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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Piero Camporesi is one of the most original and exciting cultural historians in Europe today. In this remarkable book he examines the imaginative world of poor and ordinary people in pre-industrial Europe, exploring their everyday preoccupations, fears and fantasies.
Camporesi develops the startling claim that many people in early modern Europe lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their hunger or by bread adulterated with hallucinogenic herbs. The use of opiate products, administered even to children and infants, was widespread and was linked to a popular mythology in which herbalists and exorcists were important cultural figures. Through a careful reconstruction of the everyday imaginative life of peasants, beggars and the poor, Camporesi presents a vivid and disconcerting image of early modern Europe as a vast laboratory of dreams.
Bread of Dreams is a rich and engaging book which provides a fresh insight into the everyday life and attitudes of people in pre-industrial Europe. Camporesi's vision is breathtaking and his work will be much discussed among social and cultural historians. This edition includes a Preface by Roy Porter, Professor of the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.
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Seitenzahl: 427
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Preface
Introduction
1 The ‘Disease of Wretchedness’
2 Elusive Bread
3 Sacred and Profane Cannibalism
4 ‘They Set Out into the World of the Vagabond’
5 ‘They Rotted in Their Own Dung’
6 The World Turned Upside Down
7 ‘Famine of Living’ and ‘Times of Suspicion’
8 Night-time
9 Ritual Battles and Popular Frenzies
10
Medicina Pauperum
11 ‘Tightness of Purse’
12 Collective Vertigo
13 Hyperbolic Dreams
14 Artificial Paradises
15 Poppyseed Bread
16 The ‘Fickle and Verminous Colony’
17 Putrid Worms and Vile Snails
18 A City of Mummies
19 The Triumph of Poverty
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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To my students
Bread of Dreams
Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe
Piero Camporesi
Translated by David Gentilcore
First published as Il Pane Selvaggio copyright © Il Mulino 1980
English translation © Polity Press 1989
This translation first published 1989 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. First published in paperback 1996.
Reprinted 2005
Polity Press65 Bridge Street Cambridge, CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0–7456–0349–1 ISBN 0–7456–1836–7 (pbk)
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk
Preface
by Roy Porter
Though extraordinarily prolific as a historian, Piero Camporesi remains relatively little known to more general British readers, because his works have, till now, hardly been translated from Italian. Confronting them may, at first sight, present the Anglo-American reader with certain problems, because they deal with strange subjects in unusual ways (this is what makes them so arrestingly important). It may be useful, therefore, first of all in this Preface, to say a few words about the special nature of Camporesi’s historical studies, explaining why they can seem so exotic.
Over the last generation, one of the most urgent and insistent calls amongst historians has been the demand for history to become more holistic, more ‘total’. Traditional scholarship, it has been complained over and over again, was preoccupied with the doings of far too narrow a section of society – those who governed, those who fought, those who employed. Indeed, even with respect to members of the governing elite, old-style history was interested in only a fragment of their activities – their public lives as rulers, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, captains of industry, priests and thinkers. Orthodox history gave us little of even these people’s lives as a whole, and told us nothing at all about the great majority.
In reaction, the study of peoples, societies and cultures has blossomed over the last generation, most notably thanks to the stimulus given by the Annales school. There is neither room nor need here to illustrate how systematic research into parish registers, ecclesiastical records, legal depositions, court reports, tax assessments and masses of comparable documents has utterly transformed our knowledge of the lives of the ordinary people of the past. We now have infinitely more reliable accounts, from the grass roots, of the peasant family and the artisan household, of the economy of the cottage and the smallholding, of the traditional community in village or small town in pre-modern society (‘the world we have lost’), and then of the dynamics of the encroachment of industrial-capitalist relations over the last two or three centuries. Demographers have revealed patterns of marriage and childbearing; historical epidemiologists have studied morbidity, mortality and life expectations.
And alongside such accounts of population movements, economic realities, and material culture – the elementary structures of production and reproduction – the popular mind has been seriously researched, often for the first time. Replacing old vacuous generalizations, we now possess fine analyses of popular religion (orthodox or heretical), moral and sexual attitudes, traditional views on gender, social order and disorder, living and dying, and so forth.
All this is pure gain. Yet there are, arguably, dangers latent within some of the interpretative approaches used to reconstruct the histories of societies. For one thing, it is easy – especially thanks to the ready availability of sophisticated computer software – for quantitative history to become separated from qualitative history and thereby to claim totemic status as more ‘scientific’ and thus hegemonic. In the study of population patterns or geo-social mobility, the risk is that we will end up with a proliferation of histogram blocks or lines on graphs, without understanding what these mean in terms of myriad decisions taken by millions of individual people – to marry or not, to breed or not, to move or not. Data mean nothing unless they can be related to the attitudes and actions which make these marks upon history.
But study of the mentalité of times past has its problems too. How far, and in what ways, must historians ‘make sense’ of beliefs and practices – magic perhaps – which do not, prima facie, conform to our standards of logic and normal behaviour? One widely followed approach lies in the ‘functionalist’ assumption that the most bizarre-looking creeds and customs have underlying rational purposes (e.g. creating a common identity, maintaining social solidarity, upholding incest taboos, etc.). Other schools of historians, by contrast, see the ‘rationality’ of former belief-systems more in terms of the workings of hegemony. It may not be rational for believers to believe what they do, but such (‘mystifying’) belief-systems prove profoundly useful to the ruling groups who encourage and maintain them. The history of Christian millennialism, with its typical injunction to the faithful obediently to await the coming of Christ’s Kingdom, may be viewed in this light, as indeed may Christianity as a whole.
Interpretations such as these are useful and indeed necessary, if the popular world-views of the past are not simply to resemble museums of strange beasts to be gawped at – and if they are to escape the condescension of the old folklorist mentality which saw in oral culture vestiges of the ‘primitive mind’. Surely it is healthier to treat other people’s beliefs as rational than as ‘pre-rational’ – a danger the French school of historical anthropology, in the tradition of Marcel Mauss, arguably did not avoid.
Yet we may easily run a different risk, that of trimming and tailoring popular consciousness too regularly. It is very easy to gather up disparate beliefs and pour them into scholarly moulds, interpreting them as primitive class-consciousness, as popular protest and resistance to elite values, as economically and demographically functional, or as expressions of imposed ideological social control. It is in resisting such temptations to top and tail popular consciousness according to modern categories that Camporesi has made his most important contribution to the study of the popular cultures of the past.
For the temptations to provide selective, evaluative, pre-packaged accounts of the consciousness of the past are indeed extremely strong. One of the severest challenges facing scholars and readers alike is, therefore, first to enter into, and then to offer convincing accounts of, such collective outlooks, viewed on their own terms. We must deal in an even-handed way with what to us seems sensible and what seems bizarre, what seems progressive and archaic, or sophisticated and naive. And we must grasp how such varied elements typically fitted together into what was for earlier societies – though not necessarily for us – a coherent world view.
The danger, of course, is that we privilege items which seem admirable or ‘advanced’ to us. As readers, we easily approve of Menoccio, the Friulian miller, who (as Carlo Ginzburg has shown in his The Cheese and the Worms (London, 1980)) fell foul of the Counter-Reformation Church for articulating an alternative cosmology; and we do so for precisely the same reasons that historians have traditionally been on the side of his double, Galileo. We cheer both heretics for their rejection of the world-system as dictated by Medieval Scholasticism, and indeed their resistance to intellectual authoritarianism. Likewise, when we read Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), it is hard for us not to sympathize with those largely Protestant intellectuals who regarded magic as a system for the understanding and manipulation of nature, lacking truly scientific standards of evidence, observation, experiment and proof; and it is equally difficult not to feel that the emancipation from magic was, as the philosophes of the Enlightenment saw it, a true leap forward into a more critical and hopeful frame of mind.
But such preferences lead towards the slippery slope of Whiggishness, which prefers those elements of the mentalities of the past bearing most affinities to the belief-structures of the present, and judges them anachronistically on that basis. Historians need to transcend this selectivity, in favour of what has been called the ‘Baptist theory’ of history – ‘total immersion’, or genuinely getting under the skin of the past. We must cultivate a socio-cultural history, warts and all – one in which all elements of earlier belief-systems are accorded explanatory symmetry and ‘equal time’. Above all, we must be eager to ask profound questions, which transcend run-of-the-mill issues of family functionalism, political strategies, and economic rationality. What were the dreams and nightmares of earlier cultures? What aspirations jostled alongside the unbearable harshness of reality? What fears and fantasies did they embrace? What were the often only obliquely articulated beliefs organizing the experiences of individual lives? How did the people at large make sense of the world if they did not fully accept at face value the universe of meanings stipulated by authority – by Church or state?
These challenges to read the minds of people at large at all levels are ones from which Anglo-American historians have often shied away, for fear of vagueness. One major reason is that, within English-language scholarship, ‘folklore’ studies have fallen into disrepute. They have been discredited as trivial and patronizing. As hinted above, the energetic folklore collectors of the Victorian era were excessively eager to pigeonhole popular beliefs as the vestiges of a primitive mentality, becoming extinguished in the great struggle for intellectual survival in the age of Darwin. Such folklorists reflected a real truth about English society. The extinction of the English ‘peasantry’, and the great extension of commercial, urban culture, meant the erosion of traditional oral culture rooted in the soil, which gave expression to ancestral beliefs about nature and the cosmos. The result, however, was that the decline of ‘folklore’ itself was paralleled by the decline of the investigation of ‘folklore’. Study of the folk tradition became largely restricted to amateur intellectuals and Sunday collectors.
By contrast, the study of folk and oral cultures has never been thus marginalized – indeed, discredited – within the academic traditions of Continental Europe. And it is thus no surprise that the best research into the minds of the peasant societies of medieval and early modern Europe has come from France, from Italy, and even from Russia (for instance, M. Bakhtin’s exemplary Rabelais and his World (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)). Historians from countries which have supported to this day a sturdy peasant life have been triumphantly successful in reconstituting the ‘little cultures’ of the past. In recent years, works by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie such as Montaillou (London, 1978) and Carnival (London, 1980) have achieved notable success amongst Anglo-American readers, particularly because they decipher so expertly the structures of thought and action of rural society.
But Le Roy Ladurie is just one of a host of French scholars who have mined the archives – ecclesiastical records are particularly compendious upon what the Church saw as the outrageous errors of popular beliefs – for evidence of what was a largely pre-literate mentalité. The works of most remain largely untranslated. For example, Françoise Loux, coming from the traditions of French ethnography, has surveyed peasant lore largely through analysis of proverbs. Fascinated in particular by the history of the body, she had drawn attention to beliefs which to us, at first sight, seem paradoxical or perverse, but which in fact encode a substantial logic of their own. Much peasant lore, for instance, seems to glory in mud, filth and excrement. We might conclude that the traditional peasantry were dirty – and indeed ‘uncivilized’. But these conclusions would be radically false; for within their value-system, dirt (itself, of course, a notably relative phenomenon) was commonly regarded as a form of protective armour for the skin. Whereas we associate cleanliness with health, in traditional peasant culture, health, hygiene, and warmth required a sort of dirty living.
Many of the best French studies remain untranslated. Readers confined to the English tongue, however, may find some of its more fruitful insights incorporated in studies by Robert Darnton, particularly his volume of essays entitled The Great Cat Massacre (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). What Loux has done to understand the inner codes of proverbial wisdom, Darnton has done for fairy stories. The bizarre, mysterious and often perverse aspects of such stories (their transformations of identity, their savage cruelty) can be made, through close reading and examination of common structures, to yield insights into how peasants made sense of their world. Magic, the supernatural, disguise, surprise events, coincidences – all these loomed large in the hopes and fears of those who made poor and precarious livings off the land, overshadowed by the powers of nature, darkness, and the unknown, the arbitrary and unpredictable fortunes of birth, life and death, the social exactions and exploitations of the strong and the malign. In a broadly comparable way, Peter Burke’s Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 1987) decodes some of the, at first glance, more peculiar features of the popular street culture of the Renaissance – its theatricalities of social power, the symbolic significance of food and drink, clothes and gesture. Burke demonstrates how they should be read as meeting the needs of people living in a face-to-face, pre-bureaucratic society in which personal presence was supremely important.
We might place the works of Camporesi roughly in the same camp with studies of this kind. It is, in fact, hard to label them: they defy being exclusively identified as either social history, intellectual history, historical anthropology or any other sub-specialism. Professor at the University of Bologna, Camporesi’s writings – which are copious indeed! – are undoubtedly impregnated with the Marxist viewpoint of that institution and city. But Camporesi certainly does not proclaim his works as toeing the line of Marxist orthodoxy, and he is extremely careful to avoid the reductionist trap of assuming that past idea-complexes are merely the reflections of certain class interests. Rather, the Marxist influence in Camporesi is visible in a pervasive concern to explore the dialectics of consciousness with the realities of material existence.
