Forging Communities: Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe

OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES:

Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity

Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes: The Original 1927 Cookbook and Housekeeper’s Chat

Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives

The Taste of Art: Food, Cooking, and Counterculture in Contemporary Practices

Devouring Cultures: Perspectives on Food, Power, and Identity from the Zombie Apocalypse to Downton Abbey

Latin@s’ Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think about Food

Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to Obama

American Appetites: A Documentary Reader

Forging Communities

FOOD AND REPRESENTATION IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN SOUTHWESTERN EUROPE

EDITED BY MONTSERRAT PIERA

The University of Arkansas

Fayetteville

2018

Copyright © 2018 by The University of Arkansas Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-68226-067-8 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-68226-068-5 (paper)

e-ISBN: 978-1-61075-642-6

22   21   20   19   18        5   4   3   2   1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1984.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Names: Piera, Montserrat, editor.

Title: Forging communities : food and representation in medieval and early modern Southwestern Europe / edited by Montserrat Piera.

Description: Fayetteville : The University of Arkansas Press, [2018] | Series: Food and foodways | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018001567| ISBN 9781682260678 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781682260685 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781610756426 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Food habits—Iberian Peninsula—History—To 1500. | Gastronomy—Iberian Peninsula—History—To 1500. | Cooking, Medieval. | Food in literature. | Literature, Medieval.

Classification: LCC GT2853.I16 F67 2018 | DDC 641.509/02—dc23

LC record available at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__lccn.loc.gov_2018001567&d=DwIFAg&c=7ypwAowFJ8v-mw8AB-SdSueVQgSDL4HiiSaLK01W8HA&r=4fo1OqKuv_3krqlYYqNQWNKNaWxXN20G1PCOL-2ERgE&m=yZG62i2aCOWjyI9fnogmSvvyfBjyOj19hR1TM8bctDQ&s=yiWRldH_jO3a_-KVspnB2eUtZJq5eqgyoKA1YbQ7Urs&e=

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction   Montserrat Piera

Part I: Connections and Transitions in Muslim, Hebrew, and Christian Communities

Chapter 1. From Kitāb al-tabīj to the Llibre de Sent Soví: Continuities and Shifts in the Earliest Iberian Cooking Manuals

Carolyn A. Nadeau

Chapter 2. Food and Death: Foodways and Communities in the Danza general de la muerte

Michelle M. Hamilton and María Morrás

Chapter 3. "Los que comedes mi pan": Food References in the Romancero

Hilary Pomeroy

Chapter 4. Magical Morsels: Food in Morisco Aljamiado Incantations

Veronica Menaldi

Part II: Food Choices: Ideals and Practices in Monastic and Lay Communities

Chapter 5. Notions of Nutrition and the Properties of Food in the Middle Ages

Donna M. Rogers

Chapter 6. Alleviating Hunger without Pleasing the Palate: The Dietetic Proposal of the Cistercian Order in the First Half of the Twelfth Century

Antoni Riera i Melis

Chapter 7. Salty, Sweet, and Spicy: Flavors in Benedictine Cuisine in Catalonia at the End of the Middle Ages

Ramón A. Banegas López

Chapter 8. Breaking Nonnatural Bread: Alimentary Hygiene and Radical Individualism in Juan de Aviñon’s Medicina sevillana

Michael Solomon

Chapter 9. Eating for Success: Where, When, and What to Eat in Early Modern Spain

Patricia Moore-Martínez

Part III: Food as Fetish: Gendering Sexual Desire through Food

Chapter 10. A Whim for Strawberries: At the Literary Table in Les quinze joies de mariage

Nelly Labère

Chapter 11. Have a Heart!: Love, Lust, and the Properties of Heart Consumption from Guillem de Cabestany to Curial e Güelfa

Montserrat Piera

Chapter 12. Aphrodisiacs in Medieval Iberian Texts

Amy I. Aronson

Chapter 13. Gendering Fasting: The Medieval Battles of Flesh and Lent

Ana Pairet

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

The University of Arkansas Press Series on Food and Foodways explores historical and contemporary issues in global food studies. We are committed to representing a diverse set of voices that tell lesser-known food stories and to provoking new avenues of interdisciplinary research. Our strengths are works in the humanities and social sciences that use food as a critical lens for examining broader cultural, environmental, and ethical issues.

