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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2024
Abstract
This essay investigates how different leavening agents were used in early modern English devotional, culinary, and medicinal contexts. Baking bread leavened through various means in the modern kitchen offers insight into the historical processes that made leaven and its physical effects so telling for medical practitioners, home cooks, and devotional writers of the time. In discovering a complex and contradictory history of leaven in early modern life, this essay argues that the baker and believer must rely on their own physical and faithful experiences to employ the right leaven the right way for bread or belief. The domestic practice of using leaven becomes a method of spiritual knowing which early modern practitioners could express across their culture's most central spaces.
Keywords: bread, John Donne, George Herbert, leaven, yeast, culinary history
This is the skill, and doubtlesse the Holy Scripture intends thus much, when it condescends to the naming of a plough, a hatchet, a bushell, leaven, boyes piping and dancing; shewing that things of ordinary use are not only to serve in the way of drudgery, but to be washed, and cleansed, and serve for lights even of Heavenly Truths.
In this section of The Country Parson, George Herbert advises parsons to help parishioners access complex Christian concepts by illustrating the ‘thing by something else, which he knows, making what hee knows to serve him in that which he knows not’. Following these connections between elements of daily life and their abstracted cultural significance is a way of indexing religious terminology and metaphor to pragmatic, embodied human experiences and concerns. While Herbert's end goal is to reinforce ‘Heavenly Truths’, what he provides is a comprehensive and interdependent list of early modern skills: sowing, building, reaping, cooking, and celebrating. Even in this brief passage, Herbert connects the practical, physical acts of daily survival with the practice and acquisition of abstract spiritual knowledge.
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