From medieval Western Europe to the early modern Spanish Americas and Asia, scholarship dealing with foodways and foodstuffs has considerably evolved in the last decades. From the questions of local consumption practices, global flows of commodities to evolving tastes, new studies shed light on the intricate significance of food to early modern societies across the globe. Going beyond the essential character of drinks and foodstuffs for the survival of the human body, food consumption is now also being considered as an economic, social, religious and cultural marker. While the enjoyment of a meal can bring communities together, foodways and foodstuffs are also inherent to strategies of exclusion, resistance and protest. If texts provide precious information, material and visual sources have been increasingly used by historians to inform the study of food-related practices in past societies.  

Argument

From medieval Western Europe to the early modern Spanish Americas and Asia, scholarship dealing with foodways and foodstuffs has considerably evolved in the last decades. From the questions of local consumption practices, global flows of commodities to evolving tastes, new studies shed light on the intricate significance of food to early modern societies across the globe. Going beyond the essential character of drinks and foodstuffs for the survival of the human body, food consumption is now also being considered as an economic, social, religious and cultural marker. While the enjoyment of a meal can bring communities together, foodways and foodstuffs are also inherent to strategies of exclusion, resistance and protest. If texts provide precious information, material and visual sources have been increasingly used by historians to inform the study of food-related practices in past societies.    

Stretching across a period of 500 years, this conference interrogate means of regulation and performances surrounding food across the globe and the visual and material culture methodologies to study them. What role do political and religious measures play in consumption and supply of foodstuffs? How may visual culture reinforce and capture people's table manners and perception of sociability in the past? To what extent does the preparation of food and the materiality of food consumption represent power at court and in public celebrations? How does the physical environment in which food is prepared, displayed, sold, and consumed influence knowledge-making and aesthetic perception? What light does the preparation and display of food and eating shed on the relationship between colonisers and colonised?

Event format and registration

This event will be held via Zoom on 25th and 26th of May. To register please contact Moïra Dato (Moira.Dato@eui.eu).

Organisers

Moïra Dato, Ana Struillou, Elisa Chazal, Isabelle Riepe

Department of History and Civilization, European University Institute, Florence.

Program

25 May 2021

10:00 - 10:30 Welcome & Introduction

• 10:30 - 11:30 Keynote : Melissa Calaresu (Cambridge) Feast & Fast: Exhibiting the visual and material cultures of food

12:00 - 13:00 Regulating Food | Chair: Charlotte Bellamy (EUI)

• Luca Molà (Warwick) & Giorgio Riello (EUI) Food Laws: Banqueting, Foods, and Sumptuary Laws, c. 1300-1600
• Michelle Al-Ferzly (Michigan) A Vision in Balance: ‘Port Saint Symeon Wares’ through Islamic Medico - Culinary Texts

13:00 - 14:30 LUNCH

14:30 - 15:30 Performances of eating | Chair: TBD

• Chloé Pluchon-Riera (Grenoble Alpes) Make a Fool of Food Merchants. Food, Animals and Men Comical Relationships in Italian Genre Scenes of the Cinquecento.
• Marta Manzanares Mileo (Cambridge) Of Dipping into Chocolate: Table Manners, Sociability and the Materiality of Food in Eighteenth-Century Spain

16:30 - 17:30 Table Design and Fashion | Chair: Moïra Dato (EUI)

• Kathryn Swanson (Principia College) Dinner at the Spanish Bourbon Table: Eating Practices in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic
• Alessandro Favatà (Padova, Ca' Foscari & Verona) The Sugary Triumphi: the most Ephemeral Beauty of Early Modern Italian Banquets (XVI-XVII centuries)

26 May 2021

13:30 - 15:00 Spaces of Consumption | Chair: Lavinia Maddaluno (EUI)

• Lucy Havard (Cambridge) Considering the Kitchen: Culinary Knowledge in the Early Modern Home
• Freya Purcell (V&A/Royal College of Art) Respite in a Dish: Examining the Space of the Eighteenth-Century Saloop Stall
• Jan Blonski (EUI) Between Creating and Turning the Hierarchy Upside-down. Taverns in the Early Modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

15:30 - 16:30 Food in Colonial Contexts | Chair: Lucy Riall (EUI)

• Leiyun Ni (Warwick) Negotiating Identities of Foreign Traders: Dinner Parties in Canton trade
• Olga Trufanova (Regensburg) Seeing Siberia Eating

17:00 - 18:00 Closing Remarks & Discussion with David Do Paço (Sciences Po)

All times are Central European Summer Time (CEST).

The event will be held online.

Please register via email: moira.dato@eui.eu