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This dissertation examines Spanish language manuscript cookbooks from the fifteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries that combine advice on cooking, medicine, and cosmetics in order to show how academic theories about health were utilized by non-academically trained individuals for everyday use. Much of scholarship on the early modern Hispanic Kingdoms has been afflicted by the so-called “Black Legend of Spain,” the idea that Spain was religiously backward, scientifically stunted, and culturally cruel and superstitious. This view was rooted in sixteenth-century accounts of the Spanish Empire and promoted by English and Dutch propaganda that pitted the Catholic fanaticism of the Spanish against the virtuous colonization efforts of the English and the Dutch. This had the effect of casting the Spanish Empire and its predecessors, the Hispanic Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, as being outside the scientific mainstream of the rest of Europe. Other than English and Dutch propaganda that cast their empires as scientifically progressive and religiously tolerant, much of the “Black Legend” resulted from the dysfunctional nature of empires in general and the waning power of Spain in the eighteenth century.
This dissertation focuses on illustrating the ways in which the late medieval and early modern Hispanic Kingdoms and the Empire were thoroughly involved in the development of science in Western Europe by arguing that the role of women in healthcare and women’s health concerns were an important facet of the growth of medical science in the period. I begin by examining the basic treatises of humoral theory by Galen, Avicenna and Dioscorides, and by tracing their development and influence through the formal academic systems of the middle to late Middle Ages. Toledo was an important translation site for Arabic medical texts into Latin. I then illustrate how important texts on women’s health utilized recipes to promote humoral theories of health through food, medicine and cosmetic advice. I then continue to show how Spanish recipe books continued to copy and develop these recipes. Finally, I illustrate how early modern medical explorers’ interest in women’s health led them to the Americas to utilize empirical knowledge to find remedies among native plants.