Food Feasting And Table Manners In The Late Middle Ages

"The present volume aims to offer a panorama of what people ate and how did they do it in the Iberian Peninsula from the 12th to the 15th centuries. It has long been recognized that Mediterranean cultures attach great importance to communal meals and food cooked with great refinement, but, yet medieval feasting in England, France and Italy has been thoroughly studied, it is not the case for Spain and Portugal. In this book the reader will learn about how medieval men of the Iberian Peninsula questioned themselves about different aspects deemed important in social feasting. Thus, the acquisition of table manners and rhetorical skills, the interaction between medicine and eating and the presence of food in literature and religion did shape Peninsular societies, but their attitude towards food also connected them to a Western European background. This book intends to fill a gap for scholars that wish to have an interdisciplinary approach to food and feasting from the perspectives of literature, history, language, art, religion and medicine, but also for students interested in a social, cultural and literary overview of the life in the Iberian Peninsula during the Late Middle Ages"--