Food and health in early modern Europe (introduction)

FOOD AND HEALTH IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 1 05/05/15 10:21 AM 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 2 05/05/15 10:21 AM FOOD AND HEALTH IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE DIET, MEDICINE AND SOCIETY, 1450–1800 David Gentilcore Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 3 05/05/15 10:21 AM Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © David Gentilcore, 2016 David Gentilcore has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-2889-6 PB: 978-1-4725-3497-2 ePDF: 978-1-4725-3319-7 ePub: 978-1-4725-2842-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gentilcore, David. Food and health in early modern Europe / David Gentilcore. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-2889-6 (HB) – ISBN 978-1-4725-3497-2 (PB) – ISBN 978-1-4725-3319-7 (ePDF) – ISBN 978-1-4725-2842-1 (ePUB) 1. Health promotion–Europe. 2. Nutrition–Europe. 3. Food supply–Europe. 4. Food consumption–Europe. I. Title. RA427.8.G42 2015 613.094 – dc23 2015004354 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in India 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 4 05/05/15 10:21 AM For Fabiana 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 5 05/05/15 10:21 AM 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 6 05/05/15 10:21 AM CONTENTS List of Figures viii Introduction 1 Healthy Food: Renaissance Dietetics, c.1450–c.1650 2 Healthy Food: The Fall and Rise of Dietetics, c.1650–c.1800 3 Rich Food, Poor Food: Diet, Physiology and Social Rank 4 Regional Food: Nature and Nation in Europe 5 Holy Food: Spiritual and Bodily Health 6 Vegetable Food: The Vegetarian Option 7 New World Food: The Columbian Exchange and Its European Impact 8 Liquid Food: Drinking for Health Conclusion 1 9 27 49 75 95 115 133 157 181 Notes Bibliography Index 184 219 238 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 7 05/05/15 10:21 AM LIST OF FIGURES 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 ‘Sancho at the feast starved by his physician’. Engraving by T. Cook after W. Hogarth, late eighteenth century (Wellcome Library, London). 10 Title page of Baldassare Pisanelli’s Trattato della natura de’ cibi et del bere, 1586 (Wellcome Library, London). 13 Title page of Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helth, 1539 (Wellcome Library, London). 23 ‘Thomas Wood, the abstemious miller’. Engraving by R. Cooper after J. Ogborne, 1773 (Wellcome Library, London). 28 Santorio Santorio (Sanctorius) on his weighing chair, 1718 (Wellcome Library, London). 34 Title page of the 1704 English translation of Louis Lémery’s Traité des aliments (Wellcome Library, London). 36 George Cheyne. Mezzotint by J. Faber after Johan van Diest, 1732 (Wellcome Library, London). 41 ‘Le médecin et le malade, où le gastronome égoïste et le gastronome à la diète’ (Doctor and patient, or the self-centred gourmand and the dieting gastronome). Engraving by L.-F. Charon, late eighteenth century (Wellcome Library, London). 43 ‘Le festin royal’: banquet given by the city of Paris to celebrate the birth of the dauphin. Engraving by J.-M. Moreau after P.-L. Moreau, 1782 (Wellcome Library, London). 53 Bakers and bread types. Coloured etching, late eighteenth century (Wellcome Library, London). 59 ‘Caseus. Chese’. Woodcut from Peter Treveris, The grete herball whiche gyueth parfyt knowlege and understandyng of all maner of herbes and there gracyous vertues, 1529 (Wellcome Library, London). 67 ‘Good old Dutch beer’: tavern scene. Engraving by J. Suyderhoff after A. van Ostade, seventeenth century (Wellcome Library, London). 80 ‘O the roast beef of old England’. Engraving by C. Mosley after W. Hogarth, 1848 (Wellcome Library, London). 91 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 8 05/05/15 10:21 AM List of Figures 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 8.3 ‘La marchande de poisson’ (The fish seller). Engraving by J. Beauvarlet after A. Carré, eighteenth century (Wellcome Library, London). 98 Extreme abstinence: Apollonia Schreier of Galz, near Berne. Woodcut from Paulus Lentulus, Historia admiranda, de prodigiosa Apolloniae Schreierae, virginis in agro Bernensi, inedia … tribus narrationibus comprehensa, 1604 (Wellcome Library, London). 106 A gardener working in a fruit and vegetable garden. Coloured woodcut from Eucharius Rösslin, Kreuterbüch, von natürlichem Nutz, und gründtlichem Gebrauch der Kreutter, Bäum, Gesteud, und Früchten, fürnemlich Teutscher Lande, 1550 (Wellcome Library, London). 121 ‘Gustus. Le goust’ (The sense of taste), with the prized artichoke as centrepiece. Engraving by A. Bosse after his painting The artichoke feast, c.1630–50 (Wellcome Library, London). 123 Roger Crab, frontispiece of The English Hermite, 1655 (Wellcome Library, London). 126 ‘Fragaria. Strawberrie’, the wild strawberry. Woodcut from The Seconde Parte of William Turner’s Herball, 1562 (Wellcome Library, London). 137 ‘Capsicum’ (chilli pepper). Woodcut from Nicolás Monardes, De simplicibus medicamentis ex Occidentali India delatis, quorum in medicina usus est, 1574 (Wellcome Library, London). 139 Title page of Melchior Sebisch’s De alimentorum facultatibis, 1650, with turkey in evidence (Wellcome Library, London). 143 ‘Potato of Virginia’. Engraving from John Gerard, The Herball or, Generall Historie of Plantes, 1597 (Wellcome Library, London). 151 ‘De ebrietate’ (drunkenness). Woodcut from Johann Brettschneider’s De tuenda bona valetudine, 1550 (Wellcome Library, London). 