Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Lecture 18: 16

th-Century Manners and Reformation Diets

 Another important factor in this increasingly court-dominated

society is that the general trend in most of the European powers is

for the monarchy to grow in power at the expense of the nobility.

In the 16th century, there is not only centralization, but also growth

of the physical territory of the crown; there is no longer a maze of

independent powers, but a true nation-state.

 Anyone who wants power now has to go through the king. He

becomes the font of patronage, the person who appoints government

positions as well as church positions. Therefore, more than ever,

kings set fashions. The result is a dazzling court culture that trickles

down from nobles to gentry to wealthy bourgeois businessmen and

professionals—and even to wealthy yeoman farmers.

 Almost immediately, we see the level of material culture take a

great leap forward. People with expendable income want to show

off their wealth—fl aunt it a bit—and now there’s some great stuff

to buy.

 One way to look at the plight of the poor, starving masses might

be to consider that for all the wealth that’s accumulating at the

upper end of the social scale, someone else is going hungry. Lots of

people, low wages, and high prices mean that the diet of the average

European becomes dramatically worse, and it becomes glaringly

obvious that eating customs come to be increasingly associated

with class.

The Reformations

 There’s another very important series of events that has a profound

effect on eating habits across Europe: the Protestant, Catholic,

and Radical Reformations. All of these were very important for

understanding attitudes toward food in the modern era.

 At the start of the early modern period, there was mounting a

considerable reaction to what were considered abuses of the

medieval church. Most of all, it was wealth and profl igacy, but it

was also the failure of priests to live up to their vows of chastity,