At the Table

This volume surveys recent studies of the metaphorical and material facets of food in medieval and early modern Europe. Ranging from literary, historical, and political analyses to archaeological and botanical ones, this collection explores food as a nexus of pre-modern European culture. Food and feasting are understood not simply as the consumption of material goods but also as the figurative and symbolic representations of culture, which Mauss has termed a 'total social fact'. To understand the myriad ways in which discourses about food and feasting are mobilized during this period is to better understand the fundamental role food and feasting played in the development of Europeans’ habitual patterns of behaviour and of thought.

At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe - Timothy J. Tomasik and Juliann M. Vitullo

Sweet Food of Knowledge: Botany, Food, and Empire in the Early Modern Spanish Kingdoms - Fabio López Lázaro

“Take a Long Spoon”: Culinary Politics in the English Civil War - Paul Hartle

Table Decorum and the Quest for a Bride in Clári saga - Marianne Kalinke

Stuck in Chichevache’s Maw: Digesting the Example of (Im)Patient Griselda in John Lydgate’s “A Mumming at Hertford” and “Bycorne and Chychevache” - Christine F. Cooper Rompato

Drinking from Skulls and the Politics of Incorporation in Early Stuart Drama - Melissa Walter

Food and Deception in the Discourse on Heresy and Witchcraft in Bamberg - William Bradford Smith

Þær wæs symbla cyst: Food in the Funerary Rites of the Early Anglo-Saxons - Christina Lee

Beyond Eating: Political and Personal Significance of the entremets at the Banquets of the Burgundian Court - L. B. Ross

From the “bien yvres” to messere Gaster: The Syncretism of Rabelaisian Banquets - Bernd Renner

Translating Taste in the Vernacular Editions of Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine - Timothy J. Tomasik

“Ma Salade et Ma Muse”: On Renaissance Vegetarianism - Michel Jeanneret