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The reviews have been previously published in various issues of Medieval History Magazine.
Prospect Books, 2003,
200 pages, Hb, £25.00, US$45.00
ISBN 1-903018-14-5
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Andrew Dalby has established himself well as a historian of food and cookery with his previous volumes Siren Feasts about ancient Greek cuisine and Dangerous Tastes on the history of spices. In his latest work Dalby ventures into an area that has been almost untouched to date– the food of that portion of the Roman Empire which survived through the middle ages. The task is not an easy one. The inhabitants of medieval “Rômania”, as they called it, did not see fit to write down recipes. Whether this was because cooking was too prosaic an activity to merit literary attention, or because it was too much of an art to be fixed by written records, or some combination of these attitudes is not at all apparent. The result, however, is that the historian of food in the enduring Roman Empire must cull widely dispersed mentions from other forms of literature, literature written in Greek and in many cases not even existing in accessible editions, let alone reliable translations. The major type of source for information on food in Rômania is dietary guides, a para-medical genre giving advice on what foods to eat at certain times and in certain ways and combinations in order to best preserve and improve one’s health. Another source for evidence of foods is the intricate governmental regulations placed upon the shopkeepers of Constantinople, a recorded particularly in the tenth-century Book of the Eparch Otherwise hints are gleaned from a wide variety of other types of written material ranging from histories to satires on the excesses of assorted classes of society.
Dalby has done a fine job of bringing such diverse material together in this volume. He begins with a general introduction to the history of Byzantium to set the scene. Following chapters are ‘Tastes and Smells of the City’, ‘Food and Markets of Constantinople’, ‘Water and Wine, Monks and Travellers’ followed by a chapter on how Roman practice influenced the West. Then he gives four translated sources from those dietary guides previously mentioned. The section of recipes is necessarily brief. With the lack of recipes from the time, any modern reconstructions must inevitably be a creative response to the sources or in some cases recipes in popular use which seem to have links to historical practice. The final section is a phrasebook which is a very welcome antidote to the tendency in “Byzantine Studies”, at least in its more popular form, to mystify and avoid the Greek language in favour of Latinisations or even the preservation of Latin terms which were outdated or had changed their meaning.
Flavours of Byzantium should have a place on the shelves of everyone interested in the evolving culture of the Enduring Roman Empire, or in the world history of food.
Columbia University Press, New York,
2003
576 pages, 39 ills, hb/pb,
£38.00/19.00, US$54.50/27.50
ISBN 0-231-12760-X
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This is the first English translation of a unique satirical poem from the last century of the Roman Empire. Written in vernacular Greek in the third quarter of the fourteenth century the Entertaining Tale tells of a parliament of beasts called by the king of beasts, the Lion. Like any experiment in democracy it must first run the gauntlet of class conflict, for the herbivores are understandably reluctant to meet with those creatures who prey upon them. Once King Lion assures them of their safety by signing a treaty, the atmosphere of amity does not last long. In keeping with the common modern description of parliament as a “Bear Pit”, recriminations soon begin to fly. The divisions are not along herbivore / carnivore class lines, however. Rather, every beast is moved to extol its own virtues, and denigrate those of the one preceding it. After each beast has spoken, King Lion concludes that peace amongst them is a fantasy, and abrogates the treaty. The resulting melée is by no means a walk-over, for many herbivores are far from defenceless. A nil-all stalemate sees the survivors slink back to the woods and fields to resume the daily skirmishing of the wild.
The interest of this work is the insights it provides into various aspects of the life of the time. Some one might never think of today, such as the propensity for the cat to use the grain or flour store as a litter tray. Others might be more useful, such as the mentions of clothing and food for which some animals boast they are raw materials. There is quite a lot of very interesting material on crafts using animal products. There is insight into the attitudes of the time and culture, and great stock of medieval Greek insults for anyone who should want them! The introduction and commentary to the translation are both substantial and extensively researched, and would be a great resource for someone wishing to follow up any of these areas.
The origin of this translation is itself something of a curiosity, for while the collaborators are both of Greek extraction, one is an Australian Linguist and the other an American professor of mathematics!
Not a book for everyone, but a good read for those interested in the popular culture and daily life of the Eastern Roman Empire.