Food, Feasting and Table Manners in the Early Renaissance

Volume II: From the Iberian Peninsula towards a New World

Guillermo Alvar Nuño

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040298862
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Index: History

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 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and learn how cultural aspects of food were exported to the new lands that were explored during the Age of Discovery.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: The Iberian Peninsula and the First Global Kitchen, or the Old World versus New Worlds
• 1 From a Mediterranean to a European Cuisine, from Spain to the Americas: Some Remarks about Food in the First Globalisation
• 2 At the Table with New Social Classes: Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Description of Meals for a Thriving Bourgeoisie
• 3 Eating Culture in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance Portugal
• 4 Self-discipline during the Reign of the Catholic Monarchs: Modesty and Attitudes towards Food in Hernando de Talavera’s Instrucción que Ordenó Para el Regimiento de su Casa
• 5 The Regulation of Morals during the Reign of the Catholic Monarchs: Food and Clothing in Hernando de Talavera’s Tractado provechoso
• 6 At the Table of a Noble Castilian Household: The Lords of Marchena and the Use of Courtliness as a Strategy for Power
• 7 Food in Short Chivalric Narrative: An Exploration of Uncharted Territory
• 8 Aphrodisiacs in Amatus Lusitanus: Ceres, Bacchus and Food Myths
• 9 Feasts Turned to Stone: Food in Sculpture Cycles from Seville to New Spain
• 10 Cassava: A Major Staple in Pre- and Post-Conquest America
• 11 When the Land of the Sunset Met the Land of the Rising Sun: Food in the Cultural Encounter between Iberians and the Japanese
• Index