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Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine and Society, 1450-1800
Author: David Gentilcore
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Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is both a history of food practices and a history of the medical discourse about that food. It is also an exploration of the interaction between the two the relationship between evolving foodways and shifting medical advice on what to eat in order to stay healthy. It provides the first in-depth study of printed dietary advice covering the entire early modern period, from the late-15th century to the early-19th it is also the first to trace the history of European foodways as seen through the prism of this advice. David Gentilcore offers a doctors-eye view of changing food and dietary fashions from Portugal to Poland, from Scotland to Sicily, not forgetting the expanding European populations of the New World. In addition to exploring European regimens throughout the period, works of materia medica, botany, agronomy and horticulture are considered, as well as a range of other printed sources, such as travel accounts, cookery books and literary works. The book also includes 30 illustrations, maps and extensive chapter bibliographies with web links included to further aid study. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe is the essential introduction to the relationship between food, health and medicine for history students and scholars alike. **Review Social history done well (unequivocally the case here) is a pleasure to read. Views of food, medicine, and societal practice confected in the cauldron of Europes early modern period could easily, in less scholarly and competent hands, have produced a concoction intellectually difficult to digest. The authors recipe for avoiding this is simple but skillfully executed. Two initial chapters divide the period surveyed (c.1450c.1650 c.1650c.1800) to clarify the shifting views of diet and medicine. In brief, the revival of Galens emphasis on dietary regimen and prevention (renascent as a result of humanism) is eventually challenged by iatrochemical (Paracelsian) and iatromechanical views emphasizing therapeutics and curative drugs. These views are, by the end of this diachronic survey, countered by a return to a dietetics again based on hygiene and prevention. With this foundation established, subsequent chapters explore the interaction of these ideas with changing views of social rank, religion, vegetarianism, beverage consumption, and the appearance of new foods and drinks associated with the Columbian exchange. It would be difficult to imagine any undergraduate student, irrespective of major, who could leave unsated from this intellectual feast. Summing Up Essential. All levelslibraries. -CHOICE An excellent book! Well-written, it has a logical structure and strong arguments. Its particular strengths are the European perspective, the careful analysis of discourses, the many and telling quotations, and the systematic attention to regional and social differences. This book is an eminent and original contribution to food historiography. Peter Scholliers, Professor of History and FOST (Social & Cultural Food Studies), Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium David Gentilcore had the happy idea of combining two topics that are usually studied separately, the history of medicine and the history of food. Basing his work on the rich literature of advice on a healthy diet, Gentilcore compares the food anxieties of early modern times with our own but contrasts the recommendations, noting the rejection of fish, fruit and vegetables as dangerously cold and moist. The result is a valuable contribution to both the intellectual and the social history of early modern Europe. Peter Burke, Emeritus Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge, UK The current proliferation of dietary advice makes David Gentilcores witty and learned book especially welcome. He reminds us that we moderns have no monopoly on the application of diet to health doctors and patients have agreed and disagreed about what to eat (and drink) for generations. But notions of what constituted health, and what foods promoted it, have changed drastically, with regional and religious factors also playing roles. With his deep understanding of both food and medicine, Gentilcore is the ideal guide through an era when too much fruit might kill you, and even children drank alcohol every day. Anita Guerrini, Professor of History, Oregon State University, USA Advice about food and drink has always been fundamental to medicine, but European tastes rapidly changed in response to the development of global trade and new ideas. Gentilcore captures those transformations wonderfully in this wide-ranging book, highlighting not only the novelties and curiosities but the enduring legacies of food culture in a period that fundamentally shaped European stomachs, palates, and health. Harold J. Cook, John F. Nickoll Professor of History, Brown University, USA About the Author David Gentilcore is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester, UK. He is the author of Italy and the Potato A History, 1550-2000 (2012), Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy (2010) and Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (2006).
