Edith Snook

Edith Snook’s research and teaching focus on early modern English literature, with a particular interest in writing by women, but she has also developed research expertise in bodily histories, history of medicine, and recipes, especially the recipe culture of the Maritimes.

She is the author of two books on women’s writing. Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary History (Palgrave, 2011; SSHRC funded) was named a 2011 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. Her first book was Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Ashgate 2005). She has also published work on Margaret Cavendish, Grace Mildmay, Jane Grey, and Elizabeth Isham.

Funded by SSHRC, the Early Modern Maritime Recipes database is a collaboration with Dr. Lyn Bennett at Dalhousie University. It collects print and manuscript recipes that were circulating before 1800 in what is now defined as Canada’s Maritime provinces. A book about these recipes, Early Modern Maritime Recipes: Circulating Knowledge in the Pre-1800 Atlantic World, also with Lyn Bennet, is forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Other historical work includes serving as editor of The Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2018) and developing essays on early modern recipes and grooming and hygiene (for The Cultural History of Beauty), settler colonialism, and children's diseases.

Her current research project, tentatively titled The Culture of Physic, investigates how medical practices infiltrated literary forms undertaken by early modern English women. It focuses on life writing by Elizabeth Isham, Anne Fanshawe, and Grace Mildmay, Katherine Paston’s letters, fiction by Jane Barker, and poetry and drama by Margaret Cavendish.

Professor Snook supervises theses on early modern non-dramatic literature, particularly women's writing. Current member of the Graduate Academic Unit.