Website Reviews 155

Figure 1. Quatrains in Mary Stuart’s Book of Hours: http://hri.newcastle.edu.au/ emwrn/da/index.php?content=hours.

Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities, 1500–1800 http://www.marryingcultures.eu/

The extremely attractive website for Marrying Cultures elegantly fulfills two key purposes of the academic website: it informs readers about the team’s research activities, events, and news, and, even more importantly, it provides a scholarly web resource in its own right. The project centers on early modern royal women and possesses several useful scholarly features. Marrying Cultures, a three-year project that concluded in 2016, analyzes the role of royal women as agents of cultural transfer in Europe from 1500 to 1800. Funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA), the project is a cooperative endeavor bringing together literary scholars, historians, an art historian, and a musicologist. Led by Helen Watanabe O’Kelly, Oxford University, as Principal Investigator (PI), its co-PIs included Jill Bepler, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel; Almut Bues, German Historical Institute, Warsaw; and Svante Norrhem, Lund University. These senior members paired with postdoctoral scholars Ewa Kociszewska and Adam Morton (Oxford); Elise 156 EMWJ Vol. 11 No. 2 • Spring 2017 Website Reviews

Dermineur (Lund); and doctoral researchers Maria Skiba (Wolfenbüttel) and Urszula Zachara-Zwianzek (Warsaw), thereby providing invaluable research experience to the next scholarly generation. The list of institutional partners is also impressive: Kensington Palace, the Livrustkammaren, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Museum of Polish History. The range of competencies and collections distinguished the project in several respects; the collaboration of university scholars with researchers working at museums, archives, and libraries has been very productive, attaining a high standard of scholarly results that are interdisciplinary as well as comparative. The research outcomes are equally impressive: conferences, concerts, public outreach, books, and articles. By focusing on dynastic women who left their homes to marry into new courts, Marrying Cultures takes cultural transfer as its point of departure for all its interrogations. The case studies involve women from the whole of Europe from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries: the Polish princesses Katarzyna Jagiellonka, who became Duchess of Finland and Queen of Sweden (1526–83), and Zofia Jagiellonka, Duchess of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1464–1512); Hedwig Eleonora of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp, Queen of Sweden (1636– 1715); Charlotte Amalie of Hessen-Kassel, Queen of Denmark (1650–1714); the Portuguese princess Catarina of Braganza, Queen of England, Scotland, and Great Britain (1638–1705); Maria Amalia of Saxony, Queen of the Two Sicilies and Queen of (1724–60); and Louise Ulrike of Prussia, Queen of Sweden (1720–82). These women often never returned to their parental courts, yet one of their many duties as consort was to represent their birth dynasty for the rest of their lives. They frequently moved to very different environments, strange to them not only in terms of language and geography, but also with very different expectations for women. Marrying Cultures has thus opened entirely new avenues for research concerning many aspects of royal women’s lives and their roles at the highest levels of European culture that can be found on the website. The Marrying Cultures web site is attractive and rich in information. The homepage features a banner carousel with recent color photos of the Palazzo Reale in Naples, the near Naples, and two interior views of German palaces. The images are of high quality and provide an immediate sense of place and dynasty — the Saxon bride who married to Naples or the Prussian bride who married to Sweden. At first glance, viewers gain insight into the complex cultural relationships that Marrying Cultures addresses. Directly Website Reviews 157 under the banner are the usual horizontal menu items: home, about, news, events, research, people, and contact. The homepage can be roughly divided into three sections. In the upper third, three images — a queen, a splendid Baroque library interior, and a map — provide access to three different kinds of information. Clicking on the image of the queen leads to the “about” information (which can also be accessed simply by clicking “about” in the horizontal menu) for a description of the project. Clicking on the library provides an alphabetical list of the queens consort, with short biographies that can be expanded for detailed information about each; it is followed by a detailed list of research questions. The latter offers a goldmine of research topics and perspectives that informed the current project and that also can serve as potential points of departure for future work. Clicking on the map leads users to interactive maps that trace the journeys of five brides. These maps can, in turn, be consulted for details of the routes; clicking on known points along each route brings up short texts explaining the location’s importance and the date the entourage was there. This user’s only criticism of the homepage is that when clicking the image of the consort, one is not led to detailed information about the individual consorts, but instead to a project description. This is a minor matter, however, amid a wealth of intelligently displayed information. The homepage’s middle section offers short blurbs with links to the latest and archived news and sample music. The music features the historical ensemble Bella Discordia featuring Marrying Cultures project member Maria Skiba. The 12:39-minute example here is Donna Di Maestà by the Italian composer Barbara Strozzi (1619–77), written and performed for the wedding of Eleonora Gonzaga of Mantua (1630–86) to Ferdinand III (1608–57), Holy Roman Emperor. Showcasing the music leads users new to the subject directly into the project’s core, while allowing more experienced researchers the rush of discovery: a musi- cal work written by a woman for an