Lucy Mookerjee: English Cookery or Plantagenet Propaganda?

Lucy Mookerjee will present “English Cookery or Plantagenet Propaganda? The Forme of Cury and the Politics of Culinary Authority.” The Forme of Cury is the first cookbook in the English Language; it was compiled in the late 14th-century by the master cooks of King Richard II and contains around 200 recipes. Lucy will discuss the overlooked history of The Forme of Cury, revealing how the medieval cookery was not merely a culinary manual, but moreover a political and performative text tied to the crisis of authority in the last decade of the reign of Richard II

Lucy  is a scholar of medieval literary theory and book history. Her work has received support from The Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities at The New York Public Library; The Folger Shakespeare Library; the Bibliographical Society (UK); and the Bibliographical Society of America.  As a recent recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Lucy is currently completing a scholarly edition of The Forme of Cury as well as writing narrative nonfiction work that tells the life story of the renowned medieval cookery within the broader intellectual and political climate of the Ricardian court which produced it. She received her PhD in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from NYU.

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