Abstract
Abstract This article offers insight into Protestant attitudes towards food by exploring seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English delftware dishes and chargers decorated with the biblical motif of the Temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It investigates the biblical story and doctrinal assumptions that underpinned this iconography and considers how objects decorated with it illuminate the ethics of eating in the godly household and reformed culture. Analyzing a range of visual variations on this theme, it approaches this species of Christian materiality as a form of embodied theology. Such pottery encouraged spectators to recognize the interconnections between sexual temptation and the sensual temptation presented by gluttony and to engage in spiritual and moral reflection. Probing the nexus between piety and bodily pleasure, the article also seeks to complicate traditional stereotypes about puritan asceticism.
Highlights
This article offers insight into Protestant attitudes towards food by exploring seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English delftware dishes and chargers decorated with the biblical motif of the Temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden
Such pottery encouraged spectators to recognize the interconnections between sexual temptation and the sensual temptation presented by gluttony and to engage in spiritual and moral reflection
The tin-glazed earthenware dish reproduced in Fig. 1 is decorated with an image that was ubiquitous in early modern England: the Temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden
Summary
The tin-glazed earthenware dish reproduced in Fig. 1 is decorated with an image that was ubiquitous in early modern England: the Temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
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