empress. The recording presented on the Marrying Cultures website is probably only the second-ever performance of this ephemeral composition. The lower third of the homepage has an informative paragraph in English about the project as a whole that can be accessed as well in German, Swedish, and Polish. The paragraph can also be expanded into an entire project descrip- tion. The mandatory information about contact, partners, and funders is clearly displayed at the bottom of the homepage. The website features all widely followed 158 EMWJ Vol. 11 No. 2 • Spring 2017 Website Reviews forms of social media, thus encouraging a broader audience to engage with its content more informally as well. The dynamic homepage is user-friendly and should lead even the uniniti- ated through the layers of complexity in a straightforward fashion. In short, the splash page, while containing a great deal of information, does not overwhelm the viewer with excessive detail and offers multiple points of access into the rich mate- rial to be found here. The website is functional, appeals to both scholars and inter- ested users, and is beautifully illustrated. A thoroughly professional web resource, it does not project the frequently clunky look of a “project” website. Suggestions for improvement are minor. For example, the “People” tab contains detailed information about project researchers and their role in Marrying Cultures. While this is certainly useful, a link to the respective researcher’s homepage with lists of publications would help other scholars who wish to follow the team members’ related research. One annoying feature is the title page of the manuscript “Cabinet des Dames” appearing squarely to the right on nearly every page. Despite these minor flaws, the website is both consistent and innovative. This is an especially noteworthy accomplishment, considering that the website has evolved over a period of several years. This reviewer very much appreciates that a given text or subpage can be accessed through a number of points of entry, a feature that makes the information less hierarchical and more contextually alive. Several features of the subpages deserve special mention. “News” offers extremely detailed conference reports that provide a treasure trove of informa- tion, not only about the conference participants, but also about the research discussed there. While Marrying Cultures has an ambitious program for dis- semination of research in print, the conference reports give viewers the material in a timely fashion, provide the context of persons and locations central to events, and direct users to the printed research. In general, details of what transpired at conferences are often known only to those in attendance; these conference reports, however, preserve the immediacy of the discussion and the freshness of the work accomplished. They supplement the later printed results in important ways. In addition to the conference reports, the “News” page includes information about book and article publications, concerts, and interviews about exhibitions. The contextualization and scaffolding of the complex work of the assembled research teams becomes visible here. While “News” presents the latest news, a link to all archived news spans the project’s history, from its launch in 2013 through the “Royal Couples” Children’s Competition in Warsaw, to the exhibition Website Reviews 159 at Skarhult (Sweden), and to panels at the Renaissance Society of America, as well as information on other exhibitions, concerts, lectures, and conferences. The research synergies emanating from this project are most impressive: in addition to the activities that occurred specifically within the confines of a “project only” event, the numerous individual lectures, papers, performances, and activities in other venues confirm the considerable multiplying factor of this high-powered research initiative. The website enables these multiple strands of scholarly activity to be contextualized as parts of the greater whole. Showcasing Marrying Cultures research at a single point confirms the value of web-based research presentations. Under the “Research” tab, one does not find a compilation of the project’s research results as one might expect (which may yet be forthcoming when the project is completed), but rather “Item of Interest,” “Mapping the Consort” (already discussed above), and “Recommended Reading” (a list of seven books in English about the several dynasties studied here). While the recommended reading list is short, this fact underscores the need for a project such as Marrying Cultures. The “Item of Interest” rubric is a must-read, particularly the entry “Cultural Transfer through Vegetables,” which documents how Bona Sforza brought new vegetables, such as artichokes and green beans to Poland, and introduced every Polish household to the bundle of carrots, onions, and turnips that even today goes into every stock pot. Each entry differs slightly: for example, “The Raw Materials of Printing” highlights the long relationship between Adam Olearius, the librarian and curator of the world-renowned Kunstkammer at the Gottorf court, with Queen Hedwig Eleonore of Sweden, who left Gottorf in 1655 after her wedding. Olearius sent the printed description of the Gottorf Kunstkammer to the Swedish queen, as confirmed by the series of six letters on the website. Full transcriptions of the correspondence and translations into English are pro- vided. These documents illustrate the enduring connection of the queen consort to the court of her birth. The remaining “Items of Interest” include “Le Cabinet des Dames,” “Trade Relations Between and Naples,” “Charles II and Catherine of Braganza Medal,” “Swedish Political Amulet,” “Genealogical Tree of the Jagellonians,” “Wakeman Trial Pamphlet,” “Meissen as Diplomatic Gift,” and “Adolf Fredrik’s Parliamentary Stamp.” Each “Item of Interest” is a well- researched, nicely illustrated, short introduction to objects that offer insights into cultural exchange and women as agents of exchange. Such insights emerge only out of a deep engagement with the sources in archives, libraries, and museums, 160 EMWJ Vol. 11 No. 2 • Spring 2017 Website Reviews

