[Sca-cooks] Markham Bibliography was rice pudding & marrow

[johnna holloway]

There have been enough questions regarding
what Gervase Markham wrote or translated or
published that in 1962 F.N.L. [Frederick Noël
Lawrence] Poynter published
A Bibliography of Gervase Markham, 1568?-1637.
[Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, new
series, vol. xi, 1962 a work of 218 pages by the way]
 as an attempt to make sense
of what consisted of his body of works. This is as
far as I know the only bibliography of an early
English cookery author that is dedicated to just one author.

Regarding his troubles with the Stationer's, what Markham
was attempting to do by reissuing his material was to
recoup monies for works that were previously sold to a printer
and published. The author was paid once and only once, but
the printer/publisher could reissue the work as needed
without further payment to the original author.
Markham, needing money, was selling
basicly the same work on husbandry to a number of printers
over time. They were each releasing editions that were
 then in direct competition with each
other. The Stationer's Company of course didn't like this, so
they forced him to quit. Michael Best explores part of this, as
does The Cambridge History of English and American Literature
at http://www.bartleby.com/214/1701.html#txt2 .

Johnna Holloway  Johnnae llyn Lewis


> Kirrily Robert wrote:
> > The English Housewife is webbed at http://infotrope.net/sca/cooking/ if
> > anyone wants any more from this source.  Lots of good recipes, though
> > slightly out of period (1615).  However, the just-pre-1600 cookbooks
> > I've been working with lately don't read much differently, and I don't
> > think an awful lot changed in those 20 years.
Philip & Susan Troy wrote:
> It should be noted that Markham appears as the defendant in one of England's earliest plagiarism trials, as a legal structure had not really yet been devised to prevent a publisher from buying a book in a bookstall, tacking "New" onto its title, and publishing more or less the exact same book. (Yes. Not unlike what Bill Gates does ;-) ) In Markham's case, what he was being accused of was apparently recycling his own work for republication, and being paid for it as if it were original material. My point is that I'm not exactly sure when Markham actually wrote some or all of the text that was _published_ in 1615, which might explain the fact that it doesn't read all that differently from recipes published in, say, the 1580's or '90's.
Adamantius