![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjSession 87 Schneider 2335 - Food and Violence in the Middle Ages I: Representations of Food and Violence in Medieval Art and Literature
Sponsor: Mens et Mensa: Society for the Study of Food in the Middle Ages
Organizer: John A. Bollweg, Western Michigan Univ.
Presider: Alberto Ferreiro, Seattle Pacific Univ.
Death, Dismemberment, and Delight: Illuminating the Medieval Hunt
Rebekah L. Pratt, Arizona State Univ.
Paper discusses Gaston Phoebus' Le livre de chasse. Survey of the subject matter of the manuscript's illustrations, especially the conversion of the living animal into food for consumption. The production of hunting manuals, especially ones like this that are also luxury objects on their own, highlight hunting as an upper class social ritual, not simply a means of food production. It also highlights the high status of these particular types of foods and the ability to obtain and share them. The focus on hunting as "practice for war" also empasizes it as an upper class activity.
She looks specifically at the "unmaking" part of the process (i.e., butchering the prey after the kill) and focuses on it as an act of domination over the animal and the rendering of it into an object rather than a living thing. I'm a bit skeptical about some of the positions presented here which seem to assume that it was necessary to perform this "violent act" in order to enforce the hierarchy of being, by removing the prey's 'animal nature' by turning it into meat lest the hunters absorb the lower status of the creature when consuming it (as contrasted with the desirable absorbing of the creature's admirable qualities via consumption, which is also mentioned as an important symbolism). There's some self-contradiction going on here and perhaps a touch of having a conclusion in search of supporting data.
Overall, a nice introductory paper on the subject but a bit weak on theory, I think.
Got Milk? Lactation, Violence, and the Servant’s Voice in Three Old English Riddles
Robert Stanton, Boston College
(This speaker is literally "phoning it in", on speaker-phone from another location. This is not meant to be a value judgment on the quality of the paper!)
Actually 9 riddles, rather than three, in Latin and Old English. The author has synthesized his own (?) version of the riddles in Haiku format:
When I was a youth,
I drank from four bright fountains,
murmured with delight.
As my years increased,
I lost those drinks to others;
I toiled, was used up.
Living, I broke the earth;
in death, I bind the living.
Say what I am called.
The answer is "an ox". The paper then goes on to discuss the iconography of St. Luke as an ox, with various types of representations all the way from an ordinary animal to an Irish depiction of a man with an ox's hooves. The riddles have a continuing theme of "one reared among / fed from four streams" referring to the four teats on a cow. The overall structure covers "a calf fed from four streams", "in life, laboring to break the land (ploughing)", and "in death, turned into various useful forms of leather."
The voice of the ox in the riddles sits between a beast, whose purpose in life is to provide usefulness to man, and a human narrator, who laments the injustice of the things done to him (losing his mother's milk, being forced to labor, being turned into inanimate tools after death) in terms that would be seen as pitiful in a human. A similar ambiguity of voice is seen on other riddles where an animal or even an inanimate object gives voice to its own description in terms that solicit sympathy.
The Old English riddles also contain a familiar strain of sexual innuendo, with ambiguous readings of sexual exploitation being offered alongside the physical exploitation.
There is then a discussion of animals present as grave goods in Anglo-Saxon graves. The presence of domestic animals in everyday life may have created the context for being able to imagine them as sympathetic characters, but the use of the ox as an Evangelist's symbol may have authorized acceptance of the "self-sacrifice" of cattle for human use by linking it with religious self-sacrifice and the ability to imagine the ox as a willing (if complaining) subject of his own riddle-story.
Overall, a very delightful paper with some interesting connections made between the various examples.
Chivalric Adventure as Subtlety in Chrétien de Troye’s Erec and Enide
Morgan Bozick, Pennsylvania State Univ.
We start with a catalog of the various foodstuffs and eating contexts and paraphernalia mentioned in the romance. The paper examines the various episodes in the romance as the symbolic equivalent of "entremets" formally introducing the various sections of a banquet. The description of banquets often focus more on the visual and ceremonial aspects of dishes than the taste and were an important context for communicating symbolic messages and reinforcing desired images relating to the event's host.
(A fair amount of the paper now describes the various sorts of things that might be presented either specifically as "subtleties" or more generally as "illusion foods" such meatball "urchins".) There's a discussion relating the wondrous and astounding effects of subtleties (cf. "live birds in a pie") with the ordinarily miraculous foods such as transubstantiation during the Mass.
Returning specifically to Erec and Enide we look at an episode when the apparently dead Erec is laid out on a table in the hall, as if he were a dish being presented, where the viewers will be similarly surprised at his transformative return to the living. (The lord of the hall gets the surprise, thought, because the revived Erec immediately splits his head open. We, as audience, know this is ok because the dead guy was trying to forcibly marry the bereft Enide.)
Similarly, the "joy of the court" episode in the marvellous and mysterious garden, is contextualized as representing a pair of banquets, with the combat postioned between them then interpreted as an entremet and therefore an organic part of the whole larger event.
