Early Modern Leaven in Bread, Bodies, and Spirit

Abstract

This essay investigates how different leavening agents were used in early modern English devotional, culinary, and medicinal contexts. Baking bread leavened through various means in the modern kitchen offers insight into the historical processes that made leaven and its physical effects so telling for medical practitioners, home cooks, and devotional writers of the time. In discovering a complex and contradictory history of leaven in early modern life, this essay argues that the baker and believer must rely on their own physical and faithful experiences to employ the right leaven the right way for bread or belief. The domestic practice of using leaven becomes a method of spiritual knowing which early modern practitioners could express across their culture’s most central spaces.