Feeding ourselves has long entangled us human beings with complicated moral puzzles of social injustice and environmental destruction. When we eat, we consume not only food on the plate but also the lives of innumerable plants and animals and the labors of many people. This process distributes its costs unevenly across race, class, gender, and other social categories. The production and distribution of food often obscures these material and cultural connections, impeding honest assessments of our impact on the world around us. By taking these relationships seriously, Food and Foodways provides a new series of critical studies that analyze the cultural and environmental relationships that have sustained human societies.

Forging Communities organizes the research of fourteen interdisciplinary scholars into a sophisticated collection that explores the cultural fluidities of food and identity in medieval and early modern southwestern Europe. Throughout the volume, Montserrat Piera and her contributors reveal the complex and contingent roles food played in structuring social relationships in the diverse and dynamic worlds of the Iberian Peninsula and southern France. Far from simply cataloging the culinary genealogies of Spaniards, Catalans, Muslims, Jews, or Christians, Forging Communities instead emphasizes the power and symbolism of food as a generative force for constituting new communities within and across these social boundaries. As the authors in this volume demonstrate, food had an epistemological impact in premodern Europe that elevated even prosaic labors of eating into significant forms of experience. Devout eaters tasted moral convictions. Monks used appropriate flavors to suppress their lusts, while the masses consumed aphrodisiacs to intensify their comprehension of love. Feasting and fasting both produced knowledge, and both had the potential to reify or disrupt the social order. By taking these and so many other hungers seriously, Forging Communities provides a unique and fascinating study of how medieval and early modern Europeans intertwined their foods and their bodies into elaborate representational universes.

—JENNIFER JENSEN WALLACH AND MICHAEL WISE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to all of those who have helped us with this project, especially the three anonymous readers who carefully read the manuscript and offered us excellent and constructive criticism. My warm thanks are extended also to the authors of the essays in this book for their expertise, professionalism, and good humor throughout the editorial process. It has been a deeply gratifying collaboration.

The initial impetus for this volume was forged, as it often happens, while enjoying good food, wine, and enlightening conversation among the participants in the First International Symposium of the Mens and Mensa Society, celebrated in Barcelona in October 2013. I would like to thank the institutions that provided material and financial support for that fruitful conference that brought us all together: the Institute of Catalan Studies (Institut d’Estudis Catalans) and the Catalan Association of Food Sciences (Associació Catalana de Ciències de l’Alimentació) for hosting and sponsoring the meeting and Temple University for financial support.

Last, but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to our editors at the University of Arkansas Press, Jennifer Wallach and David Cunningham, for their unwavering support for the project and their wise guidance throughout the process. The contributors and I are also greatly indebted to Molly Rector and Kate Babbitt for judiciously shepherding the book to its completion and for their painstaking editing of the text. Their efforts have undoubtedly made this book better.

INTRODUCTION

MONTSERRAT PIERA

What could I tell you, my lady, of the secrets of nature that I have discovered while cooking? I observed that an egg unifies and fries in butter or oil, but to the contrary dissolves in syrup; that in order to keep sugar liquid, it suffices to throw on it a very little bit of water flavored with quince or another bitter fruit; that the yolk and white of the same egg when separated and combined with sugar have an opposite effect, and one different from when they are both used together. I do not mean to tire you with such foolishness, which I only recount to give you a complete picture of my nature and because I think it will amuse you. But, my lady, what can women know except philosophy of the kitchen? Lupercio Leonardo has said it well: it is possible to philosophize while preparing dinner. As I often say on observing these little things, if Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more.

