Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature

Chapter One - Food Fight: Medieval Gastronomy and Literary Convention

Chapter One Food Fight Medieval Gastronomy and Literary Convention Grant fu la joie el paleis segnorez Quant ont mengie et beü a plentez. —Aliscans Food has always been one of the most essential and revealing elements of material culture because it is necessary for subsistence and survival. Food is also central to daily practices and important rituals, involving necessity, spirituality, and pleasure .1 Food habits and table manners still serve as a method of transmission of tradition, values, and cultural convention. We may witness both static and changing trends in societal values by looking at food habits.2 Diverse diets and eating practices are manifestations of cultural norms and differences. BrillatSavarin ’s perceptive view of the pleasures and necessities of food, that gastronomy rules the entirety of life because it has to do with all areas of life, is applicable to previous centuries of consumers and cooks. This chapter maps medieval alimentary codes and culinary narrative. Food, cooking, and eating are as crucial to the literary portrayal of medieval cultural codes as speech, dress, violence, and gestures.3 Serious and humorous images of the edible, tied to pleasure and pain, disgust and appetite , appear across medieval genres enhancing meaning. Though in the Middle Ages the human earthly body was perceived as transient and imperfect, and bodily concerns were considered ephemeral and less significant than spiritual devotion in this period, food was nonetheless extraordinarily significant and symbolic. Diet, appetite, and the conventions of consumption are indicators of identity. Despite the fact that étiquette was not yet a term in French courtly vocabulary, eating and table manners constituted inescapable social codes in 14 15 Food Fight this period. Table manners are social constructs that reveal much about societal roles, expectations, and socio-economic distinctions, especially in the European Middle Ages. Images of food, eating, and drinking are problematized by the realities of class differences and the havoc often caused by hunger in medieval European society. Food and drink served as spiritual sustenance and medicinal remedy as well. Special diets for fast days, lean days, pilgrimage, and feast days could mark spiritual devotion.4 In romance and epic, heroes often vow to fast during a quest or absence until they succeed and return to their beloved ladies (as in the case of Guillaume’s promise to Guiborc in Aliscans, where he confines himself to dry bread and water). Indeed, feast days were a measure of time for most, even if not everyone had rich meats available to them in times of celebration; “thus eating, in dividing the year and marking the calendar, gives form to otherwise amorphous time. Using food to mark out time is indeed one of the few cultural universals ” (Mars and Mars 12). As it still does today, eating special foods also marked important cultural events such as weddings, celebrations, and rites of passage. In addition, we will see how representations of codified consumption and food objects are used to address societal and sexual tensions. Representations of food in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries are conventionalized , and as such, they are well positioned to question and attack other societal conventions. At the intersection of medieval French material culture and literary production, the chapters to follow trace the diverse combinations of cuisine and wit in secular Old French literature across generic and temporal borders (c. 1150–1350). The human body, consumption, famine, and the possibilities for innovation in the art of cooking with the new food items being traded from other cultures were all growing concerns in this period. Literary codes and culinary codes alike are at stake in medieval narrative fiction. Paradoxically, the prolific twelfththrough early-fourteenth-century period of vernacular secular writing was a time of inventive cuisine and lavish feasts for the wealthy and the struggle of hunger and malnutrition for the less fortunate in real life. Exotic and bountiful feasts were status symbols for the aristocracy or the urban bourgeoisie that were beginning to flourish. Marketplace economies and trade routes 16 Chapter One were expanding and changing established foodways. Recipe books and didactic manners manuals began to appear, especially among these gastronomically privileged groups in thirteenth - and fourteenth-century urban France. Still, peasants’ struggles for daily bread are included only rarely in the literary corpus of this period. There are, however, countless detailed realistic portrayals of fasting, ascetic hermetic diets, and vilain food hoarding. On occasion even the courtly world...