Savoring Power, Consuming the Times, livre ebook

Pina Palma’s Savoring Power, Consuming the Times: The Metaphors of Food in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature is an innovative look at the writings of five important Italian authors—Boccaccio’s Decameron, Pulci’s Morgante, Boiardo’s Innamorato, Ariosto’s Furioso, and Aretino’s Ragionamento. Through the prism of gastronomy, Palma examines these key works in the Western literary canon, bringing into focus how their authors use food and gastronomy as a means to critique the social, political, theological, philosophical, and cultural beliefs that constitute the fabric of the society in which they live.

Palma begins with the anthropological principle that food represents the universal transformation of nature into culture and that it functions as a language that distinguishes every society and its culture from others. This suggests that food—its preparation, presentation, and consumption—is more than merely a source of nourishment. Rather, Palma argues, foodstuffs function as ethical and aesthetic instruments through which the literary hero’s virtues and flaws, achievements and failures, can be gauged. Food also serves as a means to maintain, as well as to negotiate, power, social hierarchy, and relationships between the powerful and the powerless. Touching on three centuries that were pivotal for Italian culture, literature, and history, as well as three literary genres, Palma’s analysis connects the descriptions and references to food found in these works with the wider culture of Italy in the late medieval and early modern period.

The prominent place that food occupies in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron encapsulates the essence of two mutually exclusive worlds: the world of the powerful, who have access to it, and the world of the powerless, who do not. In the representation of the stronger and the weaker, of the empowered and the disempowered, created on the basis of those who have food and those who do not, there persists the systematic reinforcement of the mechanisms that accentuate social disparity.

Subsumed and determined by both the quality and the quantity of food consumed, this social stratification constructs a system of political legitimacy. Such a structure quite naturally dovetails with two intrinsically linked discourses. The first is the human appetite for material possessions; the second is the human desire for sexual gratification.

In the Republic Plato explains social inequality and injustice as the desire of powerful people to subjugate and rule over weaker ones in order to extract personal benefits. While on the one hand this failing of values leads to self-legitimization, on the other it results in self-indulgence. In book 9 the philosopher includes sexual pleasures among the impetuous desires that self-indulgence arbitrarily pursues.

It appears, then, that rooted in the notion of power and control that an individual can exert over others, both material possessions and sexual gratifications map out the terrain of a social structure. This configuration has as its trademark the ability of the stronger to satisfy material needs, as well as physical desires, at the expense of the weaker.

Beyond this, the images of food that spice the Decameron under- score Boccaccio’s idea that sating hunger implies something more profound if less tangible than satisfying a physical need. For Boccaccio food exemplifies, among other things, knowledge. This belief is rooted in chapter 1 of the Old Testament book of Genesis. As a result, he sees the distinction between spiritual and sensual appetites as a blurred one.

Yet he understands that society insists on demarcating those deceptive boundaries on which the conflict between moral absolutes and social ideals deepens. He also recognizes the dehumanizing, and at times tragic, compromises people make in the name of stultifying social codes.

To demonstrate this point and chip away at old illusions that undermine the possibility of change, he incisively reconstitutes the elements that illustrate the error of that argument. By framing and supporting his discourse with wit and bold imagination, through food Boccaccio makes a passionate argument against social intolerance, religious fanaticism, and cultural prejudice. In his view, these issues make for a potent brew that destabilizes society from within because by force they narrow the road to social harmony. This situation unleashes the crises of values.

Boccaccio’s discourse on the central role the senses play in human relations begins where the exegetical tradition left off. According to this tradition, the desire for physical fulfillment identifies man more closely with Adam who, in his inability to suppress his appetite, yields instead to the instinct of hunger and, consequently, of the flesh.

For patristic commentators and medieval exegetes alike, Adam’s act exemplifies the transition from desire for food to carnal desire. In their view, this natural shift occurs because both desires are triggered by instinctive and uncontrollable forces. More specifically, in this tradition concupiscible appetites—the pursuit of external objects—are closely linked to the body and to the senses. Yet Boccaccio considers them autonomous from the will.

By emphasizing the instinctive nature of the senses, this inter- pretation privileges the role they play with respect to human biological development. Because of this, biblical commentators and theologians alike recognized the intrinsically powerful nature of appetites. In their views, appetites yoked humanity to the impulsiveness of desires. Predictably, this problematic truth uncovered a series of thornier questions. If humanity needs to satisfy its desires for self-preservation, how can they be restrained and kept in check? How can willpower rein in natural impulses? In dealing with these issues patristic and exegetical traditions concurred. By relying on the authority of the texts, they both demonstrated that appetites most frequently distort human judg- ment. And this fact, according to them, diminished humanity’s potential capacity for self-control.

(excerpted from Chapter 1)

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Taste and See the Power of Food

1. The Language of Food in Boccaccio’s Decameron

2. Of Frogs, Giants, and the Court: Pulci’s Morgante

3. Banquets of Power: Boiardo’s Innamorato and the Politics of Gastronomy

4. Meals, Transformations, and the Belly of History: Ariosto’s Furioso

5. Courtesans and Figs, Art and Nature in Aretino’s Ragionamento

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index