—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,

Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, 1690¹

In her definition of kitchen philosophy in the above-quoted passage, the famous Mexican nun and writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) very lucidly addresses the fallacy of disregarding seemingly nonrhetorical activities such as cooking. As Julie A. Bokser argues, Sor Juana not only derides Aristotle in this passage by suggesting that the philosopher might have gained even more knowledge if he had learned to cook, she is also responding to Plato, "whose Gorgias castigates rhetoric as analogous to mere cooking. In this dialogue Socrates says that both rhetoric and cooking are not arts at all, but habitudes. Distinct from the lofty art of dialectic, habitudes merely produce gratification and are branches of the deceitful and base business of flattery."² Sor Juana clearly disagrees and not only defies these philosophers by affirming that cooking is philosophical but also tacitly categorizes these wise men’s knowledge as incomplete when she proclaims that much can be learned from food. The authors of the present volume readily acquiesce with her.

Food and the exchange of foodstuffs are omnipresent in the historical and literary record, and their impact is felt cognitively and epistemologically as well as sociologically. Despite this inherent centrality, the study of food, now as much as in Plato’s times, is still considered a relatively marginal topic in scholarly discourse. Various scholars have attempted to explicate this disinterest on the topic of food as a subject of inquiry. Carolyn Korsmeyer suggests that the senses and daily activities linked to food (taste, eating, and drinking) have conventionally been regarded as the lower senses (as opposed to the higher senses such as vision) and have thus been categorized as too primitive and prosaic to be explored philosophically,³ while Elizabeth Telfer alludes to a prejudice against food as being too material and ephemeral a subject to merit intellectual consideration.⁴ Another, perhaps more obvious, explanation of the neglect of food as a subject of study is the ubiquitous perception, transparently sketched in Sor Juana’s soliloquy, that food production and preparation are women’s work and therefore not historically relevant.

Nevertheless, in the last three decades, scholarly interest in food and eating has increased tremendously, undoubtedly bolstered by our contemporary society’s anxieties about diet, health, and ecology and by global audiences’ fascination with food books and cooking shows on television. Scholarly discourse is now taking food seriously. All disciplines seem to have been affected by this vogue, from philosophy to sociology. Like Juana Inés de la Cruz, philosopher David M. Kaplan believes that food is pertinent as a subject of philosophical argumentation. In The Philosophy of Food, Kaplan argues that while philosophers (Plato, Epicurus, Seneca, Locke, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, among others) have always discussed food, perhaps they have done so a bit more tangentially than other topics or solely as a branch of ethical theory.⁵ But Kaplan asserts that more philosophical work has been done on food and agriculture in the last five years than the previous thirty.⁶ This work has effectively transformed food into a standard philosophical subject. The work of Paul Rozin, in particular Food Is Fundamental, Fun, Frightening, and Far-Reaching,⁷ has also been instrumental in highlighting the importance of food choices in the field of social psychology. In anthropology, one can refer to Mary Douglas’s findings on the symbolism of food in Purity and Danger and in her collected works in Food in the Social Order. Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most influential sociologists of our era, discussed food choices in the context of the broader theme of taste in his La distinction: critique sociale du jugement.⁸

The scholarly study of food in the medieval and early modern periods received a noticeable impetus with the publication of several seminal books devoted to the cultural history of food by eminent medieval and early modern historians: Caroline Walker Bynum’s landmark study Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Paul Freedman’s Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination; Massimo Montanari’s The Culture of Food (Fame e l’abbondanza); and Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Food: A History, among others. This volume aims at continuing this trend and bringing the topic of food in the early modern period to the fore of scholarly debates.⁹

The procurement and consumption of food is a constant and basic human need that provides a lens through which scholars can explore relationships among economic, religious, literary, legal, political, cultural, and social activities. The study of food and its surrounding ideas and practices enables scholars to elucidate the intersection of material and mental exchanges that are fundamental to human experience. A comprehensive study of food and how it both nourishes and affects societies and bodies will shed light on medieval and early modern culture in general.