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Author: Rebecca M. McLennan
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In the Age of Jackson, private enterprise set up shop in the American penal system. Working hand in glove with state government, contractors in both the North and the South would go on to put more than half a million imprisoned men, women, and youth to hard, sweated toil for private gain by 1900. Held captive, stripped of their rights, and subject to lash and paddle, convict laborers churned out vast quantities of goods and revenue, in some years generating the equivalent of more than $30 billion worth of work. By the 1880s, however, a growing mass of Americans came to regard the prison labor system as immoral and unbefitting of a free republic it fostered torture and other abuses, degraded free citizen-workers, corrupted government and the legal system, and stifled the supposedly ethical purposes of punishment. The Crisis of Imprisonment tells the remarkable story of this controversial system of penal servitude-how it came into being, how it worked, how the popular campaigns for its abolition were ultimately victorious, and how it shaped and continues to haunt the American penal system. The author takes the reader into the morally vital world of nineteenth-century artisans, industrial workers, farmers, clergy, convicts, machine politicians, and labor leaders and shows how prisons became a lightning rod in a determined defense of republican and Christian values against the encroachments of an unbridled market capitalism. She explores the vexing ethical questions that prisons posed then and remain exigent today What are the limits of state power over the minds, bodies, and souls of citizens and others-is torture permissible under certain circumstances? What, if anything, makes the state morally fit to deprive a person of life or liberty? Are prisoners slaves and, if so, by what right? Should prisoners work? Is the prison a morally defensible institution? The eventual abolition of prison labor contracting plunged the prisons into deep fiscal and ideological crisis. The second half of the book offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Progressive Era prison reform as, above all, a response to this crisis. It concludes with an exploration of the long-range impact of both penal servitude and the anti-prison labor movement on the modern American penal system.ReviewDeeply researched and deeply reflective, The Crisis of Imprisonment redefines the central themes of 19th and early 20th century American prison history. Its story of the rise and fall of contractual penal servitude shows how questions of imprisonment, prison labor, and the treatment of prisoners lay at the heart of ongoing struggles over the meaning of freedom and unfreedom in America. Few scholars have succeeded so well in tracing the reciprocal relations between the institutions of punishment and the broader fields of economic and political power with which they are connected. Written with clarity and conviction, this is a major new work on the formation of the American penal state. - David Garland, New York UniversityAlthough there have been several fine studies of the thinking and influence of American prison reformers, McLennan has written a revealing study of the impact of popular politics, and especially of the prisoners themselves on the shaping and reshaping of state prison systems. She helps us understand the huge prison business of our times by analyzing controversies and prison revolts that led first to the development of contract prison labor then to its abolition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. - David Montgomery, Yale UniversityA timely, penetrating look into the horrors of the nineteenth-century prison system, its brutal-and brutalizing-convict labor system, and the mass of ordinary Americans who confronted its abuses and, ultimately, brought about its abolition. - Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking and The Death of InnocentsThis is an extraordinary investigation and analysis of penal servitude and anti-prison labor campaigns in American history. Wonderfully insightful and illuminating, this work has much to teach us about where weve been and what we must consider in confronting the politics of legal punishment. - Bryan Stevenson, New York University School of Law, Executive Director, Equal Justice InitiativeOne of the smartest books about punishment I have ever read. And this is not just a book about prisons. The story Rebecca McLennan narrates so powerfully in these pages-the controversial career of penal servitude in a liberal democratic republic--has much to tell us about the history of American society, politics, and institutions. - Michael Willrich, Brandeis University, author of City of Courts Socializing Justice in Progressive Era ChicagoIn a nation dedicated to liberty, the topic of the imprisoned deserves attention and the considerate analysis exhibited in this book. Essential. -Choice Book DescriptionAmericas prison-based system of punishment has not always enjoyed the widespread political and moral legitimacy it has today. Unearthing fresh evidence from prison and state archives, McLennan shows how, in each of three distinct periods of crisis, widespread dissent culminated in the dismantling of old systems of imprisonment.
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