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Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories. Front Cover. Joan Fitzpatrick. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.,
Table of contents
- Faculty of English | Language & Literature
- Health Fitness Dieting Cooking
- Iter Press
- food, history and art – some ruminations by Fredrika Jacobs
The traditional view sees Sir Toby — the famous drunkard, glutton, misbehaver and upsetter of the household order, great appreciator as well as instigator of excess — as a memorial character, i. In contrast to this view, I would like to suggest that we should also see Sir Toby as a figure of forgetting and forgetfulness, a character by which specific cultural memories might be released. To make this point, I shall proceed in three steps. Even though the setting here is never specified, this is traditionally seen as the appropriate location where the nightly drinking and carousing of Sir Toby and his friends takes place.
Interestingly, in the entire Shakespeare canon we find thousands of references to food, eating and cooking, but we find no other single scene that is set in a kitchen with the possible exception of the cauldron-scene in Macbeth , which might have been written by Middleton. And whoever wonders where the third ass or fool might be, has already solved the riddle, because the picture counts in the beholder.
As much as the interpreter of the pub sign sees himself included in what he interprets, so spectators of this comedy find themselves included into the community of drinkers they are watching. As they follow the performance of the kitchen scene, quite possibly themselves eating and drinking, they become participants and potentially enter the theatrical space.
Sir Toby thus emerges as an emblematic figure of the theatre, an embodiment not just of bodily enjoyment but of theatrical practice which allies itself to the work of feasting. He upsets the household order, heeds neither place nor time, reverses social hierarchies and turns spectators into participants, thus constructing a community realized in performance.
For under Anglican auspices around , the old calendar of seasonal festivities was clearly under pressure to reform. Shakespearean theatre therefore, it has been argued, may serve a crucial cultural function in reminding audiences of such rites and seasons officially no longer tolerated nor observed. Food, generally speaking, often has or serves memorial functions, especially in religious rites. But even more so on stage, where Sir Toby appears as the central agent of traditional carnival culture: his food preferences may restore a sense of cultural continuity for what has otherwise been discontinued in English religious life.
According to Ken Albala, 10 there is a confessional divide involved, for instance, in the difference between real ale, the traditional English drink which Sir Toby is defending here, and beer, a new-fangled drink brewed with hops and, on the level of popular opinion, not really part of the traditional way of things in England, just like the Reformation. Another highly interesting example would be fish, strongly associated with Catholic practice, hence outlawed under Protestantism and only tolerated by Elizabethans, in a typically pragmatic compromise, so as to protect the local fishing industry.
Excess links him to the old carnival tradition, and the dietary preferences to the old faith. And yet, as I said earlier, this is just half his story. I believe we need to question this account and reverse the functional perspective on this figure to see what it also and primarily performs: the work of cultural forgetting — a function of the theatre, I would like to suggest, much in demand in post-Reformation England. Even before the Countess makes an actual appearance, she has been billed and introduced as a persistent mourner.
Faculty of English | Language & Literature
In this perspective, then, we see how the theatrical performance offers an occasion to remember, once again, specific rites and doctrines of the old religion and how it is the figure of Olivia who functions to induce such cultural memories. If the early modern playhouse is a space for the art of memory, as Frances Yates argued long ago, 17 this would include religious memories and may indeed give compensation for a specific ritual practice, such as mourning, discontinued in Elizabethan England.
Would it really do so? I think there is scope for difference, and I think we need to reconsider the work of early modern theatre in dealing with memory and mourning. As indicated earlier, the theatre contributes in my view also to the work of cultural forgetting, and it is the figure of Sir Toby with his constant gluttony who can take the lead for such a project. The art of memory, or ars memorativa , is, of course, a classic heritage from the rhetorical tradition: in the course of training orators, it offers them techniques to memorize a speech which they would otherwise, eventually and naturally, forget.
In this tradition, memory is to forgetting as culture is to nature: 19 a man-made intentional effort meant to compensate and combat processes beyond human volition. Any act that tries to make someone forget something must, inevitably, call this very thing again to mind: a performative contradiction, which led thinkers like Umberto Eco to categorically deny it.
Which brings us back to Toby and his cultural function. Lethargy is the key-word here: it designates his lack of discipline, his gluttonous enjoyment beyond body norms, and his self-forgetting. Etymologically, the word lethargy derives from the river Lethe , the underworld river of forgetfulness, which links the pathology of excessive body fluids to a lack of memory. We should also see the bliss provided by the Lethean waters, the stream of forgetting, to anyone who would like to renew, perhaps even reform, himself or indeed reform society:.