Food and drink appear in a multitude of contexts in premodern Western Europe. It is described in texts and documents and is depicted in artifacts for domestic use and in textiles, paintings, and sculptures. Images of food are carved in religious and civic buildings and in the ordinary tools of craftspeople. The symbolism of food and drink seems to have been present in all cultures, but in western culture it can be traced back to classical and biblical literature. Greek and Roman treatises on natural history and farming provide references to grains, nuts, fruits, and, of course, wine, while mythological accounts use foodstuffs as the attributes that embody each of the different gods: wheat for Ceres, grapes for Bacchus, for example. The Bible and the Apocrypha also use food symbolically (as, for instance, in the Song of Songs), and Christian exegetical texts of the medieval and Renaissance period borrowed food imagery from pagan symbolism and used it in allegorical descriptions of vices and virtues and in the development of the liturgy. In the Eucharist, for example, bread and wine symbolize the body and blood of Christ.

As anthropologists have amply demonstrated, food establishes identities, defines groups, and brings about change and revolution. Scholars have remarked that in early modern texts, the faithful interpret religious prescriptions surrounding food as conduits to the deity. We unreservedly take for granted that societal pressure always informs and restricts individual food choices. However, the literary and historical record reveals that food acts in varied communities are also bound by gender considerations (a man who fasts is appraised very differently from a woman who does so) and by other factors, such as economic relations and individual agency.

Religion prescription became of paramount importance in delimiting identities in the Iberian Peninsula during the early modern period. Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisted precariously in a world in which eating was infused with sacramental, ritual and symbolic significance and where the act of ritual eating contributed to alienating them further from one another. For example, medieval Jews and Muslims loathed the Christians’ Eucharist custom of eating the body and blood of Christ while Christians ridiculed the Jews and Muslims’ prohibitions against eating pork and other kosher practices and later persecuted them for them. However, all of them were equally bound by ritualistic and symbolic rules regarding food consumption and preparation.

Paradoxically, very often the only harmonious interaction among these three antagonistic groups was the one based on the commercial exchange of foodstuffs and spices. Trade, commerce, and navigation owe their existence to food and eating. But in premodern culture, eating also had political value. Felipe Fernández-Armesto claims that eating is a culturally transforming act: It changes personalities, it can sacralize apparently secular acts. It can release power and, I might add, it can bring about revolutions.¹⁰

Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas very revealingly discuss the relevance of food in the context of several revolutionary events in the history of humankind that truly toppled empires. Plutarch, for example, describes the savage demise of the naïve but well-intentioned senator Tiberius Gracchus and 300 of his plebeian and hungry followers, who were clubbed to death by rich opponents on the pavement of the forum in Rome on the day when Gracchus’s land reforms were to be debated in the Senate.¹¹ Fraser and Rimas also refer to the French Revolution and to other revolutionary movements fueled by food shortages; for example, the riots led by Marie Ganz and other poor, disgruntled mothers of hungry children in New York in the early months of 1917 and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994.¹² The consequences of food surpluses or shortages are never trivial; they are extremely vital in the processes of historical development. It is because of food that civilizations either thrive and prosper or are exposed to calamitous destruction and violence.

The purpose of this volume of essays is to explore this hitherto neglected subject of the power and symbolism of food in various premodern communities. Because food and foodstuffs are rooted in daily life as tangible objects, our project will use a materialistic approach and argue for the formulation of a material poetics of food. Food as a material reality can be interpreted in several ways. Because it is embedded in culture, it acquires further meaning derived from particular historical situations and not just from symbolic rituals.

The thirteen chapters that follow are devoted to cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship on ideas, practices, and artifacts concerning food in the medieval and early modern periods, particularly in the Iberian Peninsula and, to a lesser extent, in France and Italy. The chronological period under scrutiny ranges approximately from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. The chapters investigate an extensive assortment of texts and documents from Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, the three monotheistic cultures that coexisted in the West in the premodern era.

The collection endeavors to challenge geographical, chronological, linguistic, and national boundaries in order to examine the subject matter comprehensively and present a more nuanced view of the subject. It draws upon the fields of history (intellectual, social, economic, institutional, and cultural), literature studies, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and religion. The authors share a keen awareness of the crucial significance of food as a focus of inquiry and their chapters are enlightening not only because they further culinary knowledge but also because they offer groundbreaking interpretations of the linkages between food (its production, consumption, and exchange) and the communities that consume it.

