a. 468) owned by Elizabeth Fowler that shares many of the characteristics of the Hanmer document. This book begins with numerous pages of recipes, with titles such as “to pot venison” (fo. 1r), “To make Goosbury Creame” (fo. 7r), and “To Stew Mutton” (fo. 22r). Later in the manuscript, however, we find sermon notes in different italic hands, a few medicinal recipes, and, on the final page, a devotional poem. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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