Food and knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi's paper kitchens

Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well-known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early 17th century.

In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books.

What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge.