Knowledge of Middle English helpful but not necessary. Requirements include a midterm exam, a final exam, and two short essays. Short performances are optional and will reduce the writing requirement. Knowledge of Middle English is helpful but not necessary. Junior level course, open to graduate students.
Graduates write a longer final paper, though all other requirements are the same.
Topics include food, beverage, and drug production, distribution, preparation, serving, ingestion, and assimilation. Expanded description Anthropologists have long recognized that ingestion generates complex and powerful cultural meanings and performances. The course will begin by examining the religious significance of food, then expand its focus to consider a wide range of topics, such as agriculture, hunting, the spice trade, brewing and fermenting, tavern culture, cooking, tableware, table manners, herbal medicine, cannibalism, poisons, deliberate and accidental use of hallucinogens, breast-feeding, and sumptuary legislation. More theoretical works such as Jack Goody's Cooking, Cuisine, and Class will raise interpretive and methodological questions, and general studies, such as Reay Tannahill's Food in History , Peter Clark's The English Ale House , and Louis Marin's Food for Thought will furnish useful contexts for analysis. The class will also focus on works of literature and art in which eating, drinking, and drug-ingestion feature prominently, including books of hours, illustrated herbals, poems, and plays.