Marisa Rose Bordonaro
(Western University)

Paper
presented at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies
(Kalamazoo, 2025)

Session on
“Women and Manuscripts: Questions of Authorship”

Sponsored by
Research Group on Manuscript Evidence

Organized by Jaclyn L. Reed (Independent Scholar)

2025 Congress Program

“For the General Good of My Country:
Sugar as a Trans-corporeal Means
of Gendered Liberation and Colonial Subjugation
in Hannah Woolleyʼs The Queen-like Closet”

Abstract:

My paper examines the ways in which Hannah Woolleyʼs 1670 recipe book The Queen-like Closet uses sugar as a means for white middling-class English women cooks to establish gendered, class-based, and nationalist subjectivities in the context of Englandʼs colonial expansion in the Caribbean. Previous scholarship
establishes that cooks in early modern recipe books establish corporeal subjectivities through the preparation of their food. In the introduction to In the Kitchen, 1550–1800: Reading English Cooking at Home and Abroad, Madeline Bassnett and Hillary Nunn characterize recipe books as crucial sites of “domestic knowledge
production.” In accordance with this characterization, Katherine Walker argues that early modern cooks demonstrate two primary traits in their cooking: instinct (the ways in which the body speaks to oneself) and fancy (the cultivation of creativity).

I expand upon this notion of recipe books as corporeal facilitators of domestic knowledge by using Walkerʼs descriptions of instinct and fancy, along with Stacy Alaimoʼs concept of trans-corporeality, to critically examine Woolleyʼs bodily and aesthetic creations of feminine nationalism that is inherently intertwined with colonialism. Alaimo defines trans-corporeality as the intertwining of the human and the non-human environmental world. In Woolleyʼs text, while sugar allows white English women to form a liberatory community of knowledge that links the domestic, the public, and the global, it also exists as a product that African women were enslaved to produce. Ultimately, while bodily interactions with and decorative uses of sugar can be liberating for the cook, the cultivation of sugar cannot be separated from its colonial origins.

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