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

Though ostensibly a study of food in the medieval English romance, Political Appetites is in reality a wide-ranging meditation on the political stakes of consumption writ large. In Hostetter’s compelling account, it often seems like the entire world is edible, human culture itself in essence “a toothy domination of every creature” (p. 2). The “empowering observation” of the book, as Hostetter notes, is that “food choice is always a political act” (p. 7, emphasis in original). Rather than attempting an exhaustive catalogue of scenes of consumption in medieval English romances, Hostetter “isolates a particular food image that animates an individual example of romance, seeking to illuminate how that resonance pervades its raison d’être” (p. 28). For the most part, this method serves Hostetter’s argument well, and the book is most persuasive as a series of deftly executed close readings of medieval English romances—a category of which Hostetter is deliberately trying to push the limits.

Chapter 1, on the Old English Andreas, establishes from the outset the book’s ambition to define romance broadly, arguing that the poem, despite an early date of composition—perhaps as early as the late ninth century—engages with all the standard topoi of the genre: “intriguing villains, supernatural forces, a setting long ago, and a persistent fascination with sensationalism, magic, and the fantastic” (p. 34). Like Cynewulf’s Elene and the ninth-century Guthlac, Andreas in Hostetter’s account complicates a standard dating of medieval romance’s origins to the twelfth century. His interpretation hinges on an analogy between the poem’s depiction of an island of cannibals and the assimilationist project of conversion considered as “ecclesiastical imperialism” (p. 29). Though not the first to recognize the ways in which the poem’s Christian missionaries are themselves potentially “cannibalistic”—hungry for converts—Hostetter shows how this irony structures the entire poem, and in the process he makes a convincing case for the verbal artistry and sophistication of an understudied text. Hostetter has plenty of opportunity here to show off his chops as an Anglo-Saxonist, as when he notices how the Old English wiþ, “against, opposite to,” “attaches obstinately to verbs of speaking, rendering any conversation into confrontation” (p. 49), or the implications of the fact that sael, “time, season,” shares a stem with sælþ, “prosperity,” or the suggestive resemblance between thegan, “consumed,” and thegn, “servant,” as a measure of the abjection that consumption implies in this poem. This kind of close reading is consistently in evidence throughout the book, with few exceptions.

Chapter 2, on the Roman de Silence, is somewhat less convincing. Hostetter argues that the allegorical figure of Nature who appears in the poem, insofar as she is represented as a baker, is in fact shown to be unnatural, so that the nature/culture dichotomy is deconstructed in ways that resonate with this poem’s broader anxieties about the stability of supposedly natural and innate distinctions of gender and class. While not off the mark, such a reading feels familiar in its broad outlines, even if it is arrived at by a less direct route than that taken by scholars interested primarily in the heroine’s gender performances. Indeed, the “unnaturalness” of the figure of Nature in many medieval texts is an old trope of scholarship by now, and the episode in which Nature appears (focused on Merlin, not on Silence herself) feels like a slender basis for a reading of this romance as deeply invested in food. A bigger problem is that it is not obvious how attention to the role of food in the text complicates our understanding of what is at stake in this romance.

Food is undeniably central to one of the best-known of the Middle English romances, Havelok the Dane, and Hostetter’s account of the poem in chapter 3 is a highlight of the book. Hostetter shows how...