Leonie Böttiger is a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science’s graduate school and at BGSMCS at Freie Universität Berlin. Her PhD project investigates premodern Arabic recipe collections as resources of knowledge, focusing on a variety of disciplinary contexts, periods, and regions. Leonie's article "And Let Her Use It': Women Patients in Early Medieval Arabic Gynecological Recipes" is out now in a special issue of postmedieval.

In this talk, Leonie Böttiger shares some insights from her ongoing dissertation project, which investigates how practical knowledge was transmitted through premodern Arabic technical recipe collections. In particular, she discusses how authorship functioned for "unauthored" texts such as recipe collections and interrogates how author-compilers constructed authority when addressing their audiences.