Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. Krohn argues that with the increasing professionalization of many skills and trades, Scappi was at the vanguard of a new way of looking not just at the kitchen-as workshop or laboratory-but at the ways in which artisanal knowledge was visualized and disseminated by a range of craftsmen, from engineers to architects. The recipes in Scappi's Opera belong on the one hand to a genre of cookery books, household manuals, and courtesy books that was well established by the middle of the sixteenth century, but the illustrations suggest connections to an entirely different and emergent world of knowledge. It is through study of the illustrations that these connections are discerned, explained, and interpreted. As one of the most important cookbooks for early modern Europe, the time is ripe for a focused study of Scappi's Opera in the various contexts in which Krohn frames it: book history, antiquarianism, and visual studies.

The Eternal Table: A Cultural History of Food in Rome is the first concise history of the food, gastronomy, and cuisine of Rome spanning from pre-Roman to modern times. It is a social history of the Eternal City seen through the lens of eating and feeding, as it advanced over the centuries in a city that fascinates like no other. The history of food in Rome unfolds as an engaging and enlightening narrative, recounting the human partnership with what was raised, picked, fished, caught, slaughtered, cooked, and served, as it was experienced and perceived along the continuum between excess and dearth by Romans and the many who passed through. Like the city itself, Rome’s culinary history is multi-layered, both vertically and horizontally, from migrant shepherds to the senatorial aristocracy, from the papal court to the flow of pilgrims and Grand Tourists, from the House of Savoy and the Kingdom of Italy to Fascism and the rise of the middle classes. The Eternal Table takes the reader on a culinary journey through the city streets, country kitchens, banquets, markets, festivals, osterias, and restaurants illuminating yet another facet of one of the most intriguing cities in the world.

This book explores how women's relationship with food has been represented in Italian literature, cinema, scientific writings and other forms of cultural expression from the 19th century to the present. Italian women have often been portrayed cooking and serving meals to others, while denying themselves the pleasure of the table. The collection presents a comprehensive understanding of the symbolic meanings associated with food and of the way these intersect with Italian women's socio-cultural history and the feminist movement. From case studies on Sophia Loren and Elena Ferrante, to analyses of cookbooks by Italian chefs, each chapter examines the unique contribution Italian culture has made to perceiving and portraying women in a specific relation to food, addressing issues of gender, identity and politics of the body.

This Companion rethinks food in literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to contemporary food blogs, and recovers cookbooks as literary texts.

In early modern culture, eating and reading were entangled acts. Our dead metaphors (swallowed stories, overcooked narratives, digested information) are all that now remains of a rich interplay between text and food, in which every element of dining, from preparation to purgation, had its equivalent in the literary sphere. Following the advice of the poet George Herbert, this essay collection "looks to the mouth", unfolding the charged relationship between ingestion and expression in a wide variety of texts and contexts. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words fills a significant gap in our understanding of early modern cultural history. Situated at the lively intersection between literary, historical and bibliographical studies, it opens new lines of dialogue between the study of material textuality and the history of the body.

This volume offers the user a guide to the neglected field of how-to books. How do I make soap? How do I dye textiles? What ingredients do I need for a effective remedy? How can one find and mine mineral resources, how does one make pewter cups or a good meal? Practical information of this kind, on distillation, medicine, dyeing, cosmetics, glassmaking, ceramics, metallurgy and many other subjects, flooded the book market in the first centuries of printing. As varied as these subjects are the research questions that we might ask: How do you learn practical skills from a book? Why were these books so popular, who used them and how, and can they even be considered to be a clearly defined genre? The aim of this volume, which emerged from a conference at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, is to find out which patterns characterise the genre of how-to books or “Rezepte-Büchlein”. It also aims to contribute to the clarification of terms for a genre, that operates under labels such as “Books of Secrets” and "recipe books" or, in German-speaking countries, "Kunst- und Wunderbuch" or “nützlich büchlein”. Some key issues addressed in the book include the traces of book use, the media shift from manuscript to print, the interaction between text and image, and the praxeological dimension of practical books. Self-help literature not only made it possible for interested laypersons to obtain information from all possible fields of knowledge, largely independent of institutional and educational environments; as "tracts for action" they differed from other genres in that they were consistently oriented towards implementation.

Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.

Street vendors are ubiquitous across the world and throughout history. They are part of almost any distribution chain, and play an important role in the marketing of consumer goods particularly to poorer customers. Focusing on the food trades, this multi-disciplinary volume explores the dynamics of street selling and its impact on society. Through an investigation of food hawking, the volume both showcases the latest results from a subject that has seen the emergence of a significant body of innovative and adventurous scholarship, and advances the understanding of street vending and its impact on society by stimulating interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary discussions. Covering a time span of approximately two millennia, from antiquity to the present, the book includes chapters on Europe and Asia, and covers a diverse range of themes such as the identity of food sellers (in terms of gender, ethnicity, and social status); the role of the street seller in the distribution of food; the marketing of food; food traders and the establishment; the representation of food hawkers; and street traders and economic development. By taking a dynamic approach, the collection has enabled its contributors to cross disciplinary boundaries and engage in discussions which extend beyond the limits of their own academic fields, and thus provide a fresh appreciation of this ancient phenomenon.

"John Varriano's book is not only a delightful read but draws fascinating parallels between two hitherto disparate fields: art history and the history of food in the Renaissance. Outstanding scholarship that opens whole new venues of inquiry."--Ken Albala, author of Eating Right in the Renaissance and Beans: A History "Art history and food history have traditionally been separate disciplines, parallel universes. In this book John Varriano makes a cosmic leap and lures the two into a stimulating, provocative, and always entertaining study--a tasting menu of gastronomic and visual delights."--Gillian Riley, author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food "With wit and erudition, John Varriano shows us how broad cultural relationships can be drawn between the developments of Italian Renaissance art and the period's growing and changing interest in food. Enlightening and fascinating details greatly enhance our understanding of the roles that taste and temptation played in creating the early modern world."--David G. Wilkins, co-editor of History of Italian Renaissance Art "Appetites for palate and palette are both whetted in Varriano's urbane and thoroughly magisterial study. What could be more satisfying than to feast on food and art together at the same historic table?"--Patrick Hunt, author of Renaissance Visions