159 Acquajolo di Napoli (Neapolitan water seller). Watercolour, artist and date unknown (Wellcome Library, Naples). 161 ‘Temperance’, represented mixing water and wine into a drinking bowl. Engraving, artist unknown, late sixteenth century (Wellcome Library, London). 165 ix 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 9 05/05/15 10:21 AM List of Figures 8.4 8.5 8.6 ‘The gin shop displayed’: three women in a gin shop divert the landlady’s attention while a match boy steals her money. Mezzotint by C. Bowles, 1765 (Wellcome Library, London). 171 Title page of Philippe Sylvestre Dufour’s Traitez nouveaux et curieux du cafe, du the et du chocolate, 1688, showing three figures: Turkish, Chinese and Aztec (Wellcome Library, London). 173 A group of women drinking coffee. Engaving from M. Duncan, Von dem Missbrauch heisser und hitziger Speisen und Geträncke, sonderlich aber des Caffes, Schockolate, und Thees, 1707 (Wellcome Library, London). 178 x 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 10 05/05/15 10:21 AM INTRODUCTION In 1786 the French surgeon Jean Baptiste Pressavin wrote, ‘there is only one way to be in perfect health, but a thousand ways to be ill’. His was a plea for preventive medicine, which, Pressavin argued, was ‘the surest and least conjectural part of medicine’.1 In addition to being effective, it was also safe. Preventive medicine, or hygiene, had none of the risks and dangers of curative medicine, where disease treatments were frequently as harmful as the illness itself. Food was at the heart of staying healthy. In the words of the Spanish doctor and theologian Álvarez de Miraval, ‘almost all of the maintenance of our health consists in the good ordering and administration of food and drink’.2 There was nothing new in this; from the time of Hippocrates, medical authors had counselled their readers on what, how and when to eat. You might think: plus ça change … After all, we seem to be concerned with the link between food, diet and health as never before. Our own obsession with ‘nutritionism’ – the focus on the nutrition different foodstuffs provide (or not), as opposed to the pleasure they might give or the social aspects related to their consumption – derives from the medicalization of diet and food intake. More or less authoritative medical and dietary advice competes with a plethora of self-help books, media coverage, internet bloggers and food packaging information for our attention, resulting in today’s ‘food anxiety’. The questions asked of French physician Laurent Joubert in the sixteenth century remain our own: ‘is this [food] good, is this bad or unhealthy? What does this do?’3 And yet, if human concern with food and health is a constant, it also has a history. Long before the discovery of nutrition by laboratory science in the nineteenth century, medical authorities offered detailed advice to an eager and anxious public. What ‘experts’ considered ‘good to eat’, and why, changed over time.4 Advice on eating for health was also subject to a range of conditioning factors, such as rank and occupation, nation and region, religion and morality, and the reaction to novelty. In the early modern period, as now, information on healthy eating was both abundant and much in demand, just as it was often contradictory. Doctors agreed: there was no perfect dietary regime. Early modern Europeans may not have had to contend with the tussle between government agencies and health organizations (on the one hand) and food industry lobbies and marketing (on the other), as we do.5 They were not faced with today’s corporate obfuscation strategies and the confusing array of roles and positions taken up by medical professionals and the media, where the constructive generation of information meets the ‘cultural production of ignorance’.6 But early modern Europeans did have to contend with the vagaries of knowledge production, beginning with differing medical opinions. On a broader scale, they had to make sense of some quite radical shifts in the medical understanding of foods and how they worked in the human body, to say nothing of how 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 1 05/05/15 10:21 AM Food and Health in Early Modern Europe these ideas engaged with changing food availability, habits and preferences. Just as now, healthy eating was socially constructed.7 Of course, it was a very different construct from our own: and understanding that construct is what this book is about. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is the first in-depth study of printed dietary advice over the entire early modern period, here taking us from the late fifteenth century to the early nineteenth. It is also the first to trace the history of European foodways as seen through the prism of this advice. It offers a doctor’s eye view of changing food and diet. Jean Céard’s suggestion, made at a conference back in 1979, that ‘a methodical study of health regimens would doubtless provide many elements for a history of food’, is still a work in progress.8 In addition to studying European regimens spanning the early modern period, I have considered works of materia medica, botany, agronomy and horticulture, which likewise abound in dietary advice. This is enriched with comments from a range of other printed sources, such as travel accounts, cookery books and literary works. The relationship between food and medicine has often been obscured, for the two tend to be seen as separate arenas. Approaching them instead as part of a continuum, as