Introduction: The Material Worlds of Food in Early Modern Europe

All of the articles in this special issue show the necessity of having to combine different kinds of sources—texts with images, images with objects, and objects with absences—to build an integrated history of the material worlds of food in the early modern period. They also reflect newer approaches to materiality which are sensitive to the relationship between matter and the senses and consider the haptic, visual, ol-factory, and even aural aspects of cooking and eating alongside taste. In turn, the tastes of collectors and the fragility and absence of source material also need to be taken into consideration in order to write a meaningful cultural and social history of food. Despite the ephemeral nature of eating and cooking, this special issue shows that the sources studied by historians of material culture of the early modern period are remarkably rich, and their analysis fruitful.


Introduction
While food is central to human existence, the material traces of cooking and eating in the past rarely survive. Surprisingly, food remains are listed in museum catalogues around the world, such as a focus of historical research.3 For the early modern period, in particular, food has been at the center of a number of monographs, although its meanings have been primarily analyzed through texts rather than through objects. 4 Historians of the decorative arts have certainly engaged with objects related to dining but, as one historian notes, the questions of how the objects were used and what food went in them have not been their primary concern until more recently.5 A notable exception is the work of Ivan Day who has successfully combined expert knowledge of cooking practices with attention to how food was displayed, through texts, objects, and experimentation. 6 Another inspiration comes from the work of Sara Pennell whose attention to what she calls "mundane materiality" has been especially fruitful for early modern historians of the material culture of food, as she moves beyond texts and considers the materiality of the objects themselves.7 Even the field of food studies has had a recent "material turn," opening up new ways to approach the questions of embodiment and the agency of food.8 This special issue therefore proposes to draw and build on this recent work which is testimony to the richness of food as a theme through which to write early modern history. Texts and images have traditionally been important sources for the history of food in the early modern period. The emergence of printed cookery books created new publics, even if recent research suggests that scholars rather than actual cooks might have been their readers, and that they are as much prescriptive as practical texts. In turn, the divide between printed cookery books and recipe manuscripts has been elided by recent research which recognizes the connections between these two forms of knowledge production, rather than being simply divided by gender and ideas of the domestic.9 Illustrated cookery books are particularly fruitful sources, as the work of Deborah Krohn on Bartolomeo Scappi's 1570 cookery book has shown, and her discussion here of Renaissance Italian and German carving manuals demonstrates not only the complexity of the relationship between text and image within the history of printing, but also the extent to which they can also be interrogated as sources for understanding practice. Thus, the illustrations of disembodied hands folding napkins ( Figure 5 in Krohn) might help us animate the Renaissance table, even if the realities of domestic service-for example, the need to wipe greasy hands on a linen napkin after handling a large piece of meat-are obscured. Current museological practice, in fact, emphasizes the labor behind the serving of meals in historic houses and museum displays.10 However, the similarity of the carving manual illustrations to early modern representations of the instruments of the Passion in the early modern period, as Krohn suggests, takes us back to more mainstream forms of representation.
