At the Table

We wish to express our gratitude to Robert Bjork, Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, for allowing us the opportunity to work on this project, and to the entire staff of ACMRS for much assistance in the editing of this volume. We would also like to thank the Chair of the Department of Languages and Literature at Arizona State University, Joe Cutter, for helping us to grace our cover with a beautiful image by Gerard David. Finally, we would like to offer our thanks to all the contributors, especially Michel Jeanneret, who helped to make food a legitimate focus of study in early modern research. | The inspiration for a conference and volume dedicated to food in medieval and early modern Europe came from a growing scholarly trend in the humanities to reevaluate the importance of material culture even in the most philosophical and abstract historical discourses. The original title for the February 2005 ACMRS conference was Feast, Famine, and Fasting: Food and Material Consumption in Medieval and Renaissance Culture. We decided to change the title of the volume to reflect what we felt was unique about the best papers delivered at the conference. What these essays have in common is their focus on analyzing both material and metaphorical cultures of food. They all share the premise that one cannot discuss the physical acts of preparation and consumption of food without also analyzing how those acts feed and nourish social, cultural, and spiritual realities. The culture of food is polyvalent and polyglot. Food can represent the basest of human necessities yet ascend to the very height of arcane ritual and pageantry. Food and feasting can be understood not simply as the consumption of material goods but also as the Figurative and symbolic representations of culture, what sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss would term a total social fact. To tug on one strand of the societal web created around food practices is in effect to tug on all of them. The very difficulty in dissociating metaphorical from material uses of food illustrates well the richness and complexity of food’s place in human culture. According to Brillat-S avari ns famous aphorism, we are what we eat. Yet food and feasting clearly surpass questions of identity to embrace each and every facet of human culture. Ranging from literary, historical, and political analyses to archaeological and botanical ones, the collection explores food as a nexus of pre-modern European culture. To understand the myriad ways in which discourses about food and feasting are mobilized during this period is to better understand the fundamental role that the culture of food played in the development of Europeans' habitual patterns of behavior and of thought. Rather than presenting essays chronologically or by discipline, we have opted for the more loose organization of a thematic development. Beginning with a discussion of the politics of food, the collection then considers questions of gender and food. The theme of feasting and banqueting then segues into questions of the humanist philosophy of food. By organizing the volume in this way, we have endeavored to illustrate the interdisciplinarity inherent not only in the study of food culture, but also in the study of medieval and early modern Europe.