Transcribing Recipe Manuscripts Online: V.b. 380 and the “What’s in a Recipe?” Undergraduate Research Project at Penn State Abington

Abstract

In this paper we will discuss some of the practical concerns and successes related to teaching students about paleography, editing, and digital practice as part of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) project.[1] Ultimately, we argue that large-scale digital projects, such as EMROC, afford students an opportunity for legitimate peripheral participation, to use Jean Lave and Etienné Wegner’s framework, in scholarly communities of practice.[2] This experience, in turn, fosters students’ identities as researchers. In this essay, we will show several ways students encountered and engaged with these practices during a phase of the project that ran from January 2019 until April 2021. We begin this paper by introducing the concept of a community of practice and then describe how our students come to learn about both manuscripts and paleography. Then, we shift to a discussion of Folger Shakespeare Library V.b.380 and how this particular seventeenth-century manuscript provided students with research opportunities in the fields of women’s labor, social history, and food studies.[3] Finally, we describe how the students worked with the manuscript through various hands-on and digitally mediated activities, and we conclude with a discussion of student reflections and takeaways from these experiences.