A Language Not One's Own: Translational Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Iberian Recipes

abstract:This essay examines collections of recipes from Spain and Portugal in three seventeenth-century manuscript recipe books owned and attributed to Ann Fanshawe (Wellcome MS 7113); Mary Granville and Anne Granville D'Ewes (Folger MS V.a.430); and Sarah Hughes (Wellcome MS 363). Drawing on theories of translation and of the paratext, this essay argues that these recipes, which are often recorded in their language of origin, contain foreign terminology or references, or paradoxically inscribe their provenance through translation, actively positioning themselves as transcultural and transnational communications. In resisting assimilationist practices of translation, these recipes give us a household counter-narrative of amity between countries that were often antagonistic. In turn, they position the female owners of these books as "go-between" translators of cultural practices and epistemologies with the power to use, circulate, and pass down this manuscript knowledge, thus exemplifying the informal networks of hospitable exchange, friendship, and alliance that exist beyond the bounds of official state politics.