Bread of dreams: food and fantasy in early modern Europe (review)

J32 Reviews mosaics. Given the straightforward and clear layout of the text, such an oversight in the case of the plates is unfortunate. Nevertheless, The mosaics of Antioch provides a valuable addition to the corpora of mosaic pavements that now exist, not only for Turkey, but for the Mediterranean region, Europe and Britain. This is not a book of general interest, but for the student of mosaic studies it provides a technical handbook of value. Priscdla Henderson Department of Art History Australian National University Camporesi, P., Bread of dreams: food and fantasy in early modern Europe, trans. D. Gentilcore, Oxford, Polity Press, 1989; pp. 212; R. R. P. AUS$59.95. Nine years have passed since this book appeared in Italy under thetide// pane selvaggio. It followed 11 paese della fame (Bologna, 1978) and coincided with the 1980 issue of Alimentazione folclore societd by the Parma-based publisher Pratiche. All these works, together those which appeared later in the 1980s, could be characterised broadly as belonging to the field of historical anthropology, as defined by Peter Burke. However Camporesi does not fully match Burke's specifications. His methodology and style are quirky. His thesis and his methods are somewhat startling. The Anglophone reader may in fact be daunted by the verbose, sometimes elliptical narrative style, which the translator has rendered faithfully from the original Italian, a wayward Italian heavily influenced by the language of the media and noticeably short on conjunctions and qualifications, a jewelled and rhetorical discourse, often tedious and repetitious. Camporesi's stance is that of the social historian. His viewpoint is Marxian. His concerns are anthropological as much as they are historical. His sources are literary, medical, and ecclesiastical and are primarily Italian texts of the latter half of the sixteenth century. As Roy Porter writes in the preface to this English edition: 'The axis of famine and food, and the fears and fantasies linked with them, form the core of his inquiry' (p. 8). It is difficult to fix temporal parameters to Camporesi's inquiry since late medieval to contemporary Italy figure in the narrative. However, the principal chronological focus of the book is the second half of the sixteenth century. Its spatial centre is Bologna. Camporesi covers a vast amount of ground in a grand sweep and it is here that one of the book's major flaws lies. His claim that the lower orders of the population of Europe were almost permanently in a drugged state, either from hunger or because of herbal concoctions, is woven throughout the book as a kind of choric refrain. The mental and alimentary processes set in train by hunger and deprivation are fully Reviews 133 and graphically described on the basis of ecclesiastical and literary accounts. It is a batde for survival in which the elite does notfigure,except occasionally as antagonist and sometimes as benefactor. On balance the book is wrongly tided. It is the absence of food and the allpervasiveness of death, decay, and degradation which assume the clearest dimensions as the book unfolds. Camporesi has to resort to literary sources in order to exemplify in some way the popular response to the vicious predicament he describes. Those afflicted by it had no voice, let alone one that might have survived as a retrievable source. Camporesi's theses may be 'alluring', as Porter claims, but the reader, 'stolid Anglo-Saxon' or not, could be forgiven for a lack of patience with Camporesi's rambling presentation. He is short on analysis, however impressive his array of source material. His intuitive leaps are stimulating as much as they are arresting and sometimes frustrating. Camporesi is an eclectic and original writer. H e is not a writer anyone interested in Italian popular culture can afford to neglect and his influence on the progress of Italian social history has been considerable. Later works, including La casa dell'etemitd (a study of Hell) and La came impassibile (on death and the flesh), have added to the author's influential corpus. The scale of these works is just as sweeping. Camporesi leaves the way open to scholars and researchers to take up and elaborate the many leads and intuitions which he offers...