Table Manners

Abstract

Why do we eat the way we do? It is a simple question, but one that is rooted in a deep history of social customs and politics. This paper surveys the past thousand years of table manners through looking at popular courtesy handbooks both translated and written in late medieval Western Europe. It has been argued that table manners are imposed by the royalty and the upper echelons of society in order to have control over the functions of the middle and lower classes, but this paper extends this idea to explore how the population sought to either make fun of or emulate their higher ups. By looking at the history of table manners a great deal can be explored regarding the way in which medieval peoples thought about how they ate, and why it mattered.