What relish is in this? How runs the stream? Or I am mad or else this is a dream. Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep: If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep. If Sir Toby, as I argued, is a figure that embodies the theatrical and at the same time presents the theatrical as an art of the body, then his lethargy must have an impact also on spectators, who turn into participants and, as suggested with Sebastian, themselves partake of all these lures of Lethe.
In my view, then, the main point about the various traces of the old religion in this comedy — traces evident also in the food obsession that is staged — may be neither to recall nor to resist Catholicism, but more simply to perform, transform, digest and out -perform it on the stage, so as to be able to consign it to oblivion. Crucial for this function of the theatre is the figure of Sir Toby. When we juxtapose Sir Toby to Malvolio, he appears to be a memory-figure, recalling the traditional rites of festive cycles which are increasingly suppressed in Protestant society, mainly to survive on the festive stage.
But when we juxtapose him to Olivia, Sir Toby appears instead to be a figure of purgation, transformation and forgetting, that is to say, of getting rid of all such ritual memories in and by theatrical enactment. Texts were bolh tools for doing things and, in that, ways of knowing them. In this sense, the histoiy of book use and the history of theoretical speculation are entwined' Mazzio and Cormack, 4. The connection between how books were used and how such use was connected to the theo of knowledge embedded within those texts is particularly acute in the ease of recipe books.
Pushing against Aristotelian scholasticism, the books of secrets that followed from the Secretum Secretomm assumed that nature could be controlled by art. These texts did not offer their readers philosophy or science. Instead, they provided precisely the kind of instrumental knowledge that was associated with what, for Aristotle, had been two lesser kinds of wisdom: making poesis doing praxis. Recipes first appear, in print sources, primarily in the books of secrets. For Plat, art was neither separate from nor uy to nature: 'nature', he insisted, 'may be knowne to bee so cunning an uriisL as that she hath not made any thing in vaine, the wittee of man hath also fonnHc out some good use this way' Plat The books of secrets tended to be multi-part volumes made up of a number of different books, each concerned with what seem to us to be quite different kinds of inventions, experiments, and recipes.
V aVs Jewell House, for instance, contains separate books on experiments, dry, chemical distillery, and moulding, while The boke of Secrets begins with sections on the virtues of herbs, stones, and animals. Partridge's Treasurie includes more culinary material, but even here, much of the book is devoted to 'kitchen physic', with recipes for oils, extracts, salves, and other substances that wuliiu be used for medicinal purposes.
The different mechanical arts that come together in such volumes -- instructions for distilling, cryptography, medicinal saKcv dyeing, and cooking - were allied with one another to the extent that they were understood to be 'arts of the hand" and, equally important, instances of the knowledge that such arts could produce. Conking is notably not a distinct category within these volumes. Food meant something quite different to recipe book authors such as Hugh Plat or John Partridge than it did to dietary writers such as Thomas Cogan and William Bullein.
In the dietaries, food was theoretically understood to be one of the six non-naturals that gave men a way to control the body and its passions, and some dietaries would thus describe the virtues associated with different foods and make recommendations about the kinds of foods that different kinds of people should eat.
In practice, however, dietaries did not typically include recipes, which were noi inherently consistent with Galenic assumptions about the individuality of both temperament and treatment. In Partridge's Treasurie, for instance, the culinary recipes at the start of the book are simply presented To bake chickens' , but the medicinal recipes include both instructions 'To make Conserve of Roses, or Other for accounts of the books of secrets in the English tradition, sec Spiller xii-xvr Willi.
The dietaries tet d to refer to cooking itself largely in metaphoric terms, as a way to describe how ihe human body worked. From this perspective, concocting, distilling, and cooking all had their counterparts within the human digestive process. In the recipe books, by contrast, the emphasis is on the control of nature, not that of man.
Man contiols; he is not that which is controlled.
Health Fitness Dieting Cooking
For someone like Piatt, cooking is a mechar il art that is significant to the extent that it can transform nature and, thus, cr. Although cooking is initially subordinate to physic within the books of sec the shift away from Galenic models of the body tended to create an intellec 1 space for cooking as a category in its own right. This category shift is apparent in the publication histories of these volumes.
Books of secrets were introduced to English readers in the middle of the sixteenth century and were at the hei"M of their popularity in the last quarter of the century. These volumes went through multiple editions and were usually printed by more than one primer, While additional materials and even sequels were added in the later editions, these volumes were fairly consistent in combining the various mechanical arts in i single philosophical structure and narrative form.
