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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An incredible tour of hungry Europe -- Hell, really, November 21, 1997
This review is from: Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Paperback)
This scholarly and amazing book ranges through pre-modern Southern Europe, focussing not on aristocrats but rather on ordinary folk: peasants, city-dwellers, and the many beggars and poor people of Italy and to a lesser degree, France. Camporesi posits a startling theory: Europeans lived in various ongoing states of "collective vertigo," hallucination and illness brought on by starvation or the eating of tainted foodstuffs, commonplace at that time. This state of affairs, Camporesi asserts, was promoted and exacerbated by various medical, social, and religious establishments.(The medical establishment of Bologna, for example, codified the foods 'medically' appropriate for rich and poor, resulting in additional loss of life.) Hunger was the central organizing principle in the lives of so many. The notorious famine years were times of acute rather than chronic starvation -- and "incredible and repugnant substances" were often eaten, often with fatal results. It's all here : "Terrible noises, worms, vermin, ghosts and goblins," opiates, visions, toxic brews, exorisms, violence, and always death and more death. Christianity's scant words of encouragement are quoted, too. This study is replete with evidence from literature, political history, the history of medicine and religion, and contemporary accounts. It's well-organized and elegantly presented. No illustrations, but the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch would work well. A great book.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worth Your Dough, November 7, 2008
This review is from: Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Paperback)
This is a fascinating work. You don't see history like this written in the Anglo-American world, where there is a focus on reason, progress, sobriety, etc. Serious research into "material life" has only recently emerged as a source of interest to scholars in the English speaking world; it's been a staple elsewhere for decades. Even where Anglo-American scholarship has addressed the theme there is a tendency to "play it safe" and discuss aspects of life that would seem ordinary to a contemporary reader. So in other words nothing about pharmacology, intoxication, irrationality, and the like.
This work is the flip side. It's a look at the dark, dreary, desperate lives of ordinary folks, where lives were still in close contact with the earth and knowledge of plants circulated in informal channels "on the ground." When life was nasty, brutal, and short you didn't mind going through it in an often hazy drug-induced dream-like state.
It is true the chapters seem more episodic, and thematic, than part of a linear argument building in support of some larger thesis or observation. It is also true that the work is predominantly about Italy, with only occasional references to other countries. Nor is the focus of the work always about grains and breads. For example, there are digressions into how hunger led to cannibalism. A better title might have been "Hungry in Southern Europe." As someone who studies enthnopharmacology the references to various plants are a bit scattered and not very systematic. Many of the references are to sources published only in Italian so unless you are versed in Italian you are pretty much out of luck when it comes to tracking the documentation [the translater does, however, helpfully indicate when an English translation of a source is available].
Still, this work is worth the investment. Four stars.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not inedible, but not satisfying either, August 16, 2008
This review is from: Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Paperback)
I read this book because I was intrigued by the thesis that adulteration of food in Early Modern Europe might be responsible for some of the beliefs of the time. This idea, though, is taken up only a couple of times in the book and does not seem to be the book's main thesis at all. In fact, I was unable to determine what the thesis was. It seems to be kind of a critique of the focus of scholarship on Renaissance and Early Modern Italy on bourgeois cultural products to the neglect of the culture of the peasants and tradespeople. He does give some examples of ditties and popular songs of the period(s) and somewhat sarcastically comments on their formal structure, and I personally enjoyed his occasional browbeating of those who look back with fondness on the ancien regime.
I am not sure how much of it is due to the translation and how much was deliberate on the author's part, but the writing often has a somewhat hallucinatory style due to the piling up of rather nightmarish images. For example, from p. 123: "The masses of the pre-industrial era--suffering from protein and vitamin deficiencies, poorly protected from the attacks of infectious diseases by precarious and inadequate diets, tormented by shingles (particularly widespread in the areas of rye consumption), subjected to sudden attacks of convulsions and epilepsy, the deliria of fevers, the festering of wounds, ulcers which ate away at the tissues, unrelenting gangrene and disgusting scrofula, the crazed patterns of 'St Vitus's dance' and other choreographic epidemics, and the constant nightmare of worms and choleric diarrhoea--also suffered the harmful effects of 'ignoble' breads, the toxic deliria of impure flour mixtures, and the stunning, demented stupidity and dullness of food poisoning." This sentence is typical.
I was surprised by the author's disdain for famine breads that included such ingredients as acorn, lupine, or chestnut flour. Neither had he anything good to say about breads made from beans or pulses, but I was not sure if these ingredients were actually cooked before being incorporated into the bread or were just ground up raw and put in the bread before it was baked, which would indeed make them indigestible. He did not say.
Although the book is put forward as focusing on Europe, it actually concentrates almost exclusively on Italy and in particular on Bologna. Almost all of the references are to Italian works.
The preface to this book argues that the rise of industrial capitalism brought an end to famine in Europe, and states: "The nineteenth century, the century of industrialization, was a century of poverty, but it was not a century of mass famine." I think the one million Irish that died during the potato famine of the 1840s disprove that notion.
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