but they tended to be corrupt, garbled, or usually incomplete.
Now, scholars hunted down good copies in the original languages,
and most importantly, they learned to read Greek, especially after
Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 and Greek scholars escaped
to the West with books. They also went into old monasteries and long-discarded libraries
and began to fi nd and read classical texts copied hundreds of years
before. A perfect example of this is the text of the Roman cookbook
attributed to Apicius, which was fi rst written in about 400 in ancient
Rome and was eventually published in the 1400s.
This brings us to what is probably the single most important
invention in this story: the printing press. No longer does a text have
to be copied by hand—something only the wealthiest of people
could afford to have done. It can now be printed by the hundreds,
and even in a cheap format. This almost immediately stimulates a
rise in literacy as well as a vast literature of how-to books.
The overall effect of the printing press is that it speeds up the
pace of change. Information can reach more people faster, and
knowledge can be standardized and codifi ed. Not only was classical
literature printed, but also new books on every imaginable topic,
including such food-related topics as cooking, diet, agriculture,
herbs, and manners.
Another term will explain why writers shifted their attention from
topics that preoccupied medieval writers to more practical concerns
like cooking and diet. This classical revival movement is often
called humanism, which in this context means a focus on practical
human affairs. It involved topics that they believed would improve
the human condition: ethics rather than abstract theology, rhetoric
rather than logic, and poetry and art rather than canon law.
In other words, this was a major shift in the curriculum that sought
to make people well-rounded citizens rather than just professionals
trained as theologians or lawyers. This focus on humans (rather than