Paper short abstract:

This paper examines women's interaction with medical epistemology during the late colonial period in Mexico through an analysis of conventual recipe collections in manuscript sources. It highlights women's contributions as selective, critical readers and as authors of original information.

Paper long abstract:

While the majority of print medical texts that circulated in New Spain from the mid-sixteenth century through the end of the colonial period were written by male authors, medical information was also exchanged in manuscript form in ways that allowed for the active participation of women. Health advice and remedies shared by way of correspondence and in recipe collections provide an alternate vantage point from which to consider how women interacted with the medical establishment, not only as patients but also as selective, critical readers and as producers of information.

Taking as a point of departure the recipe collection of the Convent of the Purísima Concepción in Puebla, compiled in the early nineteenth century, I examine the epistemological framework behind the manuscript's organisation, which appropriates information from unnamed-yet-often recognisable print sources, juxtaposing them with innovative solutions authored by some of the convent's own sisters. My work also seeks to bridge the gap from a disciplinary standpoint between research that has been done on European recipe collections (see Lynette Hunter, Sarah Hutton and Elaine Leong), and the study of female authorship and conventual life in Spanish America (see Margaret Chowning, Asunción Lavin and Stephanie Kirk). In addition to considerations about genre and the intersection of the medical and culinary spheres, attention is paid to the link between women's writing and outside political events, with the collection's latter entries arguably reflecting the radical institutional changes experienced by Mexican convents as the colonial period came to a close with the War of Independence.