Project description
A closer look at early modern food conservation
In the early modern period, food conservation practices such as fermenting, smoking, and pickling were essential for global trade and food security, driving economic and demographic growth in Europe. However, current understanding of how this knowledge was produced and circulated remains limited. The interplay between practical and scholarly knowledge is poorly documented, hindering our grasp of historical practices. In this context, the ERC-funded PRESERVARE project will use interdisciplinary methods, including digital extraction, reconstructions, and archaeological analysis, to explore the development of practical and scholarly knowledge. This approach sheds light on historical food conservation, offering insights into its global impact and the individuals involved. The project will unravel the complexities of early modern food preservation.
Objective
In the early modern period, large-scale food conservation practices such as fermenting, smoking, and pickling were crucial for globalizing trade and increasing food security, and thus for economic and demographic growth in Europe’s cultural trading hubs. In addition, recent research indicates that domestic and trade practices like food conservation were key to the development of natural philosophical and chemical knowledge and vice versa. Yet we still know very little about how knowledge on early modern food conservation was produced, adapted, and circulated across these domains. How can we retrieve and understand embodied, practical historical knowledge through the history of early modern food conservation? How did embodied, practical knowledge of food conservation develop in conjunction with formalised, scholarly knowledge? Who were the people who produced and circulated these two types of knowledge and to ensure food supply before the industrial revolution?
PRESERVARE (‘to preserve’) answers these questions through case studies on 1) fermenting, 2) smoking, and 3) brining, curing, and pickling. It employs a theoretical framework rooted in the history of science, and a ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach that combines classical historical source interpretation with digital information extraction, archaeological data analysis, and physical reconstructions of early modern large-scale food conservation practices. Addressing these questions is urgently needed for the development of the history of knowledge, and is possible now because of recent developments in digitisation and information extraction, and theoretical and methodological advances in historical research. The project provides a history of early modern food conservation in the Low Countries in a global context, plus a theoretical and methodological framework for the historical study of dispersed epistemic domains and the retrieval and analysis of embodied, practical historical knowledge.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1011 JV AMSTERDAM
Netherlands
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