“From Law to Urban Lengend, and Vice Versa: Creative Food Counterfeiting in Early Modern Spain.” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Boletín de Literatura Oral, 2012
ABSTRACT. This text takes on common urban legends related to food forgery in order to find ground in legal texts. While literature is keen on food counterfeiting and perpetuates common topics, there seems to be more than a taste for literary expression: town cries and ordinances are eloquent in pointing out elaborate methods to manipulate certain foods, some of which coincide to what were believed to be cultural myths. RESUMEN. Este texto se aproxima a conocidas leyendas urbanas relacionadas con la falsificación de alimentos para encontrar su base en textos legales. Si bien en la literatura son frecuentes las menciones a comida manipulada, estas parecen ser más que una repetición de lugares comunes: pregones y ordenanzas abundan en métodos muy elaborados de alteración de ciertos alimentos, algunos de los cuales coinciden con lo que hasta ahora entendíamos como mitos culturales.
It is still common to find scholars restating the long-enduring stereotype that medieval cuisine was heavily spiced in order to mask the taste of spoiled meat. This article explores the purposes of this bad idea that clouds the judgment and perpetuates damaging assumptions about the Middle Ages. If we relate to the past by means of convivial experience, what does it say about our cultural needs as a function of time to insist upon a disgusting and unhealthful Middle Ages? Resumen: Es aún posible hallar entre algunos estudiosos comentarios que repiten la conocida aserción de que la cocina medieval contenía muchas especias para poder así enmascarar el sabor de la carne podrida o en proceso de deterioro. Este artículo explora los fines que se esconden tras esa idea que oscurece y perpetúa conceptos a todas luces equivocados sobre la Edad Media. La insistencia en la idea de que la Edad Media era una época de hábitos alimenticios repugnantes y poco saludables, de hecho, ilustra, paradójicamente, no la ignorancia medieval sino nuestros propios prejucios modernos.
Female Criminality and “Fake News” in Early Modern Spanish Pliegos Sueltos
2021
This book studies the early modern Spanish broadsheet, the tabloid newspaper of its day which functioned to educate, entertain, and indoctrinate its readers, much like today's "fake news." Parker Aronson incorporates a socio-historical approach in which she considers crime and deviance committed by women in early modern Spain and the correlation between crime and the growth of urban centers. She also considers female deviance more broadly to encompass sexual and religious deviance while investigating the relationship between these pliegos sueltos and the transgressive and disruptive nature of female criminality. In addition to an introduction to this fascinating subgenre of early modern Spanish literature, Parker Aronson analyzes the representations of women as bandits and highway robbers; as murderers; as prostitutes, libertines, and actors; as Christian renegades; as enslaved people; as witches; as miscegenationists; and as the recipients of punishment.
Para insertarse en la tradici6n altamente contestataria y transgresiva de la novella italiana de la Edad Media y el Renacimiento, poniendo en circulaci6n discursos "prohibidos" en plena cultura represiva de la Contrarreforma (violaci6n, incesto, adulterio, etc.), los narradores espanoles desarrollaron una estrategia narrativa que consisti6 en: 1) emplear la ret6rica del caso ficticio 0 controversia y 2) utilizar las regulaciones del Concilio de Trento y otros c6digos legales para legitimar la 16gica que preside las acciones contadas en sus novelas. Emplean, pues, el discurso legal con el fin de proteger sus narraciones de la censura y, al mismo tiempo, cumplir con el ideal renacentista del "decoro." EI estudio del discurso legal como estrategia narrativa de la novella espanola del Siglo de Oro revela, de este modo, los mecanismos utilizados para transformar el discurso contestatario del genera italiano en su contrapartida "ejemplar."
Elena del Río Parra, Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain. Reviewed by Beatriz E . Salamanca
Sixteenth Century Journal LII/1 , 2021
The study of violence in the early modern Hispanic world tends to focus on the exclusion of minority religious groups and the exploitation of native populations across imperial domains. Little attention, however, seems to have been given to what Elena del Río Parra calls "private crimes": the quotidian accounts of stabbings and dismemberments that occurred among friends, lovers, relatives, and strangers who crossed paths and swords. In her Exceptional Crime in Early Modern Spain, Del Río explores early modern narratives of unique murders and blood crimes, and shows how they reveal an eclectic period where superstitious, religious, and scientific ideas were intertwined. The work is not directly concerned with Spanish crime rates, judicial procedures, or institutional change. Instead, Del Río emphasizes the uniqueness embedded in criminal accounts while illustrating patterns and continuities. Drawing from a wide array of noncanonical sources involving correspondence, judicial documents, legal allegations, chapbooks, ballads, chroniclers, and medical treatises, her work persuasively argues that we can trace embryonic forms of criminology and criminal anthropology to a period some two hundred years prior to their formal establishment as sciences .
