Antonio Latini’s “The Modern Steward, or The Art of Preparing Banquets Well”

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Great Book ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Food Material ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health Accounts ◽  
The City

Latini’s masterpiece of Baroque cooking and household management was the first book to publish recipes using tomatoes and chilli peppers. This first complete English translation presents the text with contextual introduction and notes to aid the reader’s understanding. The Modern Steward was published in Naples in 1692-94, when the city was a major cultural centre. It includes a wealth of recipes, plus discussions of the kitchen and serving staff, setting the table, menus, protocol, entertainment, and wines. There are also sections on health, accounts of specific banquets, and even a description of an eruption of Vesuvius. It is the last great book of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque cooking tradition. Latini was also interested in local ingredients and customs, and open to new French trends. The book will interest historians of early modern Italy, food, material culture, and the social and cultural life of the European elites, as well as connoisseurs of fine dining, and cooks.

Women, Food, and Diet in the Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa A. Vaughan
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Great Book ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Food Material ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health Accounts ◽  
The City

Latini’s masterpiece of Baroque cooking and household management was the first book to publish recipes using tomatoes and chilli peppers. This first complete English translation presents the text with contextual introduction and notes to aid the reader’s understanding. The Modern Steward was published in Naples in 1692-94, when the city was a major cultural centre. It includes a wealth of recipes, plus discussions of the kitchen and serving staff, setting the table, menus, protocol, entertainment, and wines. There are also sections on health, accounts of specific banquets, and even a description of an eruption of Vesuvius. It is the last great book of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque cooking tradition. Latini was also interested in local ingredients and customs, and open to new French trends. The book will interest historians of early modern Italy, food, material culture, and the social and cultural life of the European elites, as well as connoisseurs of fine dining, and cooks.

Coda: Repositioning Early Modern Prague on the Global Stage

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The City

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different to an older field of “Rudolfine studies.” The researchers here do not focus on the emperor's court but use it as context. It is tangential to their main focal points—on Jewish communities, religious change, and the exchange of scientific and musical knowledge—and these are first and foremost historians not of Prague but of social and cultural history, music, art, material culture, and religion. This indicates a marked shift from the historiography. For this generation of scholars, Prague is not only a city that is home to a fascinating and intriguing art historical moment but is also a city of early modern international connections. It provides a unique context for understanding communities, everyday experiences, religion, and culture in early modern Europe—a multilingual, multiconfessional, and multicultural mixing pot whose composition changed dramatically across the early modern period. Rudolf's court was certainly a catalyst for these crossings and encounters, but they did not fade away after his death in 1612, nor were they limited to the confines of the castle above the city.

Street “Luxuries”

2020 ◽  
pp. 413-433
Author(s):  
Melissa Calaresu
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fast Food ◽  
Food Choices ◽  
Social Distinction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nutritional Needs ◽  
Early Modern Rome ◽  
The City

The history of eating on the street presents particular challenges as the extant material culture is especially limited. This chapter reveals the variety of food sold on the streets of early modern Rome through the study of a series of images of street sellers printed in the late sixteenth century in response to the growing ethnographic interest of travelers to the city. This chapter turns on its head what was considered a luxury in the early modern economy as these images suggest the range of foodstuffs which cannot be simply understood as daily necessities to meet the basic nutritional needs of the city’s inhabitants such as raw cooking materials or hot fast food. Instead, these images suggest that labor-saving products such as hulled rice or even products such as sweetmeats, which were normally associated with the work of the steward of an aristocratic house and the elite “dressing” of the table, were being sold on the streets. Therefore, despite the inherent ephemerality of the act of selling and eating food and the lack of surviving material culture, these images reveal the complexity of determining social distinction through food choices in early modern Rome.

Tomb cult and the ‘Greek renaissance’: the past in the present in the 8th century BC

Antiquity ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (237) ◽  
pp. 750-761 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Morris
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Greek City ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Complexity ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
City State

Greek society was changing rapidly in the 8th century BC. The archaeological record reveals population growth, increasing political complexity, artistic experiments and a strong interest in the past. Because these processes resemble those at work in early modern Italy, the period has often been referred to as the ‘Greek renaissance’ (e.g. Ure 1922; Hägg 1983a; cf. Burke 1986). This paper is about the glorification of the past in the 8th century, and its relationship to the rise of the polis, the Greek city state. I concentrate on one particular phenomenon, the spread of cults at tombs dating to the Mycenaean period (c. 1600-1200 BC). I argue that the common renaissance analogy has limited value, and that the 8thcentury Greeks created a past narrowly focussed on the persons of powerful ancient beings, from whom they could draw authority in the social upheavals which came about as the loose, aristocratic societies of the ‘Dark Age’ (c. 1200-750 BC) were challenged. Tomb cults go back at least to 950 BC, but after 750 they were redefined and used as a source of power in new ways. I have adapted my subtitle from Maurice Bloch’s well-known paper ‘The past and the present in the present’ (1977), where he argues that rituals bring the past into the present to form a system of cognition mystifying nature and preserving the social order. The argument here is slightly different. I stress the variety of the cults and the range of meanings they must have had, making their recipients highly ambiguous figures. The same cults could simultaneously evoke the new, relatively egalitarian ideology of the polis and the older ideals of heroic aristocrats who protected the grateful and defenceless lower orders, while standing far above them. Bloch's paper borrowed Malinowski’s idea of culture as a ‘long conversation’; developing the analogy, I look at the multiple meanings which any statement in such a conversation may have for the different actors.

