Overview

Forging Communities explores the importance of the cultivation, provision, trade, and exchange of foods and beverages to mankind’s technological advancement, violent conquest, and maritime exploration. The thirteen essays here show how the sharing of food and drink forged social, religious, and community bonds, and how ceremonial feasts as well as domestic daily meals strengthened ties and solidified ethnoreligious identity through the sharing of food customs. The very act of eating and the pleasure derived from it are metaphorically linked to two other sublime activities of the human experience: sexuality and the search for the divine. This interdisciplinary study of food in medieval and early modern communities connects threads of history conventionally examined separately or in isolation. The intersection of foodstuffs with politics, religion, economics, and culture enhances our understanding of historical developments and cultural continuities through the centuries, giving insight that today, as much as in the past, we are what we eat and what we eat is never devoid of meaning.

Full Product Details

9781682260685

Table of Contents

Reviews

Following in the footsteps of recent critical work on food that focuses on the medieval and early modern periods by scholars such as Bynum, Freedman, Montanari, or Fern�ndez-Armesto, Montserrat Piera has assembled a remarkable and groundbreaking set of studies which elucidate 'the intersection of material and mental exchanges that surround food and how it establishes identities, defines groups, and brings about change and (r)evolution.' The thirteen chapters here provide a fresh analysis of the way food forges communities across lands and of the intersection of foodstuffs with politics, religion, economics and culture. --Antonio Cortijo Oca�a, University of California, Santa Barbara

Author Information

Montserrat Piera is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Temple University and editor of Remapping Travel Narratives, 1000–1700: To the East and Back Again.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available