Make a Fool of Food merchants. Food, Animals and Men Comical Relationships in Italian Genre Scenes of the Cinquecento, 2021
From the second half of the sixteenth century, artists such as Vincenzo Campi and Bartolomeo Passerotti put food at the center of their paintings. Still alive or in the form of victuals, the animal is displayed in all its diversity on market stalls, inside bustling kitchens or on the tables of modest families alongside men,women and children whose trade is often directly linked to the preparation and sale of this food. We wish to focus on the comic effects that such proximity between man and the "food" he prepares or sells can generate. By associating -physically and morally -salesmen and cooks with their merchandise, painters insist on their similarities and ridiculethem, thus sending man back to his own bestiality and reminding the spectators how thin the border between man and animal can be. In these stalls where men and animals tend to merge, the boccais especiallyan important point of confusion between man and animal, and thus forms a real comic topos. Thus,the characters eating with their mouths wide open, laughing or even grimacing, by Campi and Passerotti, are perfect counterexamples to the models set up by pedagogues and humanist thinkers in their treatises on civility. Where for Erasmus, eating is a highly regulated action, for Campi it is a vulgar joke that amuses, where the eater behaves in a similar way to his food, to better entertain the spectator. This paper will therefore try to highlight the similarities between merchants and animals in these genre scenes, focusing on the motif of the bocca, acomic detailof these works, which are both entertaining and moralizing.
Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain
Vanderbilt University Press, 2020
The fourteen essays in Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain showcase the eye-opening potential of a food lens withing colonial studies, ethnic and racial studies, gender and sexuality studies, and studies of power dynamics, nationalisms and nation building, theories of embodiment, and identity. In short, Food, Texts and Cultures in Latin America and Spain grapples with an emerging field in need of a foundational text, and does so from multiple angles.The studies span from the Middle Ages to twenty-first century, and the contributing scholars occupy diverse fields within Latin American and Hispanic studies. As such, their essays showcase eclectic critical and theoretical approaches to the subject of Latin American and Iberian Food. Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain also introduces the first English-language publication of woks from such award-winning scholars as Adolfo Castañón of the Mexican Academy of Language; Sergio Ramírez, winner of the 2017 Miguel de Cervantes Prize in Literature; And Carmen Simón Palmer, winner of the 2015 Julián Marías Prize for Research.
Food, Eating, and the Anxiety of Belonging in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature and Art
2012
In my dissertation I propose that the detailed representation of food and eating in seventeenth-century Spanish art and literature has a double purpose: to reaffirm a state of well-being in Spain, and to show a critical position, because artistic creations emphasize those subjects who, because of social status or cultural background, do not share such benefits. This double purpose explains why literature and painting stress the distance between foodstuffs and consumers, turning food into a commodity that cannot be consumed directly, but through its representation and value. Cervantes's writing is invoked because, especially in Don Quixote, readers can see how the protagonist rejects food for the sake of achieving higher chivalric values, while his companion, Sancho Panza, faces the opposite problem: having food at hand and not being able to enjoy it, especially when he achieves his dream of ruling an island. The principle is similar in genre painting: food is consumed out of the picture in still lifes, or out of the hands of the represented characters in kitchen scenes, for they are depicted cooking for others. Because of the distance between product and consumer, foodstuffs indicate how precedence and authority are established and reproduced in society. In artistic representations, these apparently unchangeable principles are mimicked by the lower classes and used to establish parallel systems of authority such as the guild of thieves who are presented around a table in a scene of Cervantes's exemplary novel "Rinconete and Cortadillo." Another problem to which the representation of foodstuffs responds is the inclusion of New Christians from different origins. In a counterpoint with the scenes in which precedence is discussed, and frequently through similar aesthetic structures, Cervantes and his contemporaries create scenes where the Christian principle of sharing food and drinking wine together is the model of inclusion that dissolves distinctions between Old and New Christians. I argue that this alternative project iv of community can be related to the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, decreed in 1609, because this event made many subjects interrogate themselves about their own status and inclusion. An artistic model of response to these interrogations about belonging is the figure of the roadside meal, which appears as the main motif of a meal shared by Sancho and a selfproclaimed Christian Morisco in the second part of Don Quixote, and reappears in a painting by Diego de Velázquez, which presents in the foreground a dark-skinned servant working in a kitchen, and in the background another roadside meal: the Supper at Emmaus. Both in literature and painting the way of preparing meals, eating and drinking creates ties, establishes a different principle of belonging, and promotes unity. In this alternative model characters are recognized as subjects of the kingdom as long as they eat and drink the way Christians do. Even though this model still leads to a single Christian kingdom, paintings and writings suggest a different form of cohesion, in which subjects are considered equal and recognize each other because of their participation.
2020
Virtual International Conference on Food Economies in Pre-Modern Europe. Food markets developments and integration (XIth-XVIIIth centuries), University of Lleida, 17th-18th September 2020 Organisation: Pere Benito i Monclús (Universitat de Lleida) Frederic Aparisi Romero (Universitat de Lleida) Maria López Carrera (Universitat de Lleida) Adrià Mas Craviotto (Universitat de Lleida) Joan Maltas i Montoro (Université de Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis) Guillem Roca Cabau (Universitat de Lleida) For more information: https://foodeconomies-udl.com/ En toda Europa medieval se comunicaban a la población informaciones importantes y normas judiciales por medio del pregonero. En la ciudad de Toledo se ha conservado una fuente particular, el así llamado “Libro de Pregones”, que contiene mucha información sobre el comercio de alimentos de la ciudad y sus alrededores durante los años 1468–1518. En mi comunicación quiero destacar la importancia esencial del pregonero para la comunicación dentro de Toledo en lo que se refiere a la transmisión de información relativa al comercio de alimentos. Además, se mostrará qué temas eran de especial importancia para las autoridades. Se demuestra, por ejemplo, que se debía asegurar un abastecimiento suficiente de alimentos básicos (cereales, carne, vino) o que se protegía a los ciudadanos contra el fraude.