In the works from this group, cooking is still associated, at a philosophical level, the mechanical arts and the books of secrets, but that connection appears in a textual format. Plat's Jewell House is a typical book of secrets; his later Delig for Ladies focuses almost entirely on confectionary recipes.
Among the earliest of the volumes in this category were two Recipes for Knowledge 63 idely influential translations of Conrad Gesner's medical works, The Treasure f Euonymus and its continuation The Newe Jewell of Health Ciesner's remedies were largely chemical and alchemical. Giving a definition r distillation at the start of the first volume, Gesner makes this focus clear; is goal is to show how complex medicinal compounds can be created 'out of simple medicines by the strengths of fire' Gesner Air.
Although Gesner himself as not a supporter of Paracelsus, Allen Debus argues that his remedy books promoted chemical medicine in ways that ultimately worked to make Paracelsian iatrochemistry acceptable to English readers Debus , Paracelsian and wilier chemical remedies are prominent in later remedy books such as Leonardo f ioravanti's A Joyful Jewell , which was translated by the apothecary John Hester, Thomas Vicary's The English Mans Treasure ? The chemical remedy books have strong intellectual affiliations with the books of secrets.
Paracelsian medicine was associated closely with the mechanical arts, while alchemy as a whole was tied to the belief that human art provided the basis for the transformation of nature and the creation of knowledge.
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Despite their different audiences, these volumes thus often use a language that is cJose to that in the books of secrets. The Treasure, for instance, promises to reveal s 'wonderful hid secrets of nature' Gesner, title page. The recipes in the remedy books differ conceptually from those in the books of secrets.
John Banister warns his readers that many of his recipes are 'bitter, hiting. In saying this, Banister is in part repeating a basic tenet of Galenic medicine: food tastes good and medicine tastes. Although Banister begins with this Galenic framework, his recipes nonetheless are structured in ways that follow Paracelsian assumptions. Partridge, whose recipes in The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits are of a comparatively high standard, provides more and less quantifiable measurements: for red sealing wax, for instance, he recommends 3 ounces of clear turpentine, but specifies 4 ounces in winter.
In Partridge's culinary recipes, quantity itself is a unit of measurement: different recipes specify, in slightly different modulations, 'a quantity of butter', 'a good quantity of butter', and 'a good quantity of sugar and cream with sufficient salt' Partridge, D2r, Fir. Partridge's attitude toward measurement in part reflects a sense that cooking is an art, variable in practice and hard to convey in words.
Equally importantly, however, this sense that both quantities and results will differ also reflects the infinite variability that was understood to characterise the humoral body: in this context, what nourishes and thus what "tastes' good are as different its each individual's humoral complexion. Chemical remedy books like Banister's bring an attention to the standardisation of remedies and precision of measurement that accord with their understanding of Paracelsian physic.
Banister thus calls 64 Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare attention to the need for a uniformity that inheres in the medicine not in the patient: each of his recipes begins with a list of ingredients and measurements, given in Latin and set in an italic font, clearly set off from the instructions themselves, which are English, in a blackletter typeface.
The chemical remedy books are also affiliated with the books of secrets in their relationship to print culture. The authors and printers of these volumes consistently stress the importance of making knowledge accessible in English to those who read.
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Noting that people often die when medicines are improperly prepared, Dave explains that he 'caused this precious treasure to be translated into oure usualf. The barber surj: from St. Bartholomew's Hospital who 'revived, corrected, and published'Thomas Vicary's handbook on anatomy and chemical physic likewise emphasise thai they are making Vicary's work available in English to remedy the need, anmn't apprentices and surgeons, for accessible texts: 'many good and learned men', ihey note, 'in these our daies, do cease to publish abroad in the English tongue works and travelles' Vicary A4r-A4v.
Banister 5 I The translators and authors of English dietaries included humanists. As Eamon notes more generally ; 'when apothecaries, potters, sailors, distillers, and midwives got into print atont : with scholars, humanists, and clerics, the Republic of Letters was permanent!
food, history and art – some ruminations by Fredrika Jacobs
The knowledge that these texts sought to convey and crealt. Print culture provided the technology that made possible the standardisation of medical practice that the Pharmacopoea Londinensis was interested in achieving. At the same time, though, the I'harmacopoea Londinensis was a strong reaction against the new knowledge, and e new categories for knowledge, that print culture seemed to be stimulating.
As a text, the Pharmacopoea Londinensis was intended to prevent the dissemination of knowledge and practice at least as much as it was designed to encourage it. The Pharmacopoea was, for both the College of Physicians and the king himself, a partial solution to a textual problem created by the possibilities of print culture.