anthropologist Nancy Chen has suggested, offers insights into both food consumption and the process of health maintenance.9 Following their advice, this book is thus both a history of food practices and history of the medical discourse about that food. As a result, it is also an exploration of the interaction between the two: the relationship between evolving foodways and shifting medical advice on what to eat in order to stay healthy. I have structured this book so that the first two chapters examine the changing nature of the regimen genre in the context of wider medical trends. These are followed by a series of thematic chapters in which the dietary advice is related to changes in food perceptions, practices and preferences. The themes were chosen to reflect the main concerns of the regimens themselves: the differences between rich and poor, elites and labourers; the role of origin and nationality in diet; the benefits (or not) of a religiously inspired asceticism and fasting; the reversal in attitudes to fruit and vegetable consumption; the response to the new foods from the Americas; and the place of beverages in a healthy diet. The medical advice, opinions and preoccupations are all discussed against a backdrop of wider changes in food practices over the early modern period. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe would not have been possible without recent work by historians in a range of fields, two of which are relatively new. ‘Although historians study change, a survey of historiographical literature shows that we usually find it hard to accept something new in our own backyard’, Kyri Claflin has observed.10 This book emerges out of two separate, occasionally intersecting, sub-disciplines and historiographical traditions that were both once the focus of attempts at marginalization by mainstream historians: the social history of medicine and food history. The history of medicine has flourished like few other branches of history in the last thirty years, generating a wealth of new approaches, influenced by wider historiographical trends while also contributing to them. These include the study of learned medical discourse and the social history of medicine. The former has taken more the traditional history of ideas approach in ever new directions, where 2 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 2 05/05/15 10:21 AM Introduction medical knowledge encounters the ‘social’,11 such as in biographical studies and the reconstruction of scholarly networks. The social history of medicine, for its part, was first proclaimed to have ‘come of age’ some twenty years ago.12 Since then both directions have developed their own corpuses of primary sources, a varied secondary literature and lively debates among specialists. As these have both thrived, and despite the vaguely social orientation of both, a gap between the two – between the study of change in the theory and practice of medicine – has developed and widened, to the point that it now seems unbridgeable. One of the aims of this book is a modest, tentative contribution at bringing these two fundamental but now distinct branches of the history of medicine back into contact with one another, by exploring how the medical discourse of regimen shaped and was shaped by changing food perceptions and practices in the wider society of early modern Europe. The history of food and diet in early modern Europe, as a field of exploration, only became of interest in the 1960s, when it was the subject of study by French Annales scholars.13 Their interest lay mainly in reconstructing food production and consumption rates. The emphasis was on demographical and epidemiological crises, such as famine and dearth, and on prices and wages. Similar work was being done by British social and economic historians. The approach was largely quantitative. The ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s brought with it a move to a more qualitative approach and a study of food practices and beliefs, at different ranks and among different elements of society.14 This came together with an older history of high cuisine and gastronomy, sometimes the preserve of ‘foodies’ and local historians, to produce today’s thriving discipline.15 The earliest historical investigations into the genre of dietetics and regimen (in English) were actually carried out by a sociologist, Bryan Turner. His focus was on food discourses and social practices, in particular as suggested by the work of the physician George Cheyne (who will feature much in this book).16 One of the first historians to devote serious attention to the genre has been Andrew Wear, in a chapter of his book Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine.17 Wear wanted to redress the balance of the dominant social approach to the history of medicine by focusing on ‘knowledge’, on what people ‘knew’, without forgetting its links to practice. The study of preventive medicine was an ideal way of doing this, not least because so much history of medicine had been on the therapeutic side of things, on changing healing activities and therapies, consistent with the focus of twentieth-century medicine itself. Most of twentieth-century medicine had been a story of ‘magic bullets’ and miracle cures conquering diseases, that it must have been natural for historians studying earlier periods to see medicine in that therapeutic way. Medicine focused on curing of sick, and so the history of medicine did likewise. Just as preventive medicine took a sideline to therapeutics in the twentieth-century present, so it lay forgotten in studies of the earlier past. But with declining confidence in medicine’s all-conquering march of progress, first evident in the 1970s, we can pinpoint a corresponding resurgence in the notion and practice of preventive medicine. Journals, associations and university departments of preventive medicine were all founded in the 1970s, devoted to the prevention of disease and the promotion of health. 