Law and Architecture: The Pollution Crisis in the Italian Ghetto

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-284
Author(s):  
David Malkiel
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractMuch has been written about the establishment of ghettos in Italy and some attention has been paid to social structures and cultural forms that emerged during the ghetto period, but there is a great deal more to be learned about how living in a ghetto affected the Jewish family, society and culture. The present study sheds light on the ghetto’s physical presence, specifically on the impact on religious life of the architecture and urban development of this uniquely Jewish space.Rabbinic responsa published in the Pahad Yitzhak, an encyclopedia of Jewish law published by Isaac Lampronti of Ferrara in the mid-eighteenth century, represent an eruption of anxiety, expressed in a flurry of intense literary activity, about the ostensible impossibility of escaping “tent pollution,” contracted by anyone present under the same roof as someone deceased. The pollution seemed inescapable because the architecture and urban layout seemed to allow for it to pass from building to building across the entire ghetto. The tent pollution material is thus an instance of the interplay of architecture, urban development and Jewish law.Tent pollution particularly exercised the Jews of early modern Italy. Jews living both before and after the age of the Italian ghetto evinced virtually no interest in the tent pollution problems posed by urban development. There is a smattering of writing on the subject from northern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, which only underscores that this was a particularly Italian problem.The present study spotlights this moment in early modern Jewish life, which stands out for the agitation it aroused among Italy’s Jews, and explores its implications for the social and cultural concerns of Jews in the early modern era. Lampronti’s encyclopedia affords us entrée, serving as a kind of seismograph to draw attention to areas which were the focus of heightened concern and activity in his historical setting.

Benedict XIV’s donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze of Bologna (1751) Origins and history

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuele Tacconi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Amazon Basin ◽  
New World ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Jesuit Missions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jesuit Missionary ◽  
The City

Abstract In 1751 Pope Benedict XIV made a donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze in Bologna, a scientific academy located in the city of his birth. This article reconstructs the history of this group of objects back to its origins in the Jesuit missions of the upper Amazon basin, by presenting and examining new documentary evidence. The encounter between a Jesuit missionary and Pope Benedict XIV is analysed in the context of the early modern reception of the New World and its peoples in Catholic Europe. Finally, an overview is presented of the items in this collection, which represent some of the scarcest and oldest known examples of native material culture from the region.

When is a Room a Music Room? Sounds, Spaces, and Objects in Non-courtly Italian Interiors

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
FLORA DENNIS
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Musical Sound ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Evidence

Although never an easy feat, tracing the connections between sounds, spaces and objects becomes easier the higher up the social scale one goes in the Early Modern period. The survival of documentary and material evidence helps to identify musical repertories that were known to have been performed in specific spaces on particular instruments. Given the lack of comparative sources at lower social levels, is it possible to establish relationships between these three elements in non-courtly contexts? This chapter considers non-courtly ‘music-rooms’, addressing how practical material and conceptual motivations forged links between music and domestic space in this period. It goes on to examine broader, perhaps unexpected, connections between musical sound and the material culture of the Early Modern domestic interior.

AFTER WEINBERG. BOOK REVIEW: THE RECEPTION OF ARISTOTLE’S POETICS IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE AND BEYOND. NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICISM / ED. BY BRAZEAU B.

2021 ◽  
pp. 23-52
Author(s):  
Evgeniia Lozinskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Book History ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
New Directions ◽  
History Of

The book written by an international team of scholars and edited by B. Brazeau explores literary criticism and reception of Aristotle's «Poetics» in early modern Italy. Revisiting the «intellectual history» of Renaissance poetic studies written by Bernard Weinberg in 1960-s, the contributors find its own place whithin the 2000-years long tradition of translations, commentaries and polemic treatises. The authors apply new methods from book history, translation studies, history of emotions and classical reception to early modern Italian texts, placing them in dialogue with 20th-century literary theory, and thus map out avenues for future study.

Some Reflections on the Pre-Industrial City

Urban History ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 13-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
The Social ◽  
Tribal Societies ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
The City

In the last few years, a new word has gained popularity among historians: ‘pre-industrial’. Specialists in the social and economic history of Europe before 1800 have become increasingly aware that the object of their studies is simply one case among others of what sociologists call ‘traditional society’, and that it is easier to understand traditional or pre-industrial Europe if it is compared and contrasted with other societies of this type. Thus Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane have illuminated English witchcraft by making comparisons with witchcraft in African tribal societies, while Frédéric Mauro and Witold Kula, among others, have compared the economies of early modern Europe with those of the developing countries today. Even Richard Cobb, no great friend to the social sciences, has recorded that he came to understand eighteenth-century Paris better after visiting contemporary Calcutta. In fact, the city is an obvious and splendidly tangible unit of comparison, and it is not surprising that the term ‘pre-industrial city’ is passing into general use.

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