With the first factually accurate biography of a great lady’s entire life, Lesley Abernethy introduces Lady Grisell Baillie - the Mistress of Mellerstain. Lady Grisell Baillie’s lifetime encompassed Scotland’s covenanting ‘killing times’ when her heroic youthful efforts ensured her father Sir Patrick Hume’s safety before the entire family fled into exile in Holland. After their return in the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688, she refused a post of maid of honour to Queen Mary, preferring instead to marry George Baillie. Following her marriage in 1691 she became mistress of George Baillie’s restored estates of Jerviswood in Lanarkshire and Mellerstain in Berwickshire and shortly afterwards began her meticulous accounts. Through the book, we see how her life was directly affected by the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, and by the financial disasters of the Darien Scheme and the South Sea Bubble. But though strife was a common aspect of her life, she still found great joy. Lady Grisell’s marriage was a lifetime love affair, and her devotion to both close and extended family was exemplary, including organising a journey through mainland Europe to Naples in the hope of saving the life of her son-in-law Lord Binning, suffering from TB. A patron of poets and musicians, she had commissioned portraits from all the outstanding painters of the day, as well as work by eminent silversmiths, furniture makers and architects, including William Adam, chosen as architect for the new house at Mellerstain. Her copious letters and numerous account books reveal life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland and England in intimate and sometimes surprising detail, but above all reveal the warm personality of a remarkable, energetic and courageous woman.

A beautifully illustrated argument that reveals notebooks as extraordinary paper machines that transformed knowledge on the page and in the mind. We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long eighteenth century, this book argues that notebooks were paper machines and that notekeeping was a capability-building exercise that enabled young notekeepers to mobilize everyday handwritten and printed forms of material and visual media in a way that empowered them to judge and enact the enlightened principles they encountered in the classroom. Covering a rich selection of material ranging from simple scribbles to intricate watercolor diagrams, the book reinterprets John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa. Although one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment, scholars seldom consider why it was so successful for those who used it. Each chapter uses one core notekeeping skill to reveal the fascinating world of material culture that enabled students in the arts, sciences, and humanities to transform the tabula rasa metaphor into a dynamic cognitive model. Starting in the home, moving to schools, and ending with universities, the book reconstructs the relationship between media and the mind from the bottom up. It reveals that the cognitive skills required to make and use notebooks were not simply aids to reason; rather, they were part of reason itself.

Winner of the Garden Media Guild Awards Reference Book of the Year 2016, the Guild of Food Writers Food Book of the year 2016, and the BBC Food & Farming Awards 2016 for Outstanding Achievement. Accompanied by a beautiful and comprehensive website of the same name, this wonderfully unique book is an indispensable and one-of-a-kind guide. It tells the story of the pear from its delightful taste and wonderful appearance to breeding and cultivation, following the fruit’s journey through history and around the world. Beautifully illustrated with 40 botanical watercolour paintings by Elisabeth Dowle, The Book of Pears is the most up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the pear. Moving through continents and cultures, Joan Morgan celebrates the pear’s long history as both a fresh and cooking fruit. Revealing the secrets of the pear as a status symbol, some of the most celebrated fruit growers in history, and how the pear came to be so important as an international commodity. The pear directory, which makes up the second half of the book, covers the world’s ancient and modern varieties, each with full tasting notes and historical, geographical and horticultural detail. A fully illustrated version of this directory is shown on the author's website www.thebookofpears.fruitforum.net

Here is everything you need to know about marmalade. C. Anne Wilson, Britain's foremost historian of food, traces the history of this most British of preserves from its Roman and medieval antecedents, through its adoption in Tudor England, its development in Stuart and Georgian Britain, and its fortunes up to the present day. She tells how the Portuguese learned from the Moors to eat quince marmalade, and how its characteristic Arab flavorings enhanced its appeal to the Europeans. Marmalade's varied roles—as a gift, as a sweetmeat, as a medicine, and as an aphrodisiac-are all discussed in The Book of Marmalade. The book concludes with dozens of recipes, new and traditional, in which marmalade is the star ingredient.

“Our domestic Sherlock brims with excitement” (Roger Lowenstein, Wall Street Journal) in this erudite romp through the smoke-stained, coal-fired houses of Victorian England. “The queen of living history” (Lucy Worsley) dazzles anglophiles and history lovers alike with this immersive account of how English women sparked a worldwide revolution—from their own kitchens. Wielding the same wit and passion as seen in How to Be a Victorian, Ruth Goodman shows that the hot coal stove provided so much more than morning tea. As Goodman traces the amazing shift from wood to coal in mid-sixteenth century England, a pattern of innovation emerges as the women stoking these fires also stoked new global industries: from better soap to clean smudges to new ingredients for cooking. Laced with irresistibly charming anecdotes of Goodman’s own experience managing a coal-fired household, The Domestic Revolution shines a hot light on the power of domestic necessity.

This title was first published in 2001: Hundreds of European travelogues produced by British travellers between 1750 and 1800 remain out of sight in most libraries and have generally been out of print since the 18th century. While many people with a working knowledge of the 18th century are familiar with works including Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey" and Smollett's "Travels through France and Italy", those produced by less "literary" travellers are largely unknown. This study aims to recreate the world of 18th-century travel writing in order to illuminate its central role in shaping Britain's emerging sense of national identity - an identity which proves to be more complex an less homogeneous than some cultural and historical studies would suggest. The author finds that the developing discourse of national character is bound up with questions of gender: national and authorial virtue are projected in terms of appropriately gendered behaviour, for male and female travel writers alike. In turn, gender intersects with class, most obviously in the tendency to denigrate aristocratic travellers as effeminate and celebrate the more manly activities of the middle-class traveller. These then - national identity, authorship and gender - are the central preoccupations of the study

Sweet and Clean? challenges the widely held beliefs on bathing and cleanliness in the past. For over thirty years, the work of the French historian, George Vigarello, has been hugely influential on early modern European social history, describing an aversion to water and bathing, and the use of linen underwear as the sole cleaning agent for the body. However, these concepts do not apply to early modern England. Sweet and Clean? analyses etiquette and medical literature, revealing repeated recommendations to wash or bathe in order to clean the skin. Clean linen was essential for propriety but advice from medical experts was contradictory. Many doctors were convinced that it prevented the spread of contagious diseases, but others recommended flannel for undergarments, and a few thought changing a fever patient's linens was dangerous. The methodology of material culture helps determine if and how this advice was practiced. Evidence from inventories, household accounts and manuals, and surviving linen garments tracks underwear through its life-cycle of production, making, wearing, laundering, and final recycling. Although the material culture of washing bodies is much sparser, other sources, such as the Old Bailey records, paint a more accurate picture of cleanliness in early modern England than has been previously described. The contrasting analyses of linen and bodies reveal what histories material culture best serves. Finally, what of the diseases-plague, smallpox, and typhus-that cleanliness of body and clothes were thought to prevent? Did following early modern medical advice protect people from these illnesses?

Legendary cook and writer Elizabeth David changed the way Britain ate, introducing a postwar nation to the sun-drenched delights of the Mediterranean, and bringing new flavours and aromas such as garlic, wine and olive oil into its kitchens. This mouthwatering selection of her writings and recipes embraces the richness of French and Italian cuisine, from earthy cassoulets to the simplest spaghetti, as well as evoking the smell of buttered toast, the colours of foreign markets and the pleasures of picnics. Rich with anecdote, David's writing is defined by a passion for good, authentic, well-balanced food that still inspires chefs today.