Early Modern English Foodways: A Critical Sourcebook

Early Modern English Foodways: A Critical Sourcebook is the first anthology of food-related writing in Renaissance England.Bringing together seventy passages from a two-hundred-year sweep of British history, the volume demonstrates how food connects all forms of life in the most intimate and public ways. The sourcebook offers new insights into the early modern experience of sustenance.It introduces readers to the tribulations of the women who started a 1629 grain riot, reveals the primacy of eating in Thomas More's Utopia, and explains the significance of posset pots and wedding cultery.The volume features familiar voices such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton alongside lesser-known texts and objects to illuminate broader questions of gender, body, hospitality, religion, medicine, social status, ecology, and empire.Drawing from an expansive range of sources-including recipe books, travel narratives, philosophical treatises, and agricultural handbooks-these entries, many previ