Review: Allen J. Grieco, Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in Renaissance Italy (original) (raw)

Reviewed by: Jesse Locker Portland State University Food history is perhaps the most ephemeral of all historical disciplines, in that its primary object of study, whether the food itself or the act of its consumption, can no longer be directly experienced and thus requires a particular act of historical imagination. Moreover, perhaps even more than other premodern historical disciplines, food history is by its nature skewed toward the wealthy and powerful, as celebratory banquets for weddings, receptions, celebrations, or other special events of the very wealthy are documented in great detail, while ordinary meals show little record in traditional historical sources. This volume gathers together for the first time essays by eminent food historian Allen J. Grieco, originally published in English, French, and Italian, mostly between 1989 and 1999, and overcomes these limitations by drawing on a vast array of less conventional sources: from literature, poetry, and letters, to cookbooks and dietary treatises, to receipts from convents and orphanages, to sermons and works of art. The volume contains a new introduction and afterword that situate the author's work, and food history more broadly, within the material, social, and cultural turns in the historical disciplines as a whole. Grieco's approach is deeply rooted in the methods of the Annales school, which sought to move beyond the study of political and macroeconomic events to focus instead on how individuals experienced and interacted with the world around them. Although earlier historians might have addressed food in terms of, for example, fluctuations in food prices and their political or economic consequences, Grieco's goal is to understand "the social and cultural context in which the food was consumed" (16). The book comprises fourteen chapters covering a range of food and foodways ca. 1200 to 1550, organized into three sections: "The Renaissance Table in Theory and Practice," "Social Distinctions, Dietary Theory and Classificatory Systems," and "Food in Literary and Visual Discourse," although there is significant thematic overlap between them. The essays display a broad erudition and linguistic command on a range of subjects, from the social conventions of the Renaissance banquet (chap. 3, "Conviviality in a Renaissance Court: The Ordine et Officij of the Court of Urbino") to boar-hunting imagery in chivalric literature (chap. 13, "The Eaten Heart: Social Order, Sexuality, and the Wilderness") to representations of poultry in painting (chap. 11, "What's in a Detail: More Chickens in Renaissance Birth Scenes") to poetical discourses on fish (chap. 7, "Fiordiano Malatesta da Rimini and the Ichthyological Treatises of the Mid-Sixteenth Century"). But the unifying theme is that of the "Great Chain of Being," the Aristotelian cosmological hierarchy adapted by the Scholastics, which governed virtually all aspects of