3 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 3 05/05/15 10:21 AM Food and Health in Early Modern Europe With the exception of an important survey of ‘vernacular medicine’ by Paul Slack, it took somewhat longer for historians of medicine to shift their gaze from therapeutics to prevention, however.18 Thus Erwin Ackerknecht’s important but unashamedly presentist study of therapeutics completely missed the revival of diet and regimen in the eighteenth century.19 And this brings us back to Wear. Wear’s chapter on preventive medicine is important because it identifies the key themes: (1) the fact that this literature was addressed to the middling and upper sections of society: it provided for choices in diet and lifestyle for those who were able to make such choices; (2) that, while there may have been great interest in the literature, few people took up the advice it contained (a debateable point, it turns out); (3) that it provided a vehicle for the circulation of canonical medical ideas while allowing people to make choices for themselves, thus bringing together learned and popular, university and domestic, medicine. The contents of this dietary advice are increasingly well known to early modern historians, thanks to a variety of studies over the past decade or so. Scholars as diverse as Fin Heikki Mikkeli, the American food historian Ken Albala, the German historian of medicine Klaus Bergdolt, the French medievalist Marilyn Nicoud and the American historian and sociologist of science Steven Shapin have explored different aspects of the genre and the advice it provided.20 They have brought to the fore the importance people in the past placed on the complexities of the ars vivendi, and the role of moderation, balance and regularity in structuring one’s daily life in order to stay healthy, as well as the social and cultural constraints affecting the responses to and implementation of these ideas. The early modern period has proved a particularly fertile ground for exploration – both in the history of medicine and the history of food – given the many changes and shifts which occurred in this time of transition and tension. In terms of its print culture the early modern period saw changes in society throughout Europe (albeit with regional variations), such as vernacularization, print dissemination and reading patterns. Vernacular languages gradually replaced Latin. Latin retained its function as a language of institutionalized learning, as a lingua franca in the European context and in the use of specialized terminology, but the vernaculars were increasingly used for the communication of knowledge. Print technology made texts more widely available in multiple copies and accessible to an ever more heterogeneous public, especially of non-professional readers. This went hand in hand with increasing literacy rates, as well as the participation of the semi-literate in knowledge exchange. Useful texts like regimens were frequently read aloud. Publishers sought to meet the demands of a growing middle class of merchants, lawyers and other middling groups, even (occasionally) women, in particular during the second half of our period. The academic outlook changed significantly, from the recovery of classical civilization that characterized the humanist movement to the ideology of natural knowledge, based on direct observation, investigation and experimentation. This was also a time of changing world views: on a global scale, brought on by contacts with non-Europeans and new worlds, and the challenges these brought about, and on a miniscule scale, due to new technical instruments like the microscope. 4 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 4 05/05/15 10:21 AM Introduction There were also changes in medicine, in terms of knowledge and practice. Humours and complexions, differing from person to person, gave way to a universal physiology. Not only did the place of preventive medicine shift vis à vis curative medicine, but the content and stress of preventive medicine changed. The Renaissance ‘hot regimen’ of abundant warm meals, exercise and hot baths was replaced by a ‘cool regimen’ of light meals, fresh air and cold baths in the eighteenth century.21 Notions surrounding the preservation of health went back to the ancient idea of ‘hygiene’. Rather than being reduced to simple cleanliness, hygiene – from the Greek hygeia, or health – was the belief that staying healthy had a lot to do with one’s way of life. Of all different facets of medical education, preventive hygiene was the one most open to the non-medical public. As John Sinclair put it in the introduction to his massive survey of the genre, the ‘preservation of health and the prevention of disease, is a kind of neutral ground, between the several branches of medicine, and the common sense and daily observation of well informed men, and of course is open to everyone’.22 Before health became a goal for concerted social action, in the nineteenth century, it was a concern of individuals. What typifies the relationship between people and health