Food and Health in Early Modern Europe - by David Gentilcore (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2016

Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is both a history of food practices and a history of the medical discourse about that food. It is also an exploration of the interaction between the two: the relationship between evolving foodways and shifting medical advice on what to eat in order to stay healthy. It provides the first in-depth study of printed dietary advice covering the entire early modern period, from the late-15th century to the early-19th; it is also the first to trace the history of European foodways as seen through the prism of this advice.

David Gentilcore offers a doctor's-eye view of changing food and dietary fashions: from Portugal to Poland, from Scotland to Sicily, not forgetting the expanding European populations of the New World. In addition to exploring European regimens throughout the period, works of materia medica, botany, agronomy and horticulture are considered, as well as a range of other printed sources, such as travel accounts, cookery books and literary works. The book also includes 30 illustrations, maps and extensive chapter bibliographies with web links included to further aid study.

Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is the essential introduction to the relationship between food, health and medicine for history students and scholars alike.

Review Quotes

Gentilcore brings together food history and the history of medicine in a thoroughly engaging and - despite its period - incongruously topical book ... Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is an excellent resource for both students and academics interested in diet, medicine and early modern Europe more generally ... Gentilcore has a firm command of the material, which is presented in a humorous, appealing style that I would welcome from more historians. A thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding read.
Medical History

Gentilcore profitably sketches the shifts from the revived Galenism of the late Middle Ages ... to the rational embrace of moderation in all things by the great Bath doctor George Cheyne in Georgian England ... All this is covered with gusto and not a little scholarship.
Times Literary Supplement

Social history done well (unequivocally the case here) is a pleasure to read. Views of food, medicine, and societal practice confected in the cauldron of Europe's early modern period could easily, in less scholarly and competent hands, have produced a concoction intellectually difficult to digest. The author's recipe for avoiding this is simple but skillfully executed. Two initial chapters divide the period surveyed (c.1450-c.1650; c.1650-c.1800) to clarify the shifting views of diet and medicine. In brief, the revival of Galen's emphasis on dietary regimen and prevention (renascent as a result of humanism) is eventually challenged by iatrochemical (Paracelsian) and iatromechanical views emphasizing therapeutics and curative drugs. These views are, by the end of this diachronic survey, countered by a return to a dietetics again based on hygiene and prevention. With this foundation established, subsequent chapters explore the interaction of these ideas with changing views of social rank, religion, vegetarianism, beverage consumption, and the appearance of new foods and drinks associated with the Columbian exchange. It would be difficult to imagine any undergraduate student, irrespective of major, who could leave unsated from this intellectual feast. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.
CHOICE

About the Author

David Gentilcore is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester, UK. He is the author of Italy and the Potato: A History, 1550-2000 (2012), Pomodoro!: A History of the Tomato in Italy (2010) and Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (2006).