Grace Mildmay’s recipes and Indigenous knowledge in the early modern Atlantic world

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the use of guaiacum and sassafras in the manuscript recipe collections of Grace Mildmay, Lady Mildmay (1552–1620). Although Milday is now a fairly well known seventeenth-century domestic medical practitioner, her recipes have not received significant scholarly attention. To trace the history of these two ingredients, which had great cachet in the early modern Atlantic world, the essay looks at the earliest European herbals, travel narratives, and medical texts that reported on the use of these plants as medicines by Taino and Timucua people in the Americas. The essay argues that when these ingredients appear in Mildmay's recipes, Indigenous knowledge remains the foundation for their use, persisting in the chopping, grating, and decocting techniques that the recipes detail. The English household emerges as a site in the Atlantic world where the violence of colonial contact intersects with the gendered hierarchies of knowledge framing English women’s medical practice.