The study of household recipe books in late medieval and early modern Europe has sparked enormous interest in recent years. These troves of practical knowledge were the most common form of women's medical writing in Renaissance Europe, often providing the textual basis for female medical authority. Recent studies have shown that recipe books played a key role in the practice of household medicine, which remained the primary mode of caring for the sick until the nineteenth century. Often organized in eclectic ways, recipe books offered valuable guides to healing as well as good household management. Bundled together in these compendia were a wide variety of recipes ranging from medicaments, cosmetics, and culinary secrets to instructions for making ordinary household products such as ink, soap, and stain remover. The impressive range of activities encompassed by recipe collections testifies to the complex skills needed to govern an early modern household. In the sometimes idiosyncratic ways they curated their collections, female householders found opportunities to display both their prudence and intellectual interests.

As indicators of their authors’ active pursuits, the recipe books compiled by women also testify to female engagement with early modern cultures of experimentation. It was not uncommon for affluent women to try out medical recipes in order to improve their smell, texture, taste, and shelf life, or to adapt them in line with available ingredients.