Resumen de Establishing Biological Superiority: Food and Nobility in the Fifteenth Century

Ana María Gómez Bravo

• Notions of blood and food practices played a key role in the conceptualization of the internal nature of identity in the late medieval period. These notions were formed through a convergence of medical, literary, religious, and legal discourses. Fifteenth-century authors shaped a theory of nobility based on a defense of innate psychobiological superiority that leveraged the value placed on food through humoral theory. The justification of oligarchical inclusion and exclusion through biological and psychobiological group characteristics of nobles and non-nobles or plebeians put food at the core of such an exclusionary system by leveraging medical theories that tightly linked food and bodily constitution. Taking fifteenth-century treatises on nobility and contemporaneous medical thought as a starting point, this paper analyzes the role of food in the construction of human difference in late-medieval Spanish texts.