Wendy Pfeffer, Le festin du troubadour: Nourriture, société et littérature en Occitanie (1100–1500). Traduction de Wendy Pfeffer et Patrick Ffrench [sic]. Cahors cedex: La Louve éditions, 2016, 393 pp., numerous b/w ill.
Numerous scholars have recently turned to the world of foodstuff and food preparation in the Middle Ages. The field itself is expanding and we encounter ever new materials and documents that help us to grow in our awareness about the actual conditions on the ground, that is, in the kitchen, in the dining hall, etc. Wendy Pfeffer embarks on the same topic by way of focusing on the world of the Occitanie and its literature. She explores what we might be able to tell about all the basic aspects of food and food preparation by way of carefully scanning the relevant literary documents from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, both fictional and factual. In fact, as it becomes immediately clear, hardly any poet could ignore the demand by his/her audience to talk also about those material conditions, which allows us today to get a relatively good understanding of unique recipes and foodstuff in southern France during the high and late Middle Ages.