Mediterranean Transhumance
The wandering life of the sailor is sometimes described as a nomadic
existence, but it is more akin to that form of Mediterranean pastoral life
hardly seen these days, transhumance: the movement of shepherds and their herds
from winter grazing plains to summer pastures in the hills and back again...
The Meaning of Camporesi
The fanciful world of food that the characters in Cervantes's novel
dreamed about was just that– a dream...
Bundles of Fennel and Stalks of Sorghum
In the Middle Ages, agrarian cults of benandanti, or good witches,
fought nocturnal battles with evil witches...
Summer in the Mediterranean
Winter is cold in the Mediterranean and in the Middle Ages filling the
cellars and granaries meant working in haste through a succession of harvests:
wheat in June, figs in August, grapes in September, olives in the fall...
Don Quixote and the Wedding Feast of Camacho
As the French historian Fernand Braudel noted, feasts and banquets play a
very small role in Mediterranean literature with the salient exception of the
food of dreams--for example, as in Cervantes' Don Quixote or Rabelais's
Gargantua and Pantagruel...
Christmas in the Mediterranean
In a very real sense the celebration of Christ’s mass, the feast day
celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ on December 25 in Western Christian
churches, is the quintessential Mediterranean holiday, albeit second to Easter
in importance...
The Importance of the Butcher in the 14th Century Mediterranean
The contacts between the Arab Levant and the Christian Mediterranean
increased not only because of the Crusades that began in the late eleventh
century but also because of mercantile interests...
The Story of the Botticelli Painting on the Cover of A Mediterranean Feast
The painting on the book cover of A Mediterranean Feast is the fourth of four panels known as
the Pucci panels, painted by Sandro Botticelli (c...
Food of Dreams
Mediterranean people lived in a chronic state of malnourishment under a
threatening cloud of starvation...
Food for the Rich, Food for the Poor in Medieval Dietetics
In the Mediterranean Middle Ages, the rich had not only their country
houses, but their own doctors as well...
The Crusaders and the Diffusion of Foods
Food writers, and some
scholars as well, have for years popularized the idea that returning Crusaders
were responsible for the appearance of this or that food in Christian Europe
during the Middle Ages...
Mediterranean Take-Out Food in the Middle Ages
During the Middle Ages,
eating “take-out,” was a popular, common, and in some cases necessary way of
eating in both the Muslim and Christian Mediterranean...
History of the Fork
The history of the fork has
never been written, and when it is, it will be a study of the rules of
etiquette in society...
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