Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Giannetti
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Food Culture ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Prescriptive Literature ◽  
And Gender

As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Early English

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.

Antipodean Early Modern

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Wide Range

A Prayer Book owned by the Rothschilds, an Italian bronze casket by Antico, a lavishly illustrated Carnival chronicle from sixteenth-century Germany, an altarpiece by Pieter Brueghel the Younger - much of the artwork in this book, held by Australian collections, is essentially unknown beyond the continent. The authors of these essays showcase these extraordinary objects to their full potential, revealing a wide range of contemporary art and historical research. This collection of essays will surprise even specialists.

Latin American Connections: Recent Work on German Interactions with Latin America

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Glenn Penny
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Mining Operations ◽  
Almost Everywhere ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
German Speaking

German interactions with Latin America have a long history. Indeed, early modern historians have demonstrated that people from German-speaking central Europe took part in all aspects of the European conquest of Central and South America. They have shown that these people were critical to mining operations and publishing in sixteenth-century Mexico; they have found them among Portuguese and Spanish sailors and soldiers almost everywhere; and they have located them playing important roles in a wide range of professions from Mexico to the south of Chile.

Ladies Errant. Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy

Italica ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 531
Author(s):  
Laura Benedetti ◽  
Deanna Shemek
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Early Modern Italy

Sites of Consumption in Early Modern Europe

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelyn Welch
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Modern Europe

In 1535, the Venetian patrician Francesco Priuli began a new account book for his household's daily expenditure. Despite his elevated standing, he kept it in his own hand, noting with precision how his money was spent, where, when, and on what. There are a number of things to note about this patrician family's behaviour. One is that a major mercantile city such as Venice already offered a wide range of shopping spaces and opportunities in the early sixteenth century (and had for many years). Also, forms of payment varied and could take place long after the goods had been transferred. Moreover, Priuli's purchases (and his occasional sales) make it clear that Venice's large second-hand markets provided economic security. This article focuses on sites of consumption in early modern Europe, first considering the moral aspects of the division of labour and then discussing the spectacles of consumption. It also examines credit, the sites of bargaining and exchange of material goods, and activities such as lotteries, second-hand dealers, pawnbrokers, and auctions.

Tomb cult and the ‘Greek renaissance’: the past in the present in the 8th century BC

Antiquity ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (237) ◽  
pp. 750-761 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Morris
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Greek City ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Complexity ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
City State

Greek society was changing rapidly in the 8th century BC. The archaeological record reveals population growth, increasing political complexity, artistic experiments and a strong interest in the past. Because these processes resemble those at work in early modern Italy, the period has often been referred to as the ‘Greek renaissance’ (e.g. Ure 1922; Hägg 1983a; cf. Burke 1986). This paper is about the glorification of the past in the 8th century, and its relationship to the rise of the polis, the Greek city state. I concentrate on one particular phenomenon, the spread of cults at tombs dating to the Mycenaean period (c. 1600-1200 BC). I argue that the common renaissance analogy has limited value, and that the 8thcentury Greeks created a past narrowly focussed on the persons of powerful ancient beings, from whom they could draw authority in the social upheavals which came about as the loose, aristocratic societies of the ‘Dark Age’ (c. 1200-750 BC) were challenged. Tomb cults go back at least to 950 BC, but after 750 they were redefined and used as a source of power in new ways. I have adapted my subtitle from Maurice Bloch’s well-known paper ‘The past and the present in the present’ (1977), where he argues that rituals bring the past into the present to form a system of cognition mystifying nature and preserving the social order. The argument here is slightly different. I stress the variety of the cults and the range of meanings they must have had, making their recipients highly ambiguous figures. The same cults could simultaneously evoke the new, relatively egalitarian ideology of the polis and the older ideals of heroic aristocrats who protected the grateful and defenceless lower orders, while standing far above them. Bloch's paper borrowed Malinowski’s idea of culture as a ‘long conversation’; developing the analogy, I look at the multiple meanings which any statement in such a conversation may have for the different actors.

Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Domestic Sphere

2018 ◽  
pp. 134-151
Author(s):  
Catherine Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Children And Parents ◽  
Prescriptive Literature ◽  
Household Heads ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Domestic Organization ◽  
The Relationship

This essay is about the relationship between comic form and domestic politics—about how Shakespeare makes comedy out of household encounters, and how his plays might have intervened in current political thinking about family life and gender relations. Bringing the plays into dialogue with a range of contemporary prescriptive literature about household practice, it argues that the relationship between comedy as a genre and the patriarchal ideals of domestic organization which structured early modern society was a turbulent one, and that this adds to the plays’ political purchase and their theatrical power. The essay looks in detail at relationships between household heads, children and parents, and servants and their masters, focusing on the qualities of submission and authority which Shakespeare develops in his verse and staging—it aims to answer the question, just how does he put domestic encounters on the early modern stage?

New speaker paradigm and historical sociolinguistics: Dynamics between Florentines and learners in early modern Italy

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleonora Serra
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Endangered Languages ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Language History ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
New Speakers

AbstractThis paper aims to assess whether the emerging research paradigm of the new speaker may be useful in the study of language history. This question is tackled by exploring the dynamics which arose between Florentines and non-Florentine learners in sixteenth-century Italy. At the time, notwithstanding the peninsula’s linguistic fragmentation, the written language came to be progressively standardised around an archaic variety of Florentine (the fourteenth-century vernacular used by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio). Florentines, initially, had no active role in this process and literary Florentine was living an autonomous life, becoming, at the written level, a “learner” variety progressively influenced by its new users. If at first Florentines themselves saw the emerging exogenous written standard in negative terms, they were not immune to its influence – an influence which grew stronger as the century progressed. The dynamics which arose between Florentines and learners concerning linguistic ownership appear similar to the ones which exist between “traditional” linguistic minorities and new speakers in some present-day revitalisation contexts. It is argued that the “new speaker” lens, mainly employed in the field of endangered languages, is valuable for capturing the dynamics which emerge between different groups during historical processes of language standardisation.

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