Camporesi’s oeuvre possesses great shock value. All his works address themselves to features of past cultures which seem quite alien to us nowadays. He has explored the potent myths of pre-industrial society – in particular, of the Mediterranean and Catholic worlds – examining their ideas about the sacred and the profane, the mortal and the eternal, the worldly and the other-worldly, the relations between man and nature, man and the animal kingdom. In ways sometimes suggestive of the English anthropologists, Victor Turner and Mary Douglas, he has explored how, why, and where people draw boundary lines in their cosmologies, and the special significance attached to their violation. He has always been fascinated by what people found fascinating – often in the world of demons and marvels and witches and miracles. He has explored where power was thought to lie – so important in the consciousnesses of people often impotent and vulnerable to the oppressions of others. And he has probed these topics not in the abstract but through delving in detail into people’s day-to-day dealings, their immediate surroundings, the common objects of their work, and showing how these constituted inflections of their notions of the strange and magic powers in the cosmos, the invisible forces of good and evil, of malice and luck. The familiar and local – the supposed attributes of common substances such as salt and blood, the popular associations of places and names, the accretion of stories and legends that have grown up around heroes, patrons, historical figures, saints and martyrs – provide keys to the larger mysteries of the universe.
For instance, in his latest work, La Casa dell’Eternità (Milan, 1987), Camporesi explores that most Baroque of all the fantasies of medieval and early modern Europe: Hell. Its geography, its own upside-down social anti-order, its punishments, its roll-calls of sins and sinners – all of these are shown to have proliferated from the barest texts in the Bible, and from projections out of the familiar scenarios of crime and punishment in the home, and in the ecclesiastical and secular courts. Reality and fantasy interlock, and Camporesi indirectly suggests that the more ‘limited’ societies of earlier Europe were prone to generate more ‘luxuriant’ fantasies than the abundant societies of today, with their supersaturation of goods, images and communications.
In exploring such matters, Camporesi was tilling soil touched upon in his earlier writings. In one of the most seminal of these, La Carne Impassibile, recently translated as The Incorruptible Flesh (Cambridge, 1988), he focused upon a topic which fascinated early modern attention and which seems to defy, not just our outlooks nowadays, but above all, our expectations as historians about the thought-worlds of the past. Nowadays, exposure to the flesh, in its dead and rotting forms, is disgusting to us. We loathe contact with blood that has been spilt, with corpses and cadavers. But not so in the past. The culture of early modern Europe positively basked in the flesh, believing it had all kinds of wonderful powers, beyond normal human capacity. Dead bodies, if touched, had healing properties; human blood, bathed in, or drunken, could cure or rejuvenate. ‘Mummy’ – the powder from embalmed corpses – was likewise a potent medicine. The culture teemed with tales of apparently dead bodies coming alive, of suspended animation, of the power of mortified limbs to grow again, and so forth.
These stories of the flesh came from all kinds of different sources: from the stories of the Saints and Martyrs, officially imprimatur’d by the Church; from antiquity, whose credulous natural historians such as Pliny had faithfully magnified all manner of wonders; from popular science and medicine, from quacks, from raconteurs within both oral and literate culture. For one of the cardinal assumptions pervading Camporesi’s historical vision is that the tales of the unusual and the cosmology of the weird and wonderful with which he deals were not simply the mind-fodder of the mere peasantry, the opium of the illiterate, the daydreams of the dregs. Rather these beliefs were current throughout the society, accepted – though not necessarily in the same ways, or to the same degrees, or with the same inflexions – by representatives of all social classes, rich and poor, powerful and downtrodden, literati and illiterate. Indeed, what to our eyes is prima facie the most troublesome aspect of history as presented by Camporesi is indeed the fact that these ‘irrational’ ideas were supported and generated so powerfully, and for so long, precisely by the most educated and authoritative members of the society. A parallel is offered in the history of witchcraft, where traditional popular belief in the malign powers possessed by certain people became transformed, in the early modern centuries, into a full-scale, water-tight, punitive demonology by the clergy, professors, magistrates and nation state.
Here Camporesi confounds our expectations in a double way. Not only were popular and ‘vulgar’ views – about the normality-defying powers of the flesh – supported by the intelligentsia, but the beliefs of Medieval and early modern Christian culture turn out to have been different from, or at least far more complex than, what historians have traditionally suggested. We have always been told that Christianity inculcated a contempt for the flesh, seeing it as mere worm-food, a mass of corruption, a prison house of the soul. That is indeed true, and Camporesi cites abundant instances of ascetics and flagellants. But his point is that the contempt of the flesh, taken to such levels, becomes and endorses its opposite. It expresses a profound fascination for the flesh, as an emblem of life in a world of the inanimate, of change and becoming. It suggests almost a reverence for it, not least because the flesh of those self-scourgers, the great ascetics, became no less an object of veneration, almost adoration, than the bodies beautiful of pin-ups and movie stars nowadays.
