Eating Right in the Renaissance (review) (original) (raw)
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Food consumption, a health risk? Norms and medical practice in the Middle Ages
Appetite, 2008
The health regimen was a medical genre developed in Western Europe as of the 13th century and is one of the main sources attesting the interest that professionals working on health devoted to the dangers incurred in eating. This medical genre, part of an ancient tradition, was well known by the elites of the time. The surviving texts reveal themselves to be extremely attentive to contemporary food consumption and provided their readers with the necessary recommendations in order to enable them to take care of their health.
Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences, 2018
Alvise Cornaro’s Treatises on the Sober Life (Discorsi della vita sobria) was one of the most popular books on diet and hygiene across the whole of Europe from its publication in the sixteenth century up to the early twentieth century. In this chapter, I show that the reasons for the success of Cornaro’s work in early modern England lie in the fact that two very different communities of practice saw the work’s conclusions as grounded upon a particular configuration of evidence that resonated with them: one spiritual, where it was used as part of an attempt to forge a via media between Puritans and Anglicans; the other medical, where it served as a case study from which more general conclusions about how to prolong life might be extrapolated. The unique context in which the first English translation of the Discorsi was conceived, produced, and published—involving some of the most prominent intellectual figures of the time, such as Francis Bacon, Nicholas Ferrar, and George Herbert—make this an important case study, useful for the reconstruction of a significant chapter of the history of dieting and hygiene, and the history of conceptions of evidence and their relationship to different communities of practice.
Of Eels and Pears: A Sixteenth-Century Debate on Taste, Temperance, and the Pleasures of the Senses
Abundance and dearth, gluttony and fast are unsurprising dichotomies, often juxtaposed one to the other, and that is certainly the case in the history and literature of sixteenth-century Italy. The availability of unlimited quantities of food, as in the dreams of the Land of Cockaigne or in the Boccaccian world of Bengodi, seems to be a literary and artistic response to the fear of dearth and famine. The actual dearth and famines that periodically plagued Italy in that period might account also for the literary representation of constantly hungry peasants and servants in comedy and epic poems. But the cultural conversation is much more complicated and not limited to such simple contrasts. Other players enter the game: doctors who prescribe the right diet for perfect health, humanists who worry that a wrong diet can jeopardize their intellectual performances, preachers and fathers of the Church who condemn altogether any desire for food and warn against the sin of gluttony, cooks who want to please their patrons even on fast days and the ruling families of Italy for whom the display of luxury food is foremost a sign of their power and status. For each of these groups the perception of food could be quite different, turning on issues of culture, status, values and sensory experience. In this essay, rather than considering all these issues, I propose to start an analysis of this complex cultural process by charting the 'decline' of the sin of gluttony and the negative perception of the pleasures of food against the rise of a positive vision of taste; as a result, food was understood to exist in a complex relationship with the body that involved morality, discipline, pleasure and celebration.1
Dietary Considerations for Medieval England: A Venture into More Usual Phenomena
2017
Dietary Considerations for Medieval England: A Venture into More Usual Phenomena Kevin Roddy Continuing Lecturer Emeritus kproddy@ucdavis.edu Medieval Studies Program University of California, Davis, California 95616 For Submission to the Medieval Association of the Pacific Conference Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, California March 16-18, 2017 In 1988, Christopher Dyer, one of the foremost authorities on the English medieval diet, wrote, “For generations knowledge of medieval agriculture has advanced, yet still we have hazy notions of the consumption of foodstuffs, especially by the lower ranks of society.” In the thirty years since, Dyer has still has reason to complain that, in his survey of over 500 account-books dealing with food provisions, the diets of the lower and middle classes were not well represented, and even those surviving are incomplete in important regards. In my own research into The Household Book of Dame Alice de Bryene, an early fifteenth-century compilation of one year’s daily meals in minute detail, and valuable as representing a valetudinarian with no pretenses to lavish feasts, I have found, or not found, the following in what might be thought of as quantities of standard fare: but one oblique and irrelevant reference to legumes, and none to the other contributions from her tenants or from her own putative garden, like dairy (cheese mentioned only by way of the purchase of coarse cloth for its making), eggs, vegetables (excepting onions and garlic), fruit and nuts. Perhaps satisfactory particulars—evidence of brassica, for instance—concerning these critical dietary components as they appeared among the not-so-rich will never be recovered, but in the meantime I believe that much more can be said about the circumstances surrounding both ordinary and extraordinary dining among the gentry and the peasantry as well. For example, it is a well-known fact that the English wine industry suffered a decline in the late twelfth century, as the wines of Bordeaux came into the market in greater supply. But grape vines were still grown and cultivated well into the nineteenth century and beyond, for as Bartholomeus Anglicus stated, in Trevista’s translation, “A vinyerde with grene colour and merye pleseth the sight, and is likynge to smelle with swete smellynge, and fedeth the taste with swetnusse of savour, and is plesynge to touch and to handling with softeness and smotheness of leves, and conforeth the touch ther with.” It may be in such statements that a broader, and more “plesynge” image of the ordinary medieval dietary experience can be conceived.