Sponsor: Mens et Mensa: Society for the Study of Food in the Middle Ages
Organizer: John A. Bollweg, Western Michigan Univ.
Presider: Alberto Ferreiro, Seattle Pacific Univ.
Death, Dismemberment, and Delight: Illuminating the Medieval Hunt
Rebekah L. Pratt, Arizona State Univ.
Paper discusses Gaston Phoebus' Le livre de chasse. Survey of the subject matter of the manuscript's illustrations, especially the conversion of the living animal into food for consumption. The production of hunting manuals, especially ones like this that are also luxury objects on their own, highlight hunting as an upper class social ritual, not simply a means of food production. It also highlights the high status of these particular types of foods and the ability to obtain and share them. The focus on hunting as "practice for war" also empasizes it as an upper class activity.
She looks specifically at the "unmaking" part of the process (i.e., butchering the prey after the kill) and focuses on it as an act of domination over the animal and the rendering of it into an object rather than a living thing. I'm a bit skeptical about some of the positions presented here which seem to assume that it was necessary to perform this "violent act" in order to enforce the hierarchy of being, by removing the prey's 'animal nature' by turning it into meat lest the hunters absorb the lower status of the creature when consuming it (as contrasted with the desirable absorbing of the creature's admirable qualities via consumption, which is also mentioned as an important symbolism). There's some self-contradiction going on here and perhaps a touch of having a conclusion in search of supporting data.
Overall, a nice introductory paper on the subject but a bit weak on theory, I think.
Got Milk? Lactation, Violence, and the Servant’s Voice in Three Old English Riddles
Robert Stanton, Boston College
(This speaker is literally "phoning it in", on speaker-phone from another location. This is not meant to be a value judgment on the quality of the paper!)
Actually 9 riddles, rather than three, in Latin and Old English. The author has synthesized his own (?) version of the riddles in Haiku format:
When I was a youth,
I drank from four bright fountains,
murmured with delight.
As my years increased,
I lost those drinks to others;
I toiled, was used up.
Living, I broke the earth;
in death, I bind the living.
Say what I am called.
The answer is "an ox". The paper then goes on to discuss the iconography of St. Luke as an ox, with various types of representations all the way from an ordinary animal to an Irish depiction of a man with an ox's hooves. The riddles have a continuing theme of "one reared among / fed from four streams" referring to the four teats on a cow. The overall structure covers "a calf fed from four streams", "in life, laboring to break the land (ploughing)", and "in death, turned into various useful forms of leather."
The voice of the ox in the riddles sits between a beast, whose purpose in life is to provide usefulness to man, and a human narrator, who laments the injustice of the things done to him (losing his mother's milk, being forced to labor, being turned into inanimate tools after death) in terms that would be seen as pitiful in a human. A similar ambiguity of voice is seen on other riddles where an animal or even an inanimate object gives voice to its own description in terms that solicit sympathy.
The Old English riddles also contain a familiar strain of sexual innuendo, with ambiguous readings of sexual exploitation being offered alongside the physical exploitation.
There is then a discussion of animals present as grave goods in Anglo-Saxon graves. The presence of domestic animals in everyday life may have created the context for being able to imagine them as sympathetic characters, but the use of the ox as an Evangelist's symbol may have authorized acceptance of the "self-sacrifice" of cattle for human use by linking it with religious self-sacrifice and the ability to imagine the ox as a willing (if complaining) subject of his own riddle-story.
Overall, a very delightful paper with some interesting connections made between the various examples.
Chivalric Adventure as Subtlety in Chrétien de Troye’s Erec and Enide
Morgan Bozick, Pennsylvania State Univ.
We start with a catalog of the various foodstuffs and eating contexts and paraphernalia mentioned in the romance. The paper examines the various episodes in the romance as the symbolic equivalent of "entremets" formally introducing the various sections of a banquet. The description of banquets often focus more on the visual and ceremonial aspects of dishes than the taste and were an important context for communicating symbolic messages and reinforcing desired images relating to the event's host.
(A fair amount of the paper now describes the various sorts of things that might be presented either specifically as "subtleties" or more generally as "illusion foods" such meatball "urchins".) There's a discussion relating the wondrous and astounding effects of subtleties (cf. "live birds in a pie") with the ordinarily miraculous foods such as transubstantiation during the Mass.
Returning specifically to Erec and Enide we look at an episode when the apparently dead Erec is laid out on a table in the hall, as if he were a dish being presented, where the viewers will be similarly surprised at his transformative return to the living. (The lord of the hall gets the surprise, thought, because the revived Erec immediately splits his head open. We, as audience, know this is ok because the dead guy was trying to forcibly marry the bereft Enide.)
Similarly, the "joy of the court" episode in the marvellous and mysterious garden, is contextualized as representing a pair of banquets, with the combat postioned between them then interpreted as an entremet and therefore an organic part of the whole larger event.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-10 07:17 am (UTC)