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

Frantzen’s study seeks to recreate what might be called the lived experience and “situational identities” of “every day” Anglo-Saxons. He tackles his lofty goal using a blended study of food objects and texts. While his work starts with the arguable premise that “objects survivals are democratic,” his work represents a valuable approach to those without texts (2). Frantzen rejects the objects-as-textual discourse approach favored by many literary medievalists because, as he says, most illiterate Anglo-Saxons would not have been familiar with texts or the idea of “reading” objects; instead, he seeks to “look at objects in contexts that demonstrate their functions in the working world rather than meanings assigned to the objects within a universe of symbolic meanings” (5). He forges what might be called a hybrid process approach that links objects to their physical and symbolic networks. In the first part of the book he studies how elite, literate Anglo-Saxons imagined food objects and in the second part how those humble objects were used in villages by (likely) illiterate tenants. Finally, in the third part he explores how the tension between the vision and use of the food tools was used to shape narratives of identity for political and religious elites.

One of the Frantzen’s strengths is his unwillingness to accept objects as static demonstrations of social identity or as automatically symbolic. Sometimes a spoon (the object which spurs his questions) was not meant to represent anything; its purpose was to stir. But just because a spoon was not intentionally manipulated as part of a symbolic cosmology “does not mean that those activities [in which the spoon was employed] did not contribute to social or situational identity, or both” (27). His push to recreate the thought world around the spoon using both the object itself and the way authors discuss or gloss objects and object words in text represents the most innovative part of Franzten’s study. He draws together his expertise on Anglo-Saxon law and text to re-center our focus on the necessary but silent processes and tools required to create the feast. This is a crucial endeavor. As he so eloquently notes, “Feasting, like poetry, is rarified and sometimes spectacular. For all that, however, feasting is not more important than the routine events it obscures” (2). For the most part, scholars have been preoccupied with the food objects once they are co-opted into the spectacle, the feast, and given meaning within the semiotic system.

For Frantzen, the existence of food preparation tools and the texts that mention objects (but not how they were constructed or used) signals implicit knowledge that every day Anglo-Saxons understood more about construction and skilled labor than their texts detail. He uses the example of querns, which have most often been interpreted as symbolic grave goods, to argue that the local Anglo-Saxons retained fine finishing skills, generally accepted to have died out in the post-Roman period in England. Further, he suggests that quern finds demonstrate growing economic activity. Because the heavy, pierced stones were difficult to ship and install, Frantzen maintains there must have been trade knowledge and networks to create, ship, and install so many querns (86–88). Further, Frantzen ties quern practices to the long religious textual tradition concerning quernstones, which he suggests gave way only slowly to the water mill adaptation and shaped English ideas and practice until at least Chaucer. By focusing on only the symbolic value of the quernstone, Frantzen insists we have missed half the story. At times stretching the evidence, nevertheless, the careful consideration of archaeological remains allows Frantzen to embark on the crucial endeavor of considering the discrepancies between ideas and practice, and what those tensions might tell us about Anglo-Saxon culture.

He ends the book with an important chapter on food purity and fasting as part of social identity politics. By combining texts on food laws (especially religious) with various settlement finds, Frantzen asserts...