I’m interested in the ways that recipes and other drug literature were spaces of translation and exchange for people who spoke and wrote different languages and lived in different healing contexts in the early modern world. Some years ago I wrote an essay on this that used the translation of theriac (an extraordinarily important compound drug and poison antidote in medieval and early modern Europe) into Chinese texts (and a peek at how it got there) as a case study to think about that phenomenon. The piece recently came up at a workshop on Testing Drugs and Trying Cures, so I figured I’d post a link to it here. If you’d like to read it and can’t access it through your institution or library, please contact me.

(I’m trying to be better about archiving my work on this site, so in that spirit I will be posting links to essays, etc. until I’m caught up, and then as they come out.)