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...