Feeding inequalities: the role of economic inequalities and the urban market in late medieval food security. The case of fourteenth-century Ghent

Although the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) revised their theoretical model of food security for over two decades ago, historians have been slow in adopting these new insights to study pre-modern societies. Showcasing the potential of the holistic approach proposed by the FAO, this paper analyses the evolution of food security in the calamitous fourteenth century in Ghent, one the most populated cities at that time. In the long-term, access to food seem to have bettered during the second half of the century thanks to increased wages, wealth and investments into farmland. While these gains can partly be linked to demographic evolutions, we found no evidence of an often-hypothesized Malthusian ceiling before the Black Death.

LOOK BUT DO NOT TOUCH: PERFECT WOMEN'S EATING BEHAVIOUR IN THE NARRATIVES AND IMAGERY OF THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

Food in the medieval culture functioned not only as everyday essential, but also as a tool for symbolic communication and marker of social or gender identity. From the 13th century onwards, one can grasp an exponential growth in number of various manuals, which informed their reader how one should eat healthy and courteously. These books of manners were written in prose and rhymes, in Latin and vernacular languages and were widely spread amongst medieval elite. Texts were supplemented with symbolic and allegorical illuminations with the scenes with biblical or royal banquets, which should be treated as important sources on their own. Thus, this paper aims at revealing the place that late medieval culture reserved for women in the domain of food and its consumption. Based on the rich narrative and visual evidence, I shall highlight the main elements of the medieval food culture; reveal what was considered as women's socially acceptable behaviour during the banquets and how the social norms impacted the visual culture of banqueting. Late medieval education for women envisaged a quite particular eating behaviour. A woman had to control the needs of her body much more strictly than a man had to, to keep the fast, to pray and to go to the masses at expense of taking food. Once married she had to deprive herself of delicacies, which could be only consumed with her husband. She could not renounce taking food with her husband, what should be considered as a privilege and not as a duty. Visual culture only supported the ideal shaped in the narratives. A woman involved in drinking wine at the table became an allegory of intemperance. This image was contrasted with the image of a noble woman that was excluded from the communicative space of a banquet, who kept her eyes down and her arms on her knees. A woman so temperate that she ignores the food and drinks set for her on the table. Therefore, eating behaviour became another manifestation for women's chastity and humbleness, which were considered essential virtues in late medieval courtly literature.

“ACCORDING TO THE BROTHERHOODS’ CUSTOM” BANQUETS OF KYIV CRAFTSMEN OF THE SECOND HALF OF XVIII CENTURY

Nutrition has always been an important element of the subculture of different social communities of Early Modern Europe. Holiday feasts of craftsmen corporations in the cities performed symbolic functions, separating the socio-professional community from the rest of society, and at the same time demonstrated its status, wealth, prestige. The joint banquets of craftsmen on the occasion of church holidays and corporate events strengthened group identity, saved it from blurring, restrained the isolation and individualization of its members. The several-day banquets held after the church liturgies were accompanied by music and hearty feasts, gifts to the clergy patrons of the craft and magistrate officials, and demonstrated the material power of the craft brotherhood and the respectful social status of its members. The books of Kyiv craft corporations allow to reconstruct the middle-class townsfolk cuisine of the middle - second half of the 18th century. According to the expenditure registers contained in them, it is evident that the townsfolk gastronomic tradition retained all the features inherent in the late medieval food system. It was dominated by the meals and drinks that formed the basis of nutrition for the high and the middle-class: large amounts of meat, fresh and salted fish, thick crunchy soups and cereals, white bread, vodka (horilka), mead and beer. The culinary culture of craftsmen was no stranger to imitation of higher gastronomic patterns and habits. In early modern Kyiv, the monastic world and the everyday culture of the church hierarchs acted as a model for imitation. This is where the artisans borrowed their taste for the use of tea, caviar and sturgeon. Another model to follow was the merchants, whose table was rich in various spices, imported alcohol, vegetables, fruits and sweets. Less significant, but noticeable, was the influence of the household fashion of the Cossack officials (starshyna) and the LittleRussian nobility (shliakhta): wildfowl, lavish local and imported liquers (vodka) appeared on the townspeople's tables. For all its ostentatious personality and efforts to imitate the cuisine of the upper classes, the food style of the craftsmen was far from cosmopolitanism. In the kitchen of Kyivites we will not see manifestations of culinary fashion of the XVIII century. The periphery of Kyiv's economic and administrative status made the food of its inhabitants quite typical of the rest of the country, having preserved the noticeable features of the food structure that had been developed in the previous XVII century. In the case of craft corporate records, we can see literally microscopic changes - the appearance of cheap spices, sugars, inexpensive imported wines in the diet of burghers, which were markers of sluggish economic changes

Food Ethics in the Middle Ages

This chapter looks at what kind of foods medieval people ate and what impact on their habits religion had. It then looks closer at what they said about animals as food, but also looks at perhaps the most important aspect of medieval food ethics, namely, the moral aspect of eating itself. This is foremost governed by the virtue of fasting and the vice, or even deadly sin, of gluttony.