Food Production and Gender across the Early Modern World

This collection of nine essays presents new research exploring the significance and forms of labour involved in food production across the early modern world from c. 1500 to 1800. Ranging from the Netherlands to the Mediterranean Basin and from the Pacific to the Atlantic worlds, the volume opens up new directions in research on various activities that have received little attention, such as preserving, grinding, curing, and frying. These studies uncover historical actors engaged in the processing of different foodstuffs, whose embodied knowledge and work are often obscured in the historical record, and rendered even less accessible when performed by women. By interpreting genre paintings, revisiting well‑known documents, and engaging in hands‑on reconstruction research, the essays provide a more nuanced and fuller understanding of food production both in and out of the kitchen, while advancing long‑standing historiographical debates on gender, food, and work in meaningful ways.

About the Author

Melissa Calaresu is Professor of History and the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. She is a cultural historian whose research interests move between the history of food, the representation of urban space, and material culture in early modern Italy. Her recent publications have focused on selling food on the street, urban kitchens, and the Grand Tour of the eighteenth‑century Welsh painter, Thomas Jones. She was co‑curator with Victoria Avery of the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800 in 2019–2020. She is co‑editor of the journal Global Food History .

Marta Manzanares Mileo is a Ramón y Cajal Fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She holds a PhD from the University of Barcelona, where she examined the confectionery trade in early modern Catalonia. Her current research interests explore women’s roles in sugar‑related trades and consumption in early modern Hispanic cities.