Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare's England
Cambridge University Press, 11/7/2013
EAN 9781107039063, ISBN10: 1107039061
Hardcover, 290 pages, 23.1 x 16 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
David B. Goldstein argues for a new understanding of Renaissance England from the perspective of communal eating. Rather than focus on traditional models of interiority, choice and consumption, Goldstein demonstrates that eating offered a central paradigm for the ethics of community formation. The book examines how sharing food helps build, demarcate and destroy relationships – between eater and eaten, between self and other, and among different groups. Tracing these eating relations from 1547 to 1680 - through Shakespeare, Milton, religious writers and recipe book authors - Goldstein shows that to think about eating was to engage in complex reflections about the body's role in society. In the process, he radically rethinks the communal importance of the Protestant Eucharist. Combining historicist literary analysis with insights from social science and philosophy, the book's arguments reverberate well beyond the Renaissance. Ultimately, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare's England forces us to rethink our own relationship to food.
Introduction
eating relations
Part I. Cannibal Ethics
Excursus
The Body Edible
1. The cook and the cannibal
Titus Andronicus and New World eating
2. I will not eat with you
failures of commensality in The Merchant of Venice
Part II. Communion and Community
3. Anne Askew, John Bale, and the stakes of eating
Excursus
Receiving the Recipe
4. How to eat a book
Ann Fanshawe and manuscript recipe culture
5. Eaters of Eden
Milton and the invention of hospitality
Conclusion
toward a relational ethics of eating
Bibliography.