This book thus aspires to make a significant contribution to the increasing scholarship on food in the medieval and early modern periods. The distinctiveness of our collection lies in several factors. First, it approaches the topic of food and the forging of communities from an interdisciplinary perspective by drawing upon the study of history, sociology, literature, magic, gastronomy, religion, anthropology, and medicine. Second, it brings together scholars from distinct but interrelated disciplines for a challenging and engaged examination of the representation of food and foodstuffs in medieval and early modern Spain, France, and Italy. And third, it relates cultural developments associated with food in discrete communities in this region of Europe to those of wider western and eastern culinary and religious traditions.¹³

Furthermore, while there are many other works that delve into the separate history of Spanish food or Catalan food or Islamic food or Jewish food or French food, there are no studies that integrate these traditions in a conversation with each other. Hence, by pulling together discussions of Spanish, Catalan, French, Jewish, and Islamic foodways our volume is treading new ground in Iberian studies scholarship¹⁴ and in the emergent general discipline of food studies.¹⁵

The book is organized into three parts. Through the careful analysis of culinary and literary or performative texts, the first, Connections and Transitions in Muslim, Hebrew, and Christian Communities, corroborates the cultural hybridity prevalent in medieval Spain and reveals how food was used to preserve identity and to establish or destroy relationships in the communal and fluid borders between Muslim, Jews, and Christians in Medieval Iberia.¹⁶ The second part, Food Choices: Ideals and Practices in Monastic and Lay Communities, groups the chapters dealing with food choices and prescriptions and proscriptions about food. These chapters examine an array of communities: monastic communities and the surrounding rural communities that emerge from or depend upon the former, lay urban communities, and medico-scholastic intellectual communities. All of these were forged, in part, through partnerships associated with the production, preparation, distribution, availability, and selection of food. The third part of our collection, Food as Fetish: Gendering Sexual Desire through Food, focuses on the links between food and sexuality, particularly by analyzing instances of the act of eating as a seduction strategy in literary texts. These contributions allude not only to communities of eaters within the narrations but also to a community of readers or viewers/listeners who readily recognized the food symbolisms portrayed in the stories and were able to recall previous texts and literary traditions that used such imageries. Furthermore, in their analysis of the ties between gender, sexuality and power the chapters in this last section broaden the geographical scope of the collection, not solely because they include texts composed in the lands above the Pyrenees (Les quinze joies de mariage, troubadour poetry, Caresme Et Charnage) and the Italian Peninsula (The Decameron) but also because they examine the fruitful linkages between neighboring literary and cultural traditions and their use of similar gastronomic motifs.

The first part begins with Carolyn A. Nadeau’s "From Kitāb al-tabīj to the Sent Soví: Continuities and Shifts, in the Earliest Iberian Cooking Manuals," which examines the transculturation that shaped Iberian cuisine through Arabic and North African foodstuffs. Nadeau studies a well-known medieval Catalan cooking manual, the anonymous fourteenth-century Llibre de Sent Soví [Book of Sent Soví] and compares it to two earlier medieval cooking manuals that came from the Almohad dynasty: the anonymous Kitāb al-tabīj fi l-Magrib wa-l-Andalus fi ‘asr al-muwahhudin li-mu’allif mayhul [The book of cooking in Maghreb and Andalus in the era of Almohads] (1228–1243) and Ibn Razin al Tugibi’s Fudālat-al-Hiwan Fi Tayyibat al-Ta‘am Wa-l-Alwan [The delicacies of the table and the finest of foods and dishes] (ca. 1243–1328). Through her exploration of notions of authorship and the implied reader, the structures and shared culinary lexicon of these works, strategies of imitation, and diverse narrative voices, Nadeau traces some of the narrative bridges that bring these manuals together even though time, space and language separate them. Additionally, the chapter examines continuities of and shifts in foodstuffs in the Llibre de Sent Soví that contribute to a deeper understanding of the changing cultural and social identity of the people of the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages.

