Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales

Melissa Ridley Elmes, Kristin Bovaird-Abbo, Melissa Ridley Elmes, Kristin Bovaird-Abbo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367224905
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000372137
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In Food and Feast in Premodern Outlaw Tales editors Melissa Ridley Elmes and Kristin Bovaird-Abbo gather eleven original studies examining scenes of food and feasting in premodern outlaw texts ranging from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries and forward to their cinematic adaptations. Along with fresh insights into the popular Robin Hood legend, these essays investigate the intersections of outlawry, food studies, and feasting in Old English, Middle English, and French outlaw narratives, Anglo-Scottish border ballads, early modern ballads and dramatic works, and cinematic medievalism. The range of critical and disciplinary approaches employed, including history, literary studies, cultural studies, food studies, gender studies, and film studies, highlights the inherently interdisciplinary nature of outlaw narratives. The overall volume offers an example of the ways in which examining a subject through interdisciplinary, cross-geographic and cross-temporal lenses can yield fresh insights; places canonic and well-known works in conversation with lesser-known texts to showcase the dynamic nature and cultural influence and impact of premodern outlaw tales; and presents an introductory foray into the intersection of literary and food studies in premodern contexts which will be of value and interest to specialists and a general audience, alike.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Grendel’s Eucharist: An Outlaw’s Last Supper
• 3 Food, Feasts, and Temperance: The Social Contracts of “Mete and Drink” in The Tale of Gamelyn
• 4 Bread Without Onions: Winning the Crusades through French Cuisine in Honorat Bovet’s 1398 Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun [Apparition of Master Jean de Meun]
• 5 Of Courtesy and Community: Food and Feasting in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode
• 6 The Preparation and Consumption of Food as Signifiers of Class and Gender Identity in Selected Premodern Texts and Examples of the Robin Hood Cinematic Canon
• 7 “So Shall We Take Our Dinner Sweet”: When the Greenwood Consumes the Outlaw
• 8 Robin Hood’s Poached Feasting in Context: Poor Knights, Disguised Kings, and Romance Parody in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode
• 9 The Poached Feast and the Kingly Blow: The Question of Courtesy in Late Medieval King and Commoner Narratives
• 10 Acting Out(Law): Feasts, Outlawry, and Identity Constructions in Two Shakespearean Comedies
• 11 Early Modern Fishing Practices and Seafood Culture in Robin Hood’s Fishing
• 12 “Bread With Danger Purchased”: Hunger, Plenty, and the Outlaw on the Early Modern Stage
• Index