Abstract Summary
In 1651, John French (1616-1657) offered the English reading public a new handbook: The Art of Distillation. The work represents the fruits of French’s wide-ranging reading and translating practices and includes large sections (with images) extracted from Johann Rudolph Glauber’s (1604-1670) Furni novi philosophici, a series of five German tracts on distilling published in Amsterdam in the 1640s. In the mid-1730s, the Devon-based Tallamy family obtained a copy of The Art of Distillation. Lead by Rebecca Tallamy, they wrote a cornucopia of annotations into their treasured copy of French’s book, including hundreds of additional recipes and personalised selections from other contemporary medical books including the works of Nicholas Culpeper and William Salmon. The printed medical book, then, is at once a conduit and a receptacle for medical knowledge - a personal archive of know-how strategically assembled to suit the needs of the family. Taking this curious volume as a starting point, this talk explores translation, print, and medical reading in early modern England. I examine the intertwined practices of translation, reading and writing as ongoing, collective, and collaborative projects embedded within practices and local contexts, taking meaning both from its creators and its users. By situating the case study within analytical frameworks developed by historians of archives, I also emphasise how processes of translation, reading and note-taking were all deliberately employed to create an eighteenth-century home-based archive of everyday knowledge.
