Food Production and Gender across the Early Modern World

This collection of nine essays presents new research exploring the significance and forms of labour involved in food production across the early modern world from c. 1500 to 1800. Ranging from the Netherlands to the Mediterranean Basin and from the Pacific to the Atlantic worlds, the volume opens up new directions in research on various activities that have received little attention, such as preserving, grinding, curing, and frying. These studies uncover historical actors engaged in the processing of different foodstuffs, whose embodied knowledge and work are often obscured in the historical record, and rendered even less accessible when performed by women. By interpreting genre paintings, revisiting well-known documents, and engaging in hands-on reconstruction research, the essays provide a more nuanced and fuller understanding of food production both in and out of the kitchen, while advancing long-standing historiographical debates on gender, food, and work in meaningful ways.