Abstract

Christopher Woolgar’s authoritative volume offers a wealth of engaging material on an important topic for our understanding of medieval society and its operation. Woolgar is well known for his research and writing on medieval diet and the functioning of the medieval household. His earlier work focused upon the great household with its inevitable emphasis upon the consumption of food and the management of the same. Important themes in that work re-emerge here. Woolgar presents a great variety of material in this volume, including engaging vignettes and well-chosen exempla, and there is interest and novelty on almost every page. The author sets out his agenda in an opening chapter on food culture which also affords him the opportunity to review the kinds of sources that permit investigation of this topic. These include material directed at food and its eating, such as recipe books and household accounts, but also a range of material from which incidental reference to consumption has to be drawn: for example, moralising texts and coroners’ rolls, the latter used frequently throughout the text to illustrate the contexts for consumption and food culture. Woolgar also devotes careful attention to the actual culture of eating, the ways in which the process of eating a meal and the distribution of foodstuffs allowed medieval men and women the opportunity to represent key facets of their society, piety and social order. Food and its presentation, as Woolgar makes clear in a variety of contexts, provided material for praise and complaint: discussions about food could express fairly fundamental views on entitlement and relative power, as when the Bishop of Salisbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and even, subsequently, Henry I were called in to officiate over the size of the Abingdon Abbey cheese ration. In addition, Woolgar makes clear the importance of the accoutrements of cooking and feeding, brewing and drinking, and so on, and uses manuscript illumination, contemporary records and some archaeological evidence to discuss the mechanics of food production and distribution at the table.

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