Political Appetites: Food in Medieval English Romance by Aaron Hostetter (review)

Scenes of eating abound in medieval romance, be they rich courtly feasts or nightmarish cannibalistic banquets. It can be easy to write them off as incidental to the more serious work of the genre, to its explorations of social order, familial ties, and religious and ethnic identities. In his piquant monograph, Political Appetites: Food in Medieval English Romance, Aaron Hostetter reveals the extent to which the work of romance is cooked up in the kitchen. At the core of Hostetter's book lies the observation that 'food choice is always a political act' (p. 7). What people eat, both in medieval romance and outside of it, reveals both the identities they wish to project and the relationships they forge with each other. Attending to food allows Hostetter to trace the realistic economic relations undergirding fantastical romance plots, the ways lush meals occasion wonder, and how appetites for power and domination are made visible on the body.

Political Appetites begins with the Old English Andreas, adeptly bringing this early medieval story of cannibalism and discovery into conversation with the fuller tradition of late medieval romance. Andreas, as Hostetter shows, is itself a cannibal poem, a stew of late antique apocryphal prose and Anglo-Saxon vernacular poetry. Its dark feasts offer an anthropological perspective on the 'barbaric' Mermedonians, but also foreclose triumphalist Christian readings of the poem. The conversion of the heathens, it turns out, is just another form of violent consumption.

The Roman de Silence, an Old French romance about English characters, is the focus of Chapter 2. Silence opposes Nature and 'Noureture' (with its double sense of alimentation and education), ultimately showing how essential Noureture is to the definition of social and gender roles. Indeed, Nature is herself not natural, but a skilled baker, imprinting her forms onto the raw, undefined matter of human beings. It is occasionally difficult in this section to pin down precisely where one concept begins and the other ends, and thus to grasp the contours of Hostetter's argument. Still, this seems in line with the ceaseless questioning of boundaries and categories throughout Silence.

The latter half of the book turns to Middle English texts. The discussion of Havelok the Dane in Chapter 3 reveals the strangeness of this romance's hero. Here is a man conspicuously noble in his size and strength, whose birthright it is to consume the labor of commoners in excessive feasts, but who in fact spends much of the romance busy with quotidian drudgery. Havelok, in Hostetter's account, ultimately reinstates an aristocratic social order, but reminds its audience of the back-breaking, monotonous work that undergirds that political system, making toil nearly heroic in its own right.

In the closing chapter Hostetter reads Sir Gowther alongside conduct poems to show how central correct practices of consumption are to the construction of social and political identities. Gowther, whose romance is paired with the poem 'Urbanitatis' in the Heege manuscript, must learn to transcend his demonic parentage—an education in ethics and table manners at once. His penitential meals taken from the mouths of dogs are formal in their own right, elaborate echoes of noble practices of carving and serving. Nevertheless, as with Havelok, Gowther exposes the parasitic nature of elite dining.

While building on and recognizing earlier critical work on food in medieval literature, Political Appetites constitutes an important step in bringing a culinary approach to medieval English imaginative texts. Hostetter's analyses are theoretical, but he wears his theory lightly. His use of Marx, Bourdieu, de Certeau and others is well portioned and arises organically from his engagement with the primary literature. Particularly praiseworthy is Hostetter's attention to poetic form in his close readings of passages, appropriate for a book so deeply interested in the matter of English romance. His prose is lucid, lively, and peppered with culinary metaphors—all palatable given the medieval authors' own punning tendencies. This is a book that could easily...