Eating Right in the Renaissance

1. Overview of the Genre

chapter 1 Overview of the Genre FROM ANCIENT GREECE TO MEDIEVAL EUROPE The urge to categorize foods according to a rational system appears to be at least as old as civilization itself. Every major world culture has devised a method of appraising foods and many of these survive to this day in some form. The ancient Chinese system based on ideas of yin and yang, the Hindu Ayurvedic system, and the Levitical kosher laws still inform food choices around the world. While the system of humoral physiology no longer directly affects Western ideas about food, its history is long and influential. Its roots stretch from the ancient Greeks and through the early modern period to the eighteenth century: well over two thousand years. This study focuses on a prolific two hundred years of the genre’s history, but it will be crucial to briefly outline developments that predate the Renaissance, given that dietary writers depended almost entirely on ancient and medieval texts. Research, it must be remembered , was conducted in a library rather than a laboratory, and nutritional writers mined older authors for quotes, offering them as proof of their own opinions. Exactly which authorities were chosen for citation will be a central part of this story and accounts for many of the variations among Renaissance dietaries. The pages that follow should thus be considered a list of sources for Renaissance nutrition. 14 Overview of the Genre 15 The Greeks The ancient Greeks were the first in the Western medical tradition to write extensively on nutrition. The popularity of this genre and the dynamic nature of the medical profession in general were largely the product of a cosmopolitan, mercantile society with a wealthy elite large enough to patronize physicians. In this respect, the ancient Greeks were comparable to Renaissance Europeans. A literate audience with enough leisure and money to be choosy about diet appears to have been a prerequisite for the genre to flourish. Active competition for clients also created a contentious and argumentative medical atmosphere in which professionals were eager to advertise their skill and superior knowledge of the human body. This eventually led to rival schools and a fruitful, innovative interaction of ideas. Another feature of Greek medicine more or less inherited by the Renaissance physicians was the tendency to abandon any supernatural origin of disease, although in both societies divine and demonic disease etiologies and magical or religious cures certainly did flourish. The Asclepian healing temples remained as popular in the ancient world as healing shrines and miracle-working saints did in early modern Europe. But within learned medicine and particularly in writing about nutrition, divine or magical forces played a minimal role. Nor was astrology a major feature in nutritional theory in these periods, although astrological medicine did have its supporters throughout all periods in Western medicine , and some dietaries do make use of astrology. For the purposes of this study, the most important influence of Greek medicine was the tendency to look at health and disease in purely physical terms. The wellnourished body was believed to be a product of natural forces, internal and external, influencing the normal physiological functions, and thus it is explainable in entirely material terms. Both Greek medicine and its inheritors also looked at health in holistic terms. Mind and body formed a psychosomatic whole, and treatment of the individual was never geared toward a single organ or disease. Rather, the entire body was the subject of both diagnosis and treatment, and any successful physician would have been expected to take into account all the major factors influencing the physical constitution, especially diet. Food was considered among the crucial regulating factors in maintaining health, and diet or a change in regimen was among the most common therapies for illness. 16 Overview of the Genre 1. James Longrigg, Greek Medicine from the Heroic to the Hellenistic Age: A Source Book (New York: Routledge, 1998), 148. 2. Colin Spencer, The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism (Hanover and London : University Press of New England, 1995), 44. 3. Plato, Republic, book 3, 406a. See Ludwig Edelstein, Ancient Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 138. The first of the ancient Greeks to discuss diet was the philosopher Pythagoras, known today by every geometry student for his famous theorem . According to later admirers such as Porphyry and Plutarch, Pythagoras stressed the importance of a vegetarian diet...