[Artemisia] An Odd query for the True History Wonks

[Dr. Helm-Clark]

> I realize the risk in trying to plot a trend from
> three samples, but I can't help thinking that
> Something caused this movement from bupkis to riches
> within 25 years.
> 
> Some speculations of mine so far:
> Some change in the publishing business?
> (Technological?  Legal regulation? New business
> models?)

First English printing press: 1476.  The first books
that Caxton published were scripture followed by the 
classics of antiquity. The established English middle
class bought everything that Caxton and his competition
printed. An affluent middle class, the market for books,
and the economy of scale fostered by the spread of 
both printing and papermaking technologies all pre-date
the books you cite by ~200 years. Remember: Caxton and
Sire Thomas Morley are contemporaries.

> An intellectual paradigm shift toward encyclopedic
> descriptive folk life research?

Now there's a modern thought!  Remember, the past is
a foreign country (and the title of a really good book
by David Lowenthal on the Philosophy of History). Neither 
Hobbes nor Locke nor any of their educated contemporaries 
would have even thought of compiling folk traditions, 
even for an "encyclopedia."  Pliny the Elder was still 
the standard work for that, even in the 17th C. 

> The idea of social how-to books spreading outward from
> Muslim Spain?

I think the timing is wrong for this.  Granada fell in 1492.
What follows is the systematic destruction of diversity via
"ethnic" cleansing of the Moriscoes, Roum, et al. by the
Inquisition. Not a great place to be printing books other
than those which had an "imprimatur" from a Catholic censor.h.
 
> A result of the Commonwealth and its demise?  (Maybe
> feeling an urgent need to preserve traditions when the
> mortality of those traditions was realized?)

I will suffer the ignobility of repeating myself to say 
no, preservation of anything (other than foodstuffs) is 
just not something a 17th C. person would do. By the 17th 
C., not even religious stuff qualifies as being worthy 
of preservation, especially with anabaptists, puritans 
and levelers running about.

At least two of the articles in a collection of essays 
that I own on Stuart England support the view that the 
Restoration is responsible for "sudden explosion" of 
"how-to" books on leisure activities. The "Restoration" 
created a climate of party-going and a demand for instruction 
on the leisure activities for the merchant princes and idle
nobility. The active pleasure of leisure activities could
easily be the zeitgeist of the Restoration period after
the somberness of the Civil War and Commonwealth (p. 182,
"Minds and Manners" by Graham Parry, in: B. Worden (Ed.)
_Stuart England_, Phaidon Press, Oxford, pp. 176-198)

I think this point illustrates, more than any other, the 
difficulty of taking re-creation beyond dressing-up in period
clothes and crafting period things. Unfortunately, the attempt
to understand an historical mindset requires a level of 
research that most of us lack the time to pursue.

> Thoughts?  Do trends with cookbooks or in other areas
> shed light?

The publishing explosion of "leisure arts" books in also 
seen in cookbooks during the Stuart Restoration (p. 263, 
"The English at Home," by Peter Earle, in: B. Worden (Ed.)
_Stuart England_, Phaidon Press, Oxford, pp. 242-263).

(Yes, Mistress Crispy-Anne, it is a secondary source, but
it's a good one).

ttfn
Therasia