The difficulties and potential of images as sources for an integrated history of food are clear from an album of drawings made for the Gonzaga family at Mantua in the 1520s. While it does not represent actual objects in situ, as in the case of the Scappi illustrations, the album shows designs for elaborate silver and gilt table ware for "Popes, Cardinals, and other great lords" to be ordered for display on their sideboard (credenza) or use at their variety of ewers, basins, candlesticks, salt cellars, and goblets is richly illustrated and the reference to the credenza suggests that these beautiful and valuable objects might have been solely for display. The complexity, impracticality, and singularity of some of the designs and the prospect of their use-for instance, for a pepper pot-strengthens this argument ( Figure 2).12 Yet, there are also clues to lived experience of Renaissance dining practices in the album. The largest number of designs in the albums are dedicated to ewers and basin, reminding us of the practice and importance of washing hands before a meal to be eaten without forks across Europe, including the Ottoman world.13 The distinction between different sized salt-cellars-medium ones "for the long Table when the Prince holds a banquet" and smaller ones "for when the prince eats alone"-suggests different dining needs at different times in a courtly context.14 The distinction in the inscriptions between kinds of glasses-for drinking water and drinking wine-suggests material differences when these different beverages were served, even if one must consider further the (im) practicalities of drinking out of the "Two-handled cup for drinking water" with one's mouth ( Figure 3).15 The imaginative qualities of the designs, however, must not obscure their contribution to understanding the material cultures of food in the early modern period. The candlestick designs remind us of the need to illuminate dining spaces, even during the day, and that the reflections of the candle's flames would have shone and flickered on the silver and gilt tableware-doubling the conspicuousness of this display of consumption, by which the value of the candles could also be detected by the smell of the kind of wax used.16 The static images of pails with swing handles for water remind us not only of the need to bring water to the   The Material Worlds of Food in Early Modern Europe Journal of early modern history 24 (2020) 1-16 sounds of the handles swinging back and forth and the water swishing in them, as diners ate and demanded service of their servants ( Figure 4).17 As Helen Pfeifer's article reminds us, the social complexity at the early modern table is not always accompanied by such material abundance. Her analysis of an Ottoman text on table manners demonstrates this complexity without the presence of the variety and quantity of tableware used at the Gonzaga court. Her interpretation also demonstrates clearly the agency of the space and spaces between bodies and objects, while eating and being served at the Ottoman table, which was as powerful and significant as the agency of objects themselves. It questions directly the extent to which fixed tables as well as the "emergence" of individual forks, plates, and specialized serving ware in the early modern period continue to be harnessed to the discourse of civilization and modernity, inspired by the work of Norbert Elias, in current histories of material culture and food.
The quantity as well as quality of surviving material has determined the historical study of food practices in early modern Europe. And, yet, fasting as well as feasting were central to the social and cultural life of this period. That there is less material evidence for this practice is a methodological problem recognized by prehistoric archaeologists, whose sources are dominated by evidence related to eating rather than not eating.18 Some objects related to abstention from eating certain foods in the early modern period do survive, such as this earthenware pipkin dated 1650, with a broken handle and small lip for pouring and inscribed with the words, "Fast and pray 1650" (Figure 5). Burnished on the bottom, one can only imagine it being used to heat up one of the vegetable pottages suggested by Thomas Tryon during Advent or Lent, the cleansing qualities of which must have been both spiritual and physical. 19 We know little about the food practices around fasting in England, and this rare survival would need further study alongside prescriptive texts and other "moralizing" objects, such as those studied by Alexandra Walsham in her article in this issue.20 Historians of cooking and eating, the most ephemeral of human activities, therefore require strategies to contend with a lack of material evidence and are forced to develop their analyses with different kinds of sources and approaches. While the organic food remains in current museum collections could be the subject of material analysis to determine authenticity, there is no doubt that the collector believed that the Biddenden cakes materialized earlier culinary and cultural traditions. Similarly, historians of ordinary eating practices  in the early modern period sometimes presume continuities in cooking and dining practices through to the later periods to make up for this lack of material evidence. For example, the description of simple cooking technologies by Dorothy Hartley in her book, Food in England, first published in 1954, but dating back to her own eating and cooking experiences at the turn of the twentieth century, imply continuities with the medieval and early modern period.21 This approach can also be combined with an analysis of visual sources. For instance, there is significant visual evidence of elite dining practices in the Ottoman Empire, but much less rich material evidence. Ottoman historians sometimes rely on later objects from the nineteenth century to construct their histories, for example, in the case of the dining napkin discussed by Pfeifer ( Figure 5 in Pfeifer).
