Abstract: This essay centres upon a collection of recipes compiled between around 1655 and 1730 at the main Parisian house of the Oratorian religious order on the rue Saint-Honoré, known as the Oratoire du Louvre. Rapid development in this area of the French metropolis meant that the priests who resided in the house were close to vendors of many up-to-date and fashionable remedies. The collection’s multiple layers, when analysed, indicate the close connection between recipes and the urban medical marketplace, as well as the ways in which networks of kinship or scholarship doubled as networks for the exchange of medical information. It emerges as a collaborative project, the product of many hands, encounters and exchanges.
Emma C. Spary (Fri,) studied this question.