Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy by Deborah L Krohn PAPERBACK

Taylor & Francis

Deborah L. Krohn presents here the first full-length study of Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook. She treats the illustrations as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. > Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What'