The mystification of spices in the western tradition (original) (raw)

"Indian Spices and Roman 'Magic' in Imperial and Late Antique Indomediterranea" in JWH (2013)

W orld historical thinking can help Roman historians to explain how anxieties over the expanding world of the imperial period, and in particular trade relations with India and Meroitic Kush, contributed to a mystification and distrust of these regions. Ideas about exotic trade goods and their ritual use did not travel intact as far as the goods themselves did. This fall-off in idea exchange explains how Mediterranean trade relations beyond the Roman periphery and even a decline in contact with that periphery contributed to the Roman/Mediterranean center's association of those spices and places with magic.

“Lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon”: Romantic Spice, Postcolonial Spice

Published in Literatures in English: Priorities of Research, ed. Wolfgang Zach and Michael Keneally, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2008: 149-65.

This paper considers the discursive history of spice, with particular reference to a cross-section of Romantic and postcolonial texts and approaches. Drawing on Timothy Morton's The Poetics of Spice and basing its argument on the premise that food is a major marker of cultural identity, it begins with a consideration of its tropological function in eighteenth-century chauvinist writings, such as Fielding's "The Roast Beef of Old England" and passages in Smollett's Travels. These provide a context for a consideration of Romantic discourses of spice, where its association with exotic alterity suggests an ambivalent attitude to consumerism. This section of the paper focuses on two of the best-known spice passages in the Romantic canon: stanzas 30 and 31 of The Eve of St Agnes and the account of Don Juan's meal with Haidée in the third canto of Byron's poem. The attitude to spice that emerges from these passages is compared with postcolonial constructions of spice, where three particular patterns are identified: a greater emphasis on the material commodification of spice in (post)colonial economies; in the case of India, a pre-colonial tropology that has developed over the centuries, but whose provenance is primarily non-Western; and a contemporary redeployment of spice as exotica, which is often, but not always, strategic. Postcolonial texts discussed include works by Attia Hosain, Sujata Bhatt, Robert Antoni, Oonya Kempadoo, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Michael Ondaatje.

Medieval European Medicine and Asian Spices

This article aimed to explain the reasons why Asian spices including pepper, ginger, and cinnamon were considered as special and valuable drugs with curative powers in the Medieval Europe. Among these spices, pepper was most widely and frequently used as medicine according to medieval medical textbooks. We analyzed three main pharmacology books written during the Middle Ages. One of the main reasons that oriental spices were widely used as medicine was due to the particular medieval medical system fundamentally based on the humoral theory invented by Hippocrates and Galen. This theory was modified by Arab physicians and imported to Europe during the Middle Ages. According to this theory, health is determined by the balance of the following four humors which compose the human body: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Each humor has its own qualities such as cold, hot, wet, and dry. Humoral imbalance was one of the main causes of disease, so it was important to have humoral equilibrium. Asian spices with hot and dry qualities were used to balance the cold and wet European diet. The analysis of several major medical textbooks of the Middle Ages proves that most of the oriental spices with hot and dry qualities were employed to cure diverse diseases, particularly those caused by coldness and humidity. However, it should be noted that the oriental spices were considered to be much more valuable and effective as medicines than the local medicinal ingredients, which were not only easily procured but also were relatively cheap. Europeans mystified oriental spices, with the belief that they have marvelous and mysterious healing powers. Such mystification was related to the terrestrial Paradise. They believed that the oriental spices were grown in Paradise which was located in the Far East and were brought to the Earthly world along the four rivers flowing from the Paradise.

Epistemological Implications Of Maluku Spices Against European Minds In XIV-XVII Century

2020

Human knowledge about spices has been known since the history of European civilization in the ancient era, the Middle Ages, until the beginning of the modern age. Pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon are the main spices of Europeans. Exotic spices coming from the eastern world were introduced by Arab traders through Constantinople and Alexandria and then headed to a number of cities in Greece and other cities in Europe. Since the spice had entered and become part of the European mind, spice knowledge gave birth to various influences and implications for various aspects of human life. Colonialism and imperialism, the discovery of the new world, maritime technology and natural knowledge, including medical science and culinary traditions, and geospatial world are parts of the influence and implications of spices on European mind from the XIV century to the XVII century. The chronicles of the history of spices cannot be separated from the view of life of European mind in viewing the eas...

Spice Consumption in Late Medieval Florence: the Accounts of the Mensa della Signoria (1344-1345)

A banchetto con gli amici. Scritti per Massimo Montanari, 2021

The cultural turn taken by food studies in the early 1980s greatly developed the rich imaginary dimension of spices to the detriment of its actual consumption, other than in cookbooks. The present article examines this latter aspect in an attempt to right what seems to be a prevailingly cultural approach to the subject. In the process of examining the consumption patterns of a well defined social group it is also possible to determine little known retail prices that reveal the surprisingly contained cost of spices compared to the salaries of working men. These results suggest the need to reconsider the widely held idea that spices were only available to the wealthiest members of Florentine society in the Middle Ages.

Spice and Taste in the Culinary World of the Early Modern Mediterranean

Silk Roads From Local Realities to Global Narratives, 2020

The importance of spices in the medieval diet, and society more broadly, is well known and has been the subject of a rich body of scholarly work. The place of spices in the early modern diet, in contrast, has attracted much less attention. According to the prevailing narrative, beginning in the sixteenth century the “spicy” middle ages were supplanted by a shift toward more subtle flavorings produced by indigenous European herbs, rather than exotic eastern spices. While foodways are in constant flux, and there were undoubtedly significant changes in the early modern era, the movement away from spices was gradual and not universal. An examination of cuisine in the early modern Mediterranean provides ample evidence of the persistence of spice usage, even as foodways in this period experienced important changes as a result of the introduction of new foods and flavors from both the new and the old worlds.