In "Food and Death: Foodways and Communities in the Danza general de la muerte," Michelle M. Hamilton and María Morrás look at an anonymous text, the Danza general de la muerte, that purports to describe death but does so through powerfully symbolical food imagery. The fifteenth-century Danza general de la muerte is full of allusions to food and drink: the fat abad doesn’t want to leave behind all the tasty munchies that he was hoarding in his cell. The physician, even though he follows Avicenna’s advice concerning fasting, teetotaling, and following a regimented diet, is also fated to die, as is the canon whose parish provides him with good wine and juicy piglets and the laborer who never stopped working and ate only goat and sometimes lamb. In this work, in which one victim after another is given one brief copla (stanza) in which to reveal his/her character and to define him/herself as representative of a particular social group, food and drink become indispensable ways of making this identification recognizable for the audience/reader. The images of feasting, fasting, and food in this work offer glimpses of the significance of fifteenth-century Iberian foodways and food communities and of how food and drink serve to define social groups. Ultimately, though, all the food serves to distinguish the living from the dead and is one of the most powerful symbols of that which is lost in death.

The romancero (the corpus of romances or ballads) also provides ample material for analyzing the subject of food in medieval communities. Hispanic ballads are characterized by their direct style and absence of redundant detail. The short succinct references to food in ballads provide immediate information about the poem’s protagonists and their power struggles and status. In ‘Los que comedes mi pan’: Food, Power and Identity in the Sephardic Ballad, Hilary Pomeroy analyzes several examples of this highly effective alimentary code and demonstrates how the references to food, especially those concerning that most basic of foods, bread, inform and amplify our understanding of the ballad text and its links to Sephardic identity. In medieval culture, bread was a polysemous term that could have sexual, religious, feudal, and class connotations. For example, a reference to bread or the act of partaking of a meal conveyed considerable information about the bonds that existed between family members, among friends, or between a ruler and his subjects. References to bread also indicated the social, religious, and economic status of a ballad’s protagonists and the general historical background of the ballad.

In addition, providing and accepting a donation of bread in the ballads also served to distinguish between different social classes and communicated differing degrees of power. The provider of bread clearly symbolized the ruler, while any nobleman who accepts and eats that bread immediately became a ruled subject and vassal of the former. Thus, references to food functioned as a code that emphasized social hierarchy. Far removed from the hospitality that commensality suggests, these references foster inequality and, at times, convey outright hostility.

Veronica Menaldi’s chapter, "Magical Morsels: Food in Morisco Aljamiado Incantations," also considers how food can induce people to act in certain ways. She explores the ways that food plays an important role in a selection of early sixteenth-century morisco aljamiado spells. As Mary Elizabeth Perry has explored in The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain, food was of paramount importance in the Iberian morisco community, serving as one way to preserve their culture within the relative safety of the home. In both Perry and Menaldi’s studies, food is presented as a part of the creation and preservation of morisco identity. Several of the aljamiado spells require the use of apples, saffron, oil, onions, and honey, among other foods. And a few incantations require the caster of the spell or the intended target to consume the concocted ingredients. Menaldi focuses on a few particular spells. One requires words and symbols to be written on the peel of an apple and later consumed. Another requires the preparation and consumption of the heart of a hoopoe, a colorful bird that is well known in European folklore and magic, particularly that of Arabic origin. The materiality and talismanic nature of these spells makes the connection with food readily apparent. But with these examples of magical morsels, Menaldi also illustrates the interplay between commonplace and supernatural practices, showcasing how the pseudo-Muslims in Spain living under Christian rule were able to continue their practices with easily accessible consumable goods.

