The present volume focuses on a two-fold issue: food as a cultural element that united Mediterranean European society, and food as a cultural encounter between European explorers and new worlds during the early Renaissance.
The acquisition of table manners and rhetorical skills, the interaction between medicine and eating, and the presence of food in literature and religion shaped Peninsular societies and connected them to a Western European background during the Middle Ages. The Renaissance, however, marked a turning point in world history, and the reader will learn how eating evolved in the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal during the early Renaissance in fields such as: morals, politics, medicine, literature and religion. The book also explains how the cultural conception of food was exported by Iberian explorers to the Americas and Japan.
The present volume focuses on a two-fold issue: food as a cultural element that united Mediterranean European society, and food as a cultural encounter between European explorers and new worlds during the early Renaissance. Therefore, this volume continues the themes introduced in the previous monograph, Food, Feasting and Table Manners in the Late Middle Ages: Volume I: The Iberian Peninsula in the European Context, but takes into account the new, global scale of the era.
Readers will find here a panorama of what, and how, people ate in Mediterranean Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries and learn how cultural aspects of food were exported to the new lands that were explored during the Age of Discovery.
Introduction
THE IBERIAN PENINSULA AND THE FIRST GLOBAL KITCHEN, OR THE OLD WORLD VERSUS
NEW WORLDS
Guillermo Alvar Nuño
Chapter 1
From a Mediterranean to a European Cuisine, from Spain to the Americas. Some
Remarks about Food in the First Globalisation
María Ángeles Pérez Samper
Chapter 2
At the Table with New Social Classes. Giovanni Boccaccios Decameron and the
Description of Meals for a Thriving Bourgeoisie
Carmen F. Blanco Valdés
Chapter 3
Eating Culture in Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance Portugal
Luis Correia de Sousa
Chapter 4
SELF-DISCIPLINE DURING THE REIGN OF THE CATHOLIC MONARCHS: MODESTY AND
ATTITUDES TOWARDS FOOD IN HERNANDO DE TALAVERAS INSTRUCCIÓN QUE ORDENÓ PARA
EL REGIMIENTO DE SU CASA
Cristina Moya García
Chapter 5
The Regulation of Morals during the Reign of the Catholic Monarchs: Food and
Clothing in Hernando de Talaveras Tractado provechoso
Teresa Jiménez Calvente
Chapter 6
At the Table of a Noble Castilian Household. The Lords of Marchena and the
Use of Courtliness as a Strategy for Power
Juan Luis Carriazo Rubio
Chapter 7
Food in short chivalric narrative: an exploration of uncharted territory
Karla Xiomara Luna Mariscal
Chapter 8
Aphrodisiacs in Amatus Lusitanus: Ceres, Bacchus and food myths
Ana Isabel Martín Ferreira
Chapter 9
Feasts turned to Stone: Food in Sculpture Cycles from Seville to New Spain
Juan Clemente Rodríguez Estévez
Chapter 10
Cassava: a major staple in pre- and post-conquest America
Rudy Chaulet
Chapter 11
When the Land of the Sunset met the Land of the Rising Sun. Food in the
Cultural Encounter between Iberians and the Japanese
Antonio Doñas
Guillermo Alvar Nuño obtained his PhD in Latin Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid. He developed his teaching career at the Université de Franche-Comté (Besançon, France, 20142017) and the University of Alcalá (2017), where he currently teaches subjects related to the ancient and mediaeval worlds. As a researcher, he has worked with late antique and mediaeval pedagogical texts on the moral formation of ancient and mediaeval man. He has also researched the development of the courtly model in mediaeval Europe, the influence of classical authors in the Middle Ages and the development of Spanish humanism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
