Medieval Fare

This new book focuses on the multicultural foodways of the medieval Iberian Peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal, although Portugal is not included here at all). The emphasis is on the culinary encounters of Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the peninsula before 1500. Although there is some material on animal husbandry, viniculture, irrigation, cereal crops, and horticulture, this is not an agricultural study. However, it is an interesting introduction to Iberian foods, if rather vague at times in its geography, politics, and chronology. Martha Dass is a specialist in Castilian literature, and it is through that lens that this book can best be appreciated. Daas primarily uses food as a way to explore the interactions and tensions between different religious communities.After a short introduction on the sources (cookery books, literary and religious texts, agricultural manuals, and medical treatises dating between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries, written originally in Arabic, Castilian, Catalan, and Hebrew), the book's chapters are organized more or less by food groups. Chapter 1, “Meat and Mains,” is the longest chapter and includes dairy, eggs, poultry, fish, and game, as well as beef and pork. This odd arrangement is less a survey of sources of protein, as claimed in the introduction, and more a means of introducing the key themes of religious feasting, fasting, and food taboos as experienced by Jewish, Islamic, and Christian communities. Chapter 2 is more straightforwardly on bread and grains, although there are also religious debates to be had there. Chapter 3 is on vegetables and legumes (but includes herbs and spices). Chapter 4 is on fruits and sweets (including honey and sugar). The last chapter is devoted to wine, which again allows for a lot of religious discussion.Readers who are not very familiar with medieval Iberia may need to look up some background on its geopolitics while reading this book. A lot of knowledge is assumed, and sources are not contextualized sufficiently (beyond a few pages in the introduction). Examples from one time and place are often cited as if representative of the whole region. One of the most frustrating things about this book is that it is nicely illustrated with many black-and-white manuscript images from across medieval Europe, but they are never discussed as sources in themselves. Some of these images are as late as the seventeenth century and most relate to Italy, England, or the Low Countries. The few that are specific to the peninsula are not given special attention. One really cannot assume that processes of harvesting and cooking were the same everywhere, or that artists had the same purpose as writers of treatises and cookbooks.The complex fourteenth-century manuscripts of the medical treatise known as the Tacuinum sanitatis from northern Italy were particularly jarring to see used so often, especially because understandings of medicine and its relationship to food are a bit confused in Daas's book. For example, Daas's analysis of rhubarb in the Libro del Buen Amor (Book of Good Love)—a wonderfully entertaining allegorical or satirical text from the fourteenth century which Daas has done a lot of work on in the past and generally uses to good effect here—implies that it is a locally obtained luncheon vegetable. Rhubarb root was in fact imported from Asia and used medicinally, mainly as a laxative. Its use in religious allegory is certainly of note, but it was not a foodstuff in the Middle Ages. Another quibble is that one will not find rhubarb in the rather thin index of the book. Nor will one find in the slim bibliography all the scholarship cited in the endnotes. There is also no list of the nearly forty images with their full provenance.There are inconsistencies in this book, some of which may be laid at the door of the publisher. It is still an enjoyable read, building on earlier work by Olivia Remie Constable, Carolyn Nadeau, and Thomas Glick. The chapters on vegetables and fruit reveal foodways that were very different to those in much of the rest of Europe; these were the most innovative and interesting chapters. The combination of several genres and languages and especially the inclusion of poetry was refreshing. If there had been some discussion of the images as sources, and a fuller understanding of Iberian politics, economics, medicine, and agriculture, this fairly short book could have had more significance in the history of medieval food. The multicultural foodways of the Iberian Peninsula are certainly deserving of further research

Ancient history · Art · Archaeological and Historical Studies · Historical Studies of Medieval Iberia · History · Medieval Architecture and Archaeology