SC - Query to the list - "Good Huswifes' Handmaide for the kitchen"

[Philip & Susan Troy]

rcmann4 at earthlink.net wrote:
 
> "Good Huswifes' Handmaid for Cookerie" appears in the bibilography to "To
> the Queen's Taste" by Lorna Sass.  She lists it with a date of 1588, but
> gives no other information.

The Michael Best edition of Markham's "The English Housewife" has a
similar bibliography entry for "The Good Huswifes' Handmaide For the
Kitchin", which it lists as being published in London in 1594. As with
Brighid's example, no other information is available, but then such
early printed books can leave us in great doubt as to anything more
specific, just as a manuscript might. It might say what shop it was
printed at, upstairs from Ye Wobbly Vagrant Inn, or some such, but
certainly not an ISBN or anything.

Thomas, isn't "The Good Huswifes' Handmaide for the Kitchin" the source
we discussed that may or may not have lifted passages from the Neue
Proper Boke of Cokerie? I ask because there were, for most of the
seventeenth century, no real copyright laws, at least with regard to
cookbooks, which is why there are so many books from a relatively tight
time frame with similar, but not identical, titles. The idea is to find
a cookbook you like, copy it, with or without additional material (so
you can claim you've improved it), then publish it yourself under a name
that is similar (so you can trade on the success of the earlier volume),
but not identical (so you can claim that it's a different book), and any
similarities are purely coincidental.   

Or, as Tom Lehrer put it (and gee, I hope it was his own work), 
"Plagiarize! Let no one else's work evade your eyes! 
So don't shade your eyes! Plagiarize!" 
etc., etc.

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com