Georges Vigarello. The Metamorphoses of Fat

Since Hillel Schwartz's Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (1986), fat has attracted some historical attention in the English-speaking world, though it was only in the late 1990s and early 2000s that work in this area really began to blossom. By then, Schwartz's study was complemented by those of historians like Peter N. Stearns and Sander L. Gilman, and such literary and cultural scholars as Elena Levy-Navarro and Amy Erdman Farrell. Despite a lag in French scholarship on this topic, Claude Fischler's perspicacious ruminations on fat in L'Homnivore: Le goût, la cuisine et le corps (1990) have now been extended by more focused historical inquiries, notably Julia Csergo's edited volume Trop gros? L'obésité et ses représentations (2009) and Georges Vigarello's Les métamorphoses du gras: Histoire de l'obésité du Moyen âge au XXe siècle (2010), the latter now having been translated into English. The most impressive history of corpulence to date, The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity is enhanced by Georges Vigarello's deep knowledge of the development of the Western body and his ability to distill a wealth of information into a digestible form. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how our modern preoccupations with size, weight, health, beauty, and morality have changed over time.

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