Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages: Balancing the Humours

Abstract

This book opens with a discussion of disciplinary methodology from which one might easily surmise that this will be a study of the folklore of women and food written from the perspective of cultural anthropology. One might therefore anticipate analyses of folktales that feature women making food or hungering for it; the physical spaces where women prepared food, their tools and serving utensils, as well as the ideas circulating across the centuries about women's bodies and appetite; and images of women in kitchens or feeding the sick, as well as plays that reflect popular belief. That is, a look at all the details about ordinary people during the Middle Ages that are typically overlooked in written sources.Moreover, one might also expect written sources that add to the overall historical picture, such as licenses for ale houses, court records, wills, correspondence, and other documentation that offers glimpses of women's relation to food. There is also a vast medical literature that discusses women's diet and health, and often that of laboring classes as well. Petrus Hispanus’ Thesaurus pauperum from the thirteenth century comes to mind. Medical writers sometimes even went so far as to correct popular errors, which indicates folk medical practice. The theological literature, some of which is examined here, also prescribes women's role and place in society with an attempt to correct what misogynist males deemed aberrant behavior.Cookbooks may also offer details about the skills women were expected to possess, the size of the households they were feeding, and the technology they were accustomed to using. Occasionally, even cooking the recipe will give a very physical sense of the labor involved, not to mention the flavor of the food. Admittedly, such sources are much richer for the early modern period, but they exist for the Middle Ages as well. However, this book is not a historical study based on primary sources. We are given a list of medieval cookbooks but not a lot of discussion of what is in them.Women, Food and Diet in the Middle Ages: Balancing the Humours is based mostly on secondary sources, which examine the historical literature on diet and its legacy from ancient times, with Hippocrates and Galen, through the medieval Arab world with Avicenna and Ibn Butlan, and into medieval Europe. Elites wrote the primary sources, which sometimes do reveal ideas about sex difference and how women's diets should be different from those of men. Sometimes these primary sources go into explicit detail—such as the Trotula and other examples of gynecological literature, as well as the rather quirky writings of Hildegard of Bingen—though the latter hardly impacted medical theory or practice, and she rarely discussed women per se. Theresa A. Vaughan pulls anecdotes from these texts, which are interesting and pertinent, but there is no thorough systematic analysis of ideas about women in these texts and how that might relate to the lives of actual women. On occasion, it seems as if the author has not closely read the book being discussed—Platina's De honesta voluptate is the example that comes to mind. Platina does not even mention women in his book, except to say that women's milk is only used in medicine and that coitus is not useless if no languor or pain results from it.One cannot fault this book for not being history. But one can regret that the probing questions offered throughout the book are not answered: the relation of folk medicine and traditional healing to the academic tradition; women's roles as cooks, caregivers, and food manufacturers; and what women's practices reveal about their ideas of their own bodies. There is interesting discussion of concepts of beauty in the final chapters and how the recommended diet of women changed, but these are sometimes as much about our current obsession with these topics rather than the medieval context.In the end, one wonders what audience the author had in mind. Presumably, readers could consult the secondary sources firsthand, and scholars would want to see the primary written sources. But here, we are given an overview, perhaps more appropriate for students who need an introduction to the topic. Every author referenced is given dates, and footnotes define terms like “pessary” and explain concepts that scholars would know. The tone of the book also reads like an engaging college lecture that does not linger too long on one subject, offers interesting asides to keep the audience engaged, and often repeats information to make sure students get the point. This book would work well in a classroom, though the price might make that difficult.If you are looking for a general overview of the topic of medieval women and food, this is a good start before proceeding to the other sources. A folkloric study about the experiences of ordinary women in the Middle Ages remains to be written.