A Swift Overview of Eating and Drinking Since Antiquity

Handbook of Eating and Drinking

This is an almost final version before publication (without some stylistic changes in the published text).

TMA56, 2017

A Companion to Food in the Ancient World (edited by John Wilkins and Robin Nadeau), 2015

2016

Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is both a history of food practices and a history of the medical discourse about that food. It is also an exploration of the interaction between the two: the relationship between evolving foodways and shifting medical advice on what to eat in order to stay healthy. It provides the first in-depth study of printed dietary advice covering the entire early modern period, from the late-15th century to the early-19th; it is also the first to trace the history of European foodways as seen through the prism of this advice. David Gentilcore offers a doctor's-eye view of changing food and dietary fashions: from Portugal to Poland, from Scotland to Sicily, not forgetting the expanding European populations of the New World. In addition to exploring European regimens throughout the period, works of materia medica, botany, agronomy and horticulture are considered, as well as a range of other printed sources, such as travel accounts, cookery books and literary works. The book also includes 30 illustrations, maps and extensive chapter bibliographies with web links included to further aid study. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is the essential introduction to the relationship between food, health and medicine for history students and scholars alike.

2018

La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 2021

2013

In the last few decades new theoretical perspectives have emphasized the significance of material culture for an understanding of historical and sociocultural developments. As a consequence of this renewed interest in more pragmatic aspects of daily life through the ages scholars have turned to the study of food as a window to the cultural dynamics that are embedded within. The acquisition, preparation and consumption of food is a basic human need that provides a lens through which scholars can explore relationships among economic, religious, literary, legal, political, cultural and social activity. Scholarly study of food, as well as its surrounding ideas and practices, illuminate the boundaries and nexus of material and mental exchanges which are so fundamental to human experience that they often escape a culture’s nominal categories to occasion the crossing of social and political borders. Scholarly interest in food and eating in the Middle Ages increased after the publication of...

Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2005

Food occupies a central role in all cultures. However, what we eat, how and why we eat it and where it comes from differs remarkably. This intersession course examines the sociohistorical context of food in European societies during the classical, medieval and renaissance periods. Lectures will address such topics as technology, trade networks, political institutions, religious observances, and medicinal/magical applications with respect to both staples, like bread and salt, and luxuries, such as spices and swans (!).

Mètode Revista de difusió de la investigació, 2020

This work addresses the food system as a complex structure connected to the environment, like a living organism. It uses the contributions from multiple fields (including anthropology, nutritional, medicine, and economics) to establish connections between analytically disparate fields in order to highlight their transformations over time and space. It also studies social organisation over millions of years to understand the synergy between the environment, extraction technologies, economic and political structures, and the resulting cooking environments (each with their own social construction of tastes) as conditioning factors for sickness and death. In short, it delves into the anthropology of food by relying on three main pillars: critical thinking, a relational approach, and historicity.