Eating Right in the Renaissance (review)

Albala's account of dietary ideals and eating practices from 1470 to 1650 (two themes then, as now, often as discordant as harmonious) is based on an impressive range of Western European texts dealing with diet and gastronomy, health, hygiene, and medicine. Albala is a genial presiding host, laying out a smorgasbord of attitudes to food and other factors considered relevant to diet, including sex, class, geography, and nationality. He serves up a variety of delectable anecdotes on such subjects as the "fear of fruits" (8), the threat posed by cucumbers (9), and cannibalism, which "both titillated and revolted" Renaissance writers. The human body was considered to be the substance most easily converted into flesh, an important criterion of the ideally nutritious diet; classical sources were invoked to testify that "St. Jerome as a boy ... witnessed the Scots enjoying a meal of swine-herd buttock and maiden's breast" (69).

Albala defines three periods in Renaissance writing on diet, corresponding to stages in the history of medicine. The first, from the earliest printed texts of the 1470s to c. 1530, was marked by continuity with medieval literature based on Arab and Jewish authors, as well as the authoritative Galen, the Greek physician of the 2d century A.D.; the audience of these works was the ruling elite. In the second period, from the 1530s to the 1570s, the humanists inspired an attempt to restore the entire Greek medical corpus, including Hippocratic writings, and to excise the Arab writers; authors assumed a moral tone and denounced the excesses of courtly life: "As gods worde and storis, the treuth to tell/That unsatiat glottons shall faste in hell" (35). finally, from the 1570s to 1650, criticism of ancient authorities and growing reliance on empirical observation of ordinary consumers, to whom manuals by then were addressed, coincided with the gradual breakdown of Galenic hegemony in this and other fields of medicine. Subsequently the genre of dietary advice died out, due, Albala surmises, to a surfeit of publications.

The essential connection between changing dietary prescriptions and the evolution of medicine is solidly established, particularly in several sections discussing Galenic theories of humoral physiology. Health was seen as a matter of balancing the four humors in the body—blood, choler, phlegm and bile, each a particular combination of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness—with food, corrected by cooking and seasoning, and adjusted according to such factors as age, exercise, and emotional temperament. Nevertheless, the division of an only partly digested mass of material into sections dealing with these topics sits rather ill with the aim of demonstrating change over time, resulting in some confusing and tiresome repetition. Perhaps detailed digests of numerous tracts might profitably have been sacrificed to a sharper analytical treatment.

Albala is less successful in his more ambitious aim—he re-works the dictum of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are," as "tell me what a culture thinks it ought to eat, and I will tell you what it wants to be" (4)—to show how changes in dietary advice "also reflected broader cultural and social changes in Europe" (26). With the possible exception of the relation between social class and food preferences (he cites the cautionary tale of a peasant at court who "died painfully because he was not given any turnips or fava beans ... He who is used to turnips must not eat meat pies," 113), the correspondences that he suggests seem based on speculative deductions from doubtful premises, often appealing to perceived modern parallels (for example, the fluctuating twentieth-century fortunes of spam or tortillas) rather than any profound exploration of these broader changes, which are necessarily beyond the scope of this book.