Basic structure of CoWITE

Composition period

The texts included in CoWITE span from 1550 to 1899, a period deliberately chosen to trace how women engaged in instructive writing over three and a half centuries. This time frame captures the gradual shift from early, often anonymous or pseudonymous recipe books to more confident and professionalised forms of female authorship by the end of the nineteenth century. We begin in 1550, a moment when vernacular literacy was spreading, and when the first women started to appear, sometimes only marginally, as contributors to domestic and medical knowledge in print. Though rare, these early texts are revealing: they show us how women worked within social and rhetorical constraints to offer guidance on household matters, health, and food. By including this early material, CoWITE aims to preserve these foundational voices and make visible the linguistic strategies they used to instruct, persuade, and advise.

The corpus ends in 1899, just before the turn of the century, by which point women's instructive writing had become more widespread and more varied. The late nineteenth century saw the rise of formal cookery schools, hospital dietetics, and domestic science education—contexts where women could publish more openly and professionally. These new roles shaped the way advice was written and presented, bringing changes not only in tone and structure, but also in how authority was claimed and shared. By covering this long stretch, from Tudor households to Victorian classrooms, CoWITE offers a diachronic view of how language, knowledge, and gender intersect in instructive discourse. The periodisation into four subcorpora, namely, CoWITE16 (1550–1599), CoWITE17 (1600–1699), CoWITE18 (1700–1799), and CoWITE19 (1800–1899), makes it possible to examine these developments decade by decade, always with attention to how women worked within and sometimes resisted evolving expectations around expertise, politeness, and persuasion.

This structure reflects the vision behind the project: to give space to women’s voices across time, and to make it easier to understand how their language shaped everyday knowledge and practice.

Medium

The corpus draws from both printed books and manuscript sources, allowing us to capture the full range of women’s instructive writing across time and social contexts.

The printed texts, ranging from modest cookery pamphlets to widely circulated domestic manuals, reflect the public face of women’s instructional authorship. These include works published under the authors' real names, initials, or pseudonyms such as A Lady, and span commercial cookbooks, medical handbooks, and practical guides on household management. Many of these were produced by professional or semi-professional women seeking to share knowledge with a broader audience.

The manuscript texts, by contrast, offer a more intimate glimpse into domestic literacy and private transmission of knowledge. Often compiled in household recipe books or family collections, these manuscripts contain generations of handwritten notes, marginalia, and adaptations—evidence of living texts shaped by everyday use. They provide insights into informal authorship, collaborative authorship (e.g., mother-to-daughter), and practices that rarely reached the printing press but were central to household knowledge.

These two mediums give voice to a wide spectrum of female experience, both published and unpublished, professional and amateur, and allow the corpus to reflect the complex ways in which women recorded, shared, and shaped instructive discourse over more than three centuries.

Types of texts and genres

CoWITE consists of instructional and technical writing authored by women, covering a range of topics related to domestic, medical, and culinary knowledge. The texts were written to offer practical advice, guidance, and procedures, often grounded in lived experience, and are unified by their didactic purpose. From a discourse-analytical perspective, the corpus includes texts that correspond predominantly to Werlich’s (1976) “instructional” text type, though features of descriptive and expository types are also present, particularly in medical and dietetic contexts. At present, the main genre represented in the corpus is the recipe genre, dealing with the following topics: culinary practices, household and domestic economy, medical and health-related advice, and diet and nutrition for specific populations (e.g., infants, convalescents).

Sampling

The corpus follows a diachronic and decade-based sampling strategy, covering each decade from 1550 to 1899, with approximately 50,000 words per decade. This structure ensures a balanced diachronic representation of instructive writing by women and allows for meaningful comparisons across time. Full texts are rarely included. Instead, the corpus is built from carefully selected excerpts taken from a wide range of sources. Given the repetitive nature of many instructive genres, particularly cookery books, which often follow formulaic patterns, the sampling avoids including long contiguous portions from a single source. Rather, to ensure internal diversity and reduce redundancy, excerpts are drawn from different books and different positions within those books: for example, the beginning of one text, the middle of another, and the end of a third.

This strategy provides a broader view of textual routines, lexical variation, and instructional tone, while remaining faithful to the didactic and procedural focus of the corpus. The sampling also reflects variation in authorship, geographical origin, and topic, supporting analyses of how women across time and place contributed to knowledge transmission in domestic and semi-professional domains.