Food and the middle ages

The study of food in the middle ages attracted much interest among antiquarians from the eighteenth century on. New perspectives came with the growth of social and economic history. Over the last two decades, re-evaluations of historical sources, along with contributions from other disciplines, especially archaeology, the archaeological sciences, anthropology and sociology, have changed the possibilities for this area of research. The study of cooking, of cuisine and its cultural context, as much as food production and the material conditions of life, is now central to developing our understanding of consumption. This paper explores new possibilities for the study of taste and demotic cuisine, food and virtue, the association of women with food, and the role of food in society and in cultural change.     

Andrew Jackson Downing and the Tyranny of Taste

The following essay examines the published writing of Andrew Jackson Downing, the early nineteenth century architect and landscape gardener. As the most popular writer and commentator on house and landscape design of his time Downing profoundly shaped – both literally and metaphorically – the social and geographical environment of the emergent middle class. Relating his writing to the promotion of a shared nationalism as embodied in the landscape painting of the Hudson River School, the essay assesses Downing's drive to order by seeing it as a response to the general violence and disorder of the antebellum American city and demonstrates that the defining logic of Downing's project was the universalization of bourgeois taste, uniting the mutually legitimating discourses of privacy, consumption and self‐control.