ProQuest, 2018
It has become something of a scholarly truism that during the medieval period, gluttony was combatted simply by teaching and practicing abstinence. However, this dissertation presents a more nuanced view on the matter. Its aim is to examine the manner in which the moral discourse of dietary moderation in late medieval England captured subtle nuances of bodily behavior and was used to explore the complex relationship between the individual and society. The works examined foreground the difficulty of differentiating bodily needs from gluttonous desire. They show that moderation cannot be practiced by simply refraining from food and drink. By refiguring the idea of moderation, these works explore how the individual’s ability to exercise moral discretion and make better dietary choices can be improved. The introductory chapter provides an overview of how the idea of dietary moderation in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English didactic literature was influenced by the monastic and ascetic tradition and how late medieval authors revisited the issue of moderation and encouraged readers to reevaluate their eating and drinking habits and pursue lifestyle changes. The second chapter focuses on Langland’s discussion in Piers Plowman of the importance of dietary moderation as a supplementary virtue of charity in terms of creating a sustainable community. The third chapter examines Chaucer’s critique of the rhetoric of moderation in the speech of the Pardoner and the Friar John in the Summoner’s Tale, who attempted to assert their clerical superiority and cover up their gluttony by preaching moderation. The fourth chapter discusses how late Middle English conduct literature, such as Lydgate’s Dietary, revaluates moderation as a social skill. The fifth chapter explores the issue of women’s capacity to control their appetite and achieve moderation in conduct books written for women. Collectively, the study illuminates how the idea of moderation adopted and challenged traditional models of self-discipline regarding eating and drinking in order to improve the laity’s discretion and capacity to assess its own appetite and develop a healthy lifestyle for the community.
Health, national character and the English diet in 1700
By 1750, the 'roast beef of Old England' had become a byword. Half a century earlier, however, debate raged about the appropriate diet for the English temperament, a term laden with medical as well as political implications. John Evelyn's Acetaria (1699, 2nd ed. 1706) valorized a rural society that subsisted mostly on vegetables, while the physician Martin Lister's preface to his edition of the Roman cookery book of Apicius (1705) praised the imperial Roman diet and its use of sauces and spices as healthful. The Grub Street writer William King satirized Lister in The Art of Cookery (1708), claiming that a pre-Roman British diet of grilled meats was the most suited to the English character. But the politics of meat-eating was complex: Evelyn's emphasis on vegetables had earlier been endorsed by the radical Thomas Tryon, while the Royal Society stalwart Edward Tyson argued that although the human body seemed best suited for a vegetable diet, human free will trumped nature.
REFORMING FOOD AND EATING IN PROTESTANT ENGLAND, c. 1560–c. 1640
The Historical Journal
As the field of food history has come to fruition in the last few decades, cultural historians of early modern England have begun to recognize the significance of food and eating practices in the process of identity construction. Yet its effect on religious identities has yet to be written. This article illuminates a printed discourse in which Protestants laboured to define a new relationship to food and eating in light of the Reformation, from Elizabeth I's reign up until the Civil War. It is based on a wealth of religious tracts written by the clergy, alongside the work of physicians in the form of dietaries and regimens, which together highlight the close relationship between bodily and spiritual concerns. As a result of the theological changes of the Reformation, reformers sought to desacralize Catholic notions of holy food. However, by paying greater attention to the body, this article argues that eating continued to be a religiously significant act, which could both threat...