The second part of this collection, Food Choices: Ideals and Practices in Monastic and Lay Communities, begins with Donna Rogers’s Notions of Nutrition and the Properties of Food in the Later Middle Ages, which provides a general and descriptive overview of how medieval people perceived food and its uses. Rogers discusses how notions about the properties of food and drink and their consumption in our past and in our present are often bound up with notions of need and desire, obsession and control, subsistence and decadent indulgence. Prescriptions and proscriptions about food have long been associated with medicine, hygiene, and health and with opposing notions of satiety, pleasure, and extravagance. In medieval Europe, the three great religions each imposed constraints on the consumption—and sometimes the production—of certain foods. Based on a variety of doctrinal, medical, historical, and literary sources, Rogers examines the regulations, customs, and practices underlying food consumption in medieval Europe in general and in the Iberian Peninsula in particular.

Antoni Riera i Melis analyzes the socioeconomic pressures that led to the establishment and consolidation of the Cistercian diet in Alleviating Hunger without Pleasure: The Dietetic Proposal of the Early Cîteaux Rule. At the end of the eleventh century, in reaction to the dietary leniency that had become the norm at the majority of Benedictine and even Cistercian abbeys, a series of new precepts appeared that sought to reinstate a stricter observance of Benedict of Nursia’s rule by reestablishing the monks’ link to manual labor and imposing a negative view of food and the act of eating. The monks renounced all earthly and sensual pleasures, including those related to taste and smell. As a consequence, eating acquired a mere nourishing and practical role. Particularly in the Cistercian institutions, a strictly vegetarian diet was instated. In addition, both qualitative restrictions (a prohibition against using animal fat, dairy, or eggs and a mandate to use only unrefined flour for bread production) and quantitative restrictions (even the basest of vegetables had to be consumed sparingly) were imposed. To compensate for this alimentary paucity, wine production was increased. These imperatives functioned very well during the initial and difficult moments of the order under the firm control of its ascetic leader, Bernard of Clairvaux. But his death and the huge social and financial success of the order brought about a reconceptualization of the function and uses of food, ushering in new and more positive viewpoints about eating and nourishment. This change enabled the order to become a decisive contributor to the evolution of medieval European enology.

Ramón A. Banegas López also studies monastic communities in Salty, Sweet, and Spicy: Flavors in Benedictine Cuisine in Catalonia at the End of the Middle Ages, which surveys the eating habits of Benedictine communities. Various legal and notarized documents and consuetudines of Benedictine monasteries reveal that the communities used to prepare their food carefully, using spices and sweeteners to achieve complex flavors. The rule of St. Benedict of Nursia gives only guidelines about the food uses of Benedictine communities, which each community could adapt to their circumstances. The flexibility of the rule and the evolution of food behavior in Benedictine monasticism worried moralists and reformers, such as St. Bernard or Peter the Venerable, who wrote mainly about meat consumption in Benedictine communities. However, another cause for concern was the proliferation of dishes that were too elaborate, were made with luxury products, or simply were very tasty. Reformers thought that the use of spices and sweeteners might encourage monks to eat too much, putting them in danger of becoming gluttons. In spite of the danger of gluttony, cooks in Benedictine convents continued to prepare elaborate food with spices and sweeteners. For example, the consuetudines of one particular monastery, Sant Cugat, written in the thirteenth century, document the preparation of torrons, neules, and other sweets; the use of spices to make sauces; and the addition of honey to wine. The use of honey, salt, and spices to make special preparations might have had a direct relationship to the forbidden, or at least very limited, consumption of meat in Benedictine communities. Since Galenic medicine considered meat as the better food to maintain one’s health, a complete lack of meat in a diet might have been regarded as dangerous for the health of monks. Some of these tasty preparations could have emerged as compensation for the lack of meat in monks’ diets. Banegas López scrutinizes consuetudines and account books from the monasteries of Sant Cugat and Sant Llorenç de Munt i de l’Obac, both situated in the region of El Vallès in Catalonia, to determine the correlation between the emergence of a rich array of flavors and the Benedictines’ aim of achieving balance, avoiding rigidity as well as gluttony. He contrasts the data in these documents with medical advice about food, diets, and flavors and with texts about food and eating composed by Benedictine reformers and other moralists.

