10 - Minding the Fire : Human-Fire Coagency in Margaret Cavendish’s Matrimonial Trouble and Seventeenth-Century Recipes

Summary

Abstract

This chapter begins with the example of The Lady Grace Castleton's Booke of Receipts (Folger MS V.a.600), a recipe collection from the late seventeenth century, which uses six words to describe a low fire: ‘soft’, ‘easy’, ‘gentle’, ‘slow’, ‘small’, and ‘sober’. The chapter then turns to a consideration of this wonderfully evocative language alongside other moments that denote attention to fire within a new searchable recipe corpus in LUNA, the Folger digital manuscript repository. It ends with a meditation upon the vigilance needed to maintain the right amount of heat for certain recipes and the implications for our understanding of the role of kitchen work in the development of human psychology.

Keywords: fire and hearth, recipes, coagency, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Castleton, ecofeminism

In her analysis of the creation of a fire barrier in Alberta, Canada to help curtail the spread of pine beetle kill, which could contribute to uncontrollable forest fires in the province, ecofeminist Donna Haraway writes that ‘Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing as well as an agent of double death, the killing of ongoingness’. On the other side of the globe, in the early months of 2020, ‘defensive burning’ as practiced by Aboriginal people in Australia was receiving international recognition for its effectiveness in curtailing the damage done by wildfires and for the resulting reduction in greenhouse emissions. Haraway's analysis looks largely at the present time of a particular geographic region and ends with a projection into a fictional future; the Aboriginal practices draw on centuries-old knowledge about how to use fire as a ‘tool’ in ‘protecting the land’. Here I would like to consider how the wildfires of our current moment and the ways they have made some of us aware of this ‘complicated multispecies history’, such as described above, signifies a return to another time and place.