Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This book enables you to see the Elizabethans through their food in a very intriguing way. Hilary Spurling inherited from an old aunt a little leather-bound manuscript volume, which in fact contained all the recipes of someone called Elinor Fettiplace, who wrote it out in 1604. And so Spurling turned it into a book with about 200 of the recipes, with her comments and the background and history of Elinor Fettiplace and her family.
Hilary Spurling inherited from an old aunt a little leather-bound manuscript volume, which in fact contained all the recipes of someone called Elinor Fettiplace, who wrote it out in 1604. And so Spurling turned it into a book with about 200 of the recipes, with her comments and the background and history of Elinor Fettiplace and her family. Fettiplace was the daughter of a man who lived at Sapperton in Gloucestershire, so she came from a good country house background. She married into the Fettiplace family who were Oxfordshire gentry. This book enables you to see the Elizabethans through their food in a very intriguing way, and she actually tried out a lot of the recipes herself. They’re not just recipes for eating – there are recipes for medicine, and recipes for scent: Elizabethans loved to put very intense smells into pots which you could open up and the smell would come out.
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Mark Girouard is an architectural writer, a leading architectural historian, and biographer of James Stirling, as well as an authority on the country house. He was previously architectural editor of Country Life magazine, and was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1975 to 1976. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987. His book Elizabethan Architecture was published in 2009. Elizabethan theatre, he says, wasn’t at all a provincial thing but was tied into the classical world and Europe. There were ideas of geometry and proportion in the theatres, and there was this idea that the theatre was a miniature of the world. ‘Elizabethan theatre was a conscious re-creation of Roman theatres,’ he says.