Michael Solomon’s article, "Breaking Nonnatural Bread: Alimentary Hygiene and Radical Individualism in Juan de Aviñon’s Medicina Sevillana," reiterates the symbolism surrounding the consumption of bread, particularly in connection to medicine. Eating bread with others was one of the most important acts in developing collective identities. Physicians extolled the alimentary properties and salutary benefits of bread in many regimina and vernacular health guides that emerged in the late middle ages and early modern period. At the same time, physicians trained in the Galenic tradition gave thoughtful consideration to contingent individual factors that implicitly challenged any received notions of the universal and fixed benefits of eating bread.

Juan de Aviñón (Moses Samuel de Roquemaure), a converted Jew who moved to Seville after being schooled in the Galenic tradition in southern France, was one such physician. After practicing in Seville for thirty years, Aviñón committed his medical knowledge to writing in a treatise he called Medicina Sevillana. In his study of this treatise, Solomon demonstrates that Aviñón considered medicine to be a complex art that was further complicated by contingencies related to the radical individuality of each patient and his or her circumstances. Aviñón believed that each human being is distinctive and that what is necessary for one person’s health will be different from what another individual needs. Aviñón would have abhorred the idea that laypeople could manage their own health by using a medical treatise.

That is exactly what the public began to demand in the later middle ages and early modern period. This led to an explosion of vernacular medical works that nonprofessionals could use. These works responded to the public’s hunger for simple, uniform, and universal medicines, cures, and hygienic imperatives from university-trained professionals. A later edition of the Sevillana medicina by sixteenth-century physician and botanist Nicolás Monardes exemplifies this decisive trend away from the radical individualism of medieval Galenism and toward nonnatural, less contingent forms of hygiene and therapy.

In Eating for Success: Where, When, and What to Eat in Early Modern Spain, Patricia Moore-Martínez looks at how gender and class inform new patterns of consumption in the early modern period as exhibited in the works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberian authors Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and María de Zayas. Fasting and forbidden food acts often take place within the context of prescriptive dietary laws. Anthropologists have posited that these laws serve to cleanse a people, unify disparate groups, or contribute to the economic well-being of a region’s population. In medieval Iberian literary studies, scholars have illustrated that the rigorous religious prescriptions surrounding food in medieval texts—prohibition, moderation, fasting—functioned as pathways to God. The commonality among these food studies is the social pressure that was systematized in the prescriptive practices that guided and limited individual food acts. Moore-Martínez ponders what we are to make, then, of an individual’s food decisions when the decisions reflect agency. While a male who chooses to fast was disempowered and his political, psychological, and social status was lost, fasting was the primary source of food agency for women, who were proven pure, virtuous and worthy through the act. In the Iberian works of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and María de Zayas, however, individual food decisions reflect intentional choices designed to enhance the worldly lives of the individual. These new patterns of consumption were clearly informed by gender and class. Female agency was illustrated by women’s ability to manipulate time, space, and men through food by determining not only when a meal happens but also whether it was meager or sumptuous. In El castigo de la miseria, an episode in one of Maria de Zayas’s novelas amorosas y ejemplares, doña Isidora, a widow past her prime, seduces don Marcos through his stomach. This allows her to not only overwhelm him with sensation during his meals in her home but also allows him to conflate marriage with a sense of gustatory well-being. For the men, food choice and more specifically food refusal is inextricably linked to social status; these practices manifested one’s class status or enabled one to maintain it. Through an analysis of quotidian food acts in the comedias of Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca and the works of Zayas, Moore-Martínez demonstrates the motives of the individual in food choice and the power people obtained or lost through seemingly simple decisions.

The third part of the collection, Food as Fetish: Gendering Sexual Desire through Food begins with a study of a fifteenth-century anonymous text, Les quinze joies de mariage, that uses gastronomic references for the purpose of enacting a sardonic critique of marriage, as Nelly Labére cogently demonstrates in "‘A Whim for Strawberries’: At a Literary Table in Les quinze joies de mariage. Medieval cookbooks and manuals of conduct defined rules of social interaction that emerged in the context of a European representation of oneself and the other." Writing (understood widely in its many various practices) and the