during the early modern period was a concern for their own individual health. It was literally axiomatic: ‘Every man is a fool or a physician, to himself at least’. This saying had its origins in the Annals of Tacitus, who said that by the age thirty every man ought to know what was best and worst for his own constitution.23 It was reiterated throughout the early modern period whenever a medical author wanted to stress the importance of self-regulation. The forms that this personal interest in health took varied widely from person to person and over time, of course, but a commitment to the maintenance of one’s own health and the treatment of disease remained. There is ample historical evidence of both the desire to learn about and follow such advice, just as there is evidence of a resistance to the detailed minutiae of it. On the one hand, we have growing evidence of a ‘culture of prevention’, as Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey have recently put it.24 Although their focus is on late Renaissance Italy, the notion can be applied to the entire early modern period, even considering the vagaries in shifting medical fashions and preferences. Not that we should expect early modern patients to be the willing and passive recipients of medical advice. As Alisha Rankin has recently shown, individually tailored dietary advice could be the subject of intense negotiation and, indeed, rejection.25 There is also evidence of increasing dissatisfaction in learned circles with the fundamental nature of dietary advice: ‘an exact ordering of our life and diet … such progidy, tediousness, and inconvenience’, in the words of Francis Bacon, writing in the early seventeenth century.26 But as if to answer Bacon’s concerns, when there was a renewal of the regimen genre in the mid-eighteenth century, it had shed its Renaissance exactness and tedium, replaced by more generalized and simplified rules of life, as we shall see. The demand for information and guidance was certainly there and medical authors rushed in to satisfy it. Sinclair listed 1,878 titles, overwhelmingly for the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.27 Admittedly, it is an eccentric and selective list, including numerous titles which are not regimens at all – but it provides a good 5 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 5 05/05/15 10:21 AM Food and Health in Early Modern Europe indication of the sheer scale of the genre at a Europe-wide level. What Nancy Siraisi has said with respect to a fairly early title, Girolamo Cardano’s De sanitate tuenda (On the maintenance of health), is pertinent to the genre as a whole: ‘[Cardano’s] writings on nourishment and the body cross and re-cross – in both genre and content – the boundaries between academic medicine and the culture of cities and courts, between natural history and medicine, between medicine and moral or political philosophy, between the care of others and the examination of the self ’.28 From the sixteenth century medical authors increasingly made their regimens and health guides accessible by writing in the vernacular. They developed enticing titles like ‘haven of health’, ‘medicinal anchor’, ‘health’s improvement’ and ‘portrait of health’ – even if the bulk had more prosaic titles along the lines of ‘preservation of health’. Publishers contributed to their success by printing them in inexpensive octavo (or smaller) formats. Thomas Moulton’s Mirror or Glass of Health, which went through at least seventeen editions between 1530 and 1580, was as cheap as any book on the English market, at 2d or 3d.29 Not only were there multiple editions of the more successful regimens, but these could long outlast the time of their printing. Castore Durante’s Il tesoro della sanità, first published in Rome in 1586, went through an extraordinary thirty-four editions in Italy over the next ninety-three years (the last being in 1679).30 A copy of the English translation, printed in 1686, was inscribed by a William Davis in 1798.31 This longevity was possible because the notion of regimen and the literary genre associated with it held sway throughout the early modern period, whether ‘as a holistic metaphysical paradigm or a practical set of rules’.32 However, the most successful and long-lived of all, still regularly reprinted, was not written by a physician at all and for the simple nature of its advice constitutes almost a sort of non-regimen: Alvise Cornaro’s Della vita sobria (1558). In English alone, ‘on the sober life’ went through twenty-five editions between 1634 and 1777 and a further thirty over the next 55 years – not to mention a ‘ten cent pocket series’ edition published in Girard, Kansas, in 1918, which brings us back to the popularizing spirit of many of these titles.33 But was the pursuit of health and physical well-being truly open to everyone, as Sinclair claimed? It was certainly far from being ‘neutral’ and ‘common sense’, Sinclair’s other descriptors. An interest in the intricacies of such advice, to say nothing of the wherewithal to put it into practice, presumed a degree of wealth, leisure and education. Before health became an essential human right, at least as an ideal, it was recognized as a preserve of the elites: a luxury for those spared the necessity of long hours of toil, poor living conditions and little choice in matters of food consumption. Only the well-off and the educated had the luxury of worrying about what they ate and drank; the poor simply worried about staving off hunger. As a result, our authors