Resumen de Premodern Food Studies: Practices and Ideologies

Emily Colbert Cairns

• Articles in this volume illustrate what the study of premodern Iberian texts and practices can offer the larger field of food studies, from insights about social hierarchies and gendered knowledge to religious identity. In these articles scholars apply the knowledge gained in a variety of fields—from archeology, anthropology, cultural, religious and gender studies, to linguistics and literary criticism, and, perhaps most importantly, the relatively new field of food studies—to premodern Iberian texts and communities. The articles by Ana Gómez-Bravo and Daniela Gutiérrez Flores examine food practices at tables and in the kitchens of the elite from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Juan Vicente García Marsilla's contribution offers a compelling analysis of the places, spaces, and materials related to food among everyday people of the middle and lower classes from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Cristina Guardiola-Griffiths examines how Martínez de Toledo's depiction of a woman's lost egg uses beliefs about food and cosmetics to vilify women. Matthew Desing and Veronica Menaldi discuss the Christian and Jewish literary legacies that shaped Iberia in the medieval period, and Martha Daas reflects on the changing confessional landscape in the early modern period.