Reconstructing the specific assemblages of these items on the table has proven a challenge too. As Krohn's article demonstrates, folded napkins were central to elite table display, as the practice of folding illustrated in Renaissance carving manuals confirms, but texts have their limits. Napkin displays, in any case, cannot be studied in isolation. They would have been part of a structured display of objects made of glass, majolica, silver, and later porcelain, many of which have survived, as well as the folded napkins, sugar sculptures, and the tableside performance of serving guests, most of which have not survived. The historical reconstructions by Joan Sallas and Ivan Day have closed this gap between extant and lost objects by animating early modern table displays and practices for contemporary audiences in innovative ways.22 However, the ephemerality of these practices continues to present methodological difficulties. Reflection on the nature of different materials as well as further experimentation in remaking or reconstruction allow us to consider further the agency of and relationship between objects, bodies, and spaces. The tugging of a communal napkin between Ottoman diners suggests how objects served to articulate these.23 In turn, recent research recognizes the role of the senses in the material reconstruction of early modern practices-the visual, the olfactory, and the haptic are all part of the display and eating of food.24 The smell of cooked dishes would have been less powerful than the bodily odors of early modern diners, which were counteracted by herb-filled pomanders on their bodies, perfume burners on the floor and the scented gloves by their side, and all this would have combined with the smell of tallow or beeswax candles to light the table.25 In turn, the fleeting aural experience of the clatter of knives hitting the majolica or pewter dishes, together with the delicate nature of textiles and sugar sculptures-often reused, recycled, and eventually thrown away-means that the ceramic plates and silver tableware are all that survive of these ephemeral eating experiences in museum collections today.
The field of material culture studies has been shaped by the interests and motives of specific collectors. For instance, the extensive ceramic collection of Dr. James Glaisher in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge provides us with important evidence for the contextualization of more ordinary eating practices. Yet, Glaisher's intentions were not necessarily to materialize a history of early modern food. His interest in the forms of objects was connected to the chronological mapping of ceramics which dominated collectors' handbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Posset pots, which were used to make a warm custard drink, mixed with alcohol, were particularly popular with collectors like Glaisher because of their unusual shape. Posset pots came in a variety of forms and decorations, such as this one with a dome-shaped cover and decoration of squares and diamonds ( were of particular interest to Glaisher and his contemporaries.27 These spouts, unlike those of a teapot, clung to the body of the pot, and were designed to enable the user to suck the alcoholic liquid at the bottom of the pot while the frothy foam floated above. Glaisher's understanding of the function of these spouts is significant, showing an awareness of their materiality. Glaisher was also an avid collector of ceramics that referenced fertility, including this 27  sauceboat, analyzed by Walsham, in which a reclining nude would have been revealed as the sauce poured out (Figure 8 in Walsham). Yet, in his manuscript catalogue, he focuses on form and decoration and does not refer to their possible function or meaning in relation to eating or serving food.28 In fact, most of Glaisher's early modern ceramics survived because they had not been used on a daily basis; they had been kept safely above the busyness of the kitchen and treasured as wedding or christening gifts by the original owners and their descendants.29 Even if Glaisher did not intentionally collect for future food historians, Walsham's original analysis shows that these ceramics offer ample evidence for the contextualization of eating practices. She reveals the tensions between broader moral messages transmitted by these objects and the specific forms associated with the serving and eating of food, suggesting the existence of contradictions in the various early modern discourses about eating, the body, and Godliness, contradictions which go well beyond Glaisher's interests as a collector of unusual earthenware. Many of the contributions in this issue largely focus on an exploration of food history, which is committed to histories of sitting down and eating at a table, an approach which is determined by the survival of sources such as books of table etiquette and tableware.30 Recent research, however, has gone outside of the house and focused on the role of production and provisioning of food.31 As Melissa Calaresu's article shows, the unusually detailed account book of Thomas Jones' purchases in Naples reveals the complex interconnectedness of foodways from the hinterland to the city, and from the city to the urban kitchen. As for most kitchens of this period, no material object survives from Jones' Neapolitan kitchen. Yet, his account book allows us to build a story of the workings of his household and link it to questions of storage and seasonality as well as to sources such as recipe books and tableware which are the mainstays of food history. In this way, a material culture approach to the history of food links the outside with the inside and can make a contribution to urban history.
All of the articles in this special issue show the necessity of having to combine different kinds of sources-texts with images, images with objects, and objects with absences-to build an integrated history of the material worlds of food in the early modern period. They also reflect newer approaches to materiality which are sensitive to the relationship between matter and the senses and consider the haptic, visual, olfactory, and even aural aspects of cooking and eating alongside taste. In turn, the tastes of collectors and the fragility and absence of source material also need to be taken into consideration in order to write a meaningful cultural and social history of food. Despite the ephemeral nature of eating and cooking, this special issue shows that the sources studied by historians of material culture of the early modern period are remarkably rich, and their analysis fruitful.