addressed a limited readership (unlike today’s nutritionists and health educationalists who aim to reach a much broader public). The beneficiaries, to judge from the book titles and dedications, were variously, princes, magistrates and scholars. They were the elites, leisured and urban. During the eighteenth century this category swelled to include the expanding bourgeoisie. That said, access to the information contained in these regimens was not just the preserve of those who could read and afford books. Just as one book could pass through many hands, so 6 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 6 05/05/15 10:21 AM Introduction its contents could also be transmitted orally. In a world where books were frequently read aloud, and where literacy and illiteracy overlapped, information circulated widely. The extent to which these supposedly popular medical books were targeted at the ‘popular classes’ remains a matter for speculation. The rural population is mentioned often, but only as a foil for the urban elites (such as ‘this foodstuff is suitable only for peasants’). The first, and perhaps only, regimen directed at ‘country-dwellers’ was published late in the eighteenth century, in the context of an Enlightenment concern with the health of the lower orders.34 By this time, the poor were becoming the targets of well-intended efforts by the elites, the objects of medical reforms, but still did not feature as subjects in health regimens. I have made especial effort in this book to cover the full chronology of the early modern period, charting the many significant changes, as well as the continuities. I have also tried to do justice to the ‘Europe’ of the title, ranging from Portugal to Poland and Scotland to Sicily. But if French, Italian and English material tends to predominate, this is only in part the result of the limits of my linguistic abilities; it also reflects both the culinary importance of, first, Italy and then France during the period, as well as the emerging historiography of the field of food history. Finally, a word on what Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is not. This is not a book on the role of dietary recommendations as a part of medical therapeutics, which would (and should) require a book of its own. Thus I have not done justice to manuscript regimens penned for specific people; in fact, I have had to ignore manuscript altogether in favour of print. Nor does this book explore works recommended for special categories of people, such as children or the elderly.35 For our medical authors writing on how to preserve health only male adults corresponded to the healthy ideal – and the regimens were written to help them stay that way. This also explains why there is no thematic chapter on food and gender, as one might have expected, given the importance of the subject. Dietary advice was not written with women in mind; indeed, the first regimen directed at women was only written at the end of our period, as we shall see. That said, there is (of course) a gendering of many of the topics explored in the book, and this has been discussed where pertinent. Acknowledgements The writing of this book was made possible by a semester’s teaching buy-out courtesy of the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Leicester, in 2012, for which I would like to thank the Centre’s director, Professor Steve King, and a semester of university study leave, in 2014, for which I would like to thank the University of Leicester. Colleagues across Europe and North America have generously shared their work and provided valuable advice and suggestions: Ken Albala (University of the Pacific, CA), Melissa Calaresu (University of Cambridge), Brian Cowan (McGill University), Trudy Eden (University of Northern Iowa), Violaine Giacomotto-Charra (Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux), Elizabeth Hurren (University of Leicester), Michael LaCombe (Adelphi University, NY), Paul Lloyd (University of Leicester), Philippe 7 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 7 05/05/15 10:21 AM Food and Health in Early Modern Europe Meyzie (Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux), Heikki Mikkeli (Finnish Academy of Science and Letters), William O’Reilly (University of Cambridge), Steven Shapin (Harvard University), Peter Scholliers (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Emma Spary (University of Cambridge) and Irma Taavitsainen (University of Helsinki). I am also grateful to the staff at Bloomsbury, in particular Rhodri Mogford and Emma Goode, for expertly guiding this book through the editorial process. In this strange new e-world in which we live (for better or for worse), the primary resources for this book are almost all available electronically, many as a result of excellent digitalizations done in the last few years. Thankfully, for my purposes, the David Wilson Library at the University of Leicester has subscriptions to both Early English Books online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), which together provide access to all works published in English for the course of the early modern period; all the rest are freely available courtesy of sites such as ‘Gallica’ (Bibliothèque Nationale de France), the Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB), ‘Medic@’ (BIU Santé, Paris), the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel Cervantes and, of course, Google. David Gentilcore, Leicester, September 2014 8 9781472534972_txt_final.indd 8 05/05/15 10:21 AM