Food, Eating and Identity in Early Medieval England by Allen J. Frantzen (review)

A simple bone spoon with a leaf-shaped handle illustrates the cover of Frantzen’s study of how food shaped identities in Anglo-Saxon England. Excavated from the middle Saxon settlement site at Flixborough, Lincolnshire, the spoon stands for the material culture of food production and consumption, the subjects that Frantzen seeks to elucidate in this genuinely interdisciplinary book. Most of our images of medieval food relate to feasting and its associated ceremonies—drinking, singing, and making speeches—because those are the occasions most frequently described in contemporary written sources. Frantzen widens his study beyond literary texts to include the words found in Old English to describe foods and the physical objects associated with agriculture and cooking, as well as the material evidence of the ordinary, everyday items used by the Anglo-Saxons to grow, transport, prepare, and eat their food. In addition to spoons and knives, he considers bowls, cups, cooking pots, and kneading troughs. He examines not only the tools of consumption but also the food producers—those who planted fields, kept swine, caught fish, brewed beer, or ground wheat—and the objects that they used in the production of food and drink.

Close focus on the material (and on excavated food waste) enables Frantzen to set legal and admonitory evidence about food discipline (for example, from penitentials) in new light. He argues that discussion of Anglo-Saxon social identity has paid too little attention to material culture, failing to acknowledge the extent to which the material world (amply evidenced through the archaeological record) served to construct social systems. Central to his study, therefore, is the integration of physical objects with linguistic and textual evidence, with an emphasis on the ordinary and mundane, and with the networks of food production and distribution that gave objects meaning in communication. Because food is personal in the literal sense of becoming part of the body, Frantzen argues that the act of eating is “the most-identity-producing point in the food network,” thus conferring on the objects associated with it (cups, spoons, etc.) the capacity to reveal individual identities, just as larger, often shared, objects involved with production—like quernstones and iron tools—signal community identity (173).

Frantzen locates his study theoretically in two contexts—Bourdieu’s theory of habitus (as developed in recent Anglo-Saxon archaeology) and Frazer’s theory about social identity (“situational identity” in this work) in medieval culture.¹ Frantzen frequently criticizes other scholars who have not engaged with theory, and with those who have perpetuated a polarized Anglo-Saxon world, contrasting the feasting of the rich with the hunger of the poor. He is markedly less transparent about his own ideological stance, particularly his repeated implication that the Church represented a negative force, exerting an unwelcoming control over lay society. Observing religion only through the lens of legislation and prescription seriously distorts its role in creating and enriching social identities. Frantzen clearly enjoys the anticlerical satirical poem The Seasons of Fasting (early eleventh century), with its ridicule of priests who failed to obey the injunctions of their preaching, but he never mentions the place of food at the heart of Christian liturgy in the Eucharist. His demonstration that fish became more plentiful in the late Anglo-Saxon period as a mark of high status that only the wealthy could afford, however, is important; fish was a luxury, not a fasting food. The increased finds of fish bones after c. 1000 do not reflect adherence to stricter rules about abstinence, as had once been thought.

Methodologically, the book has much to contribute but, as Frantzen admits, it is harder to provide explanations of objects than it is of texts. He has asked many questions of his spoons, but they do not always have the answers. To misquote Grierson, “It has been said that the spoon cannot lie, but it owes this merit in part to the fact that it cannot speak.”²