Figure 1. Home page Marrying Cultures. from research conducted by scholars with multilingual competencies, paleograph- ic skills, and a detective’s sense of a trail to be followed. It is hoped that the website for Marrying Cultures is not ephemeral, but will be archived, migrated, and maintained by the research sponsors, preferably with mirror copies at all participating institutions. We have moved beyond the days when having a project website was merely a way of advertising one’s grant and providing a feature desired by funding agencies and recipient institutions, none of whom wanted to be bothered with maintaining the site after the close of the project. In stark contrast, this website is a research product in its own right. Owing to the scholarship presented here and nowhere else, it is in itself a valu- able research outcome. Moreover, it documents clearly the multifaceted, bundled approach to an exciting and complex topic. The website Marrying Cultures leads scholars and students alike into the sources. Because the assembled researchers come from libraries, universities, museums, and archives, the website for Marrying Cultures makes visible the project’s interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the early modern queen consort. It will have durable value as a model for others seeking to launch similar projects. The research outlines, biographies of the queen consorts, scholarly reports, and items of interest published on the website offers impeccable research that multiplies the potential for new knowledge creation in Website Reviews 161 tandem with the printed publications. The website not only points scholars to the published research results, but also clearly identifies the printed works with the exhibitions, performances, public outreach, and the many other activities associ- ated with this project. Finally, and most usefully, Marrying Cultures has pedagogical value by providing information that can easily be used in teaching: music, transcriptions and translations, overviews, biographies, and maps, to name but a few examples. Readers of this journal will want to spend time getting acquainted with the website, both for their own research and for their instructional needs. By all stan- dards, Marrying Cultures is an exemplary web resource. Mara R. Wade University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Recipes Project https://recipes.hypotheses.org/

The Recipes Project, edited by Elaine Leong, Lisa Smith, Amanda Herbert, and Laurence Totelin, is an online scholarly blog that explores the history of recipes from an interdisciplinary perspective. Originally conceived by a group of scholars researching historical medicinal recipes, the project was launched in 2010 with the title “Remedies, Recipe, Receipts,” and was superseded by its current version four years ago. The Recipes Project has now expanded beyond the initial goal of creating “a new informal network for active researchers into historical medicinal receipts.” It currently holds over 470 posts spanning over 117 pages. In present-day English, the term “recipe” denotes a genre of texts that give instructions on how to prepare food. Historically, in addition to culinary and medical recipes, alchemical recipes were also common. In the last category, one could find instructions on the subject of transmutation of base metals into silver or gold as well as other related exercises involving the fabrication of colors, inks, and dyes. Witchcraft and magic could conceivably be woven into ways of prepar- ing dishes, remedies, and beauty tinctures as well. The Recipes Project includes examples of all these kinds of recipes, considered from a broad range of disci- plinary and methodological perspectives. The longevity of this project, its broad appeal to scholars and students in various stages of their academic careers, and the sheer quantity of contributions attest to its resounding success.