Bread of Dreams further explores many of the themes implicit in the above. The Incorruptible Flesh focused upon the miracle and mystery of life in a world in which all things grew and then decayed, and in which the threat of putrefaction seemed omnipresent and all-dangerous. The sustainer of life, indeed the very staff of life, was food. Itself organic, itself therefore subject to the laws of growth and decay – itself, indeed, all too often nearing a state of putrefaction – food was a life-source more aboriginal even than flesh and blood. Yet food itself was dead, the once-living cut off for human consumption. So food utterly symbolized the ambiguous cycles of existence, and the interdependence of all things sublunary. It was an organic cosmos in which all changed and was changed. Man fed on animals which had themselves fed on lower forms of life; in turn man would die, and himself be eaten by the worms. Thus all was transformation, all was interconnected in a cosmic alchemy – compare cheese and worms as the basis for a cosmology in Ginzburg’s book. The most elementary and direct realities of a material, countryside culture fermented into the most vivid imaginative cosmology.
What moved the masses most in the societies of five or three hundred years ago? It was not, au fond, politics or religion, or art or ideas, or even sexuality, argues Camporesi. It was, above all, hunger, and the urgent need to relieve it through food. The axis of famine and food, and the fears and fantasies linked with them, form the core of his inquiry. Using sources as varied as ecclesiastical records and official reports, proverbs, scurrilous verse and popular drama, Camporesi explores the diverse features of a way of life in which, for the vast majority of a society of small-scale peasants, labourers, wanderers, paupers and vagabonds, Lenten living was a cruel and perpetual necessity as much as an act of Christian holiness, and in which a public feast could be the apogee of a lifetime’s aspirations.
Camporesi shows how hunger and satiation, eating and drinking, digesting and defecating, in all their aspects, dominated both private and public, official and unofficial cultures. There is no need to summarize here in any detail all the themes covered in the book. It is, however, worth mentioning a few. Camporesi shows the enormous symbolic significance attached to having enough to eat. Eating well was more important than being rich, famous, or of high status – conspicuous food consumption in fact stood as the very proof of all these attributes. The man able to eat handsomely, with a groaning board, with ovens, fires, and cooks, the man able to stand feasts or run soup kitchens for the poor, was recognized to be the grand man. The fat man was – as in so many third world cultures these days – the visible embodiment of the successful man, the man who had literally incorporated his success, become his own corporation (the obsolescent Victorian colloquial connotation of ‘corporation’ is apt). This prevalent symbolism of body size and shape is, of course, utterly alien in the light of the fashionable connotations of today’s Western societies of superabundance, where fat is corrupt – diseased even – and lean is fit.
Of course, as Camporesi never forgets to emphasize, such symbols are never univocal: they are resources which can be used in a variety of different ways in the culture. As a figure from the past, the fat man is enviable. Yet often enough that enviability becomes the target of criticism, when he keeps all his fat to himself as an alimentary miser – or indeed when he has no business being fat at all, as with the gross monks and friars of popular satire. Through their gluttony, such people are thus condemned out of their own mouths.
Camporesi further expatiates upon the meanings of different sorts of food – which were thought healthy and which unhealthy? which patrician and which plebeian? what precise associations were carried by flesh and vegetables? by red and white meat? by fowl and fish? which foods were considered especially clean and unclean? wholesome or indigestible? which were appropriate for those who worked with their hands, or their brains? Foodstuffs, raw and cooked, bespoke a symbol system which identified the social order no less than did the clothes people wore or the idiom they uttered.
He is also deeply concerned with popular physiologies. How did people envisage what actually happened to the food they ate? How did digestion work? How did potential nourishment get transformed into actual nutrition through the action of the stomach, turning into the fluids which in turn created new, fresh, warm, red blood, which, as demonstrated in The Incorruptible Flesh, was standardly viewed as the very life-force itself? Camporesi thus explores how the acts of eating, digestion, and defecation formed the core of a popular cosmology concerned with explaining living and dying, change and process, the tendency to decay and the capacity to resist it.
It was a culture in which all dreamed of eating flesh (meat was nourishment, taste and status) but in which eating the flesh of certain animals was taboo, and above all, the notion of eating human flesh was utterly charged with feelings of abomination, yet fascination. Tales of anthropophages, and of tribes which practised cannibalism, proliferated. How could it have been different within a religion whose most sacred ritual was the ceremonial repetition of an act of cannibalism? Popular culture, in its orgiastic drunken feasts, mocked the sacred cannibalism of the eucharist. In the world-turned-upside-down respite of Carnival, eating and drinking necessarily assumed the parodic overtones of the blood and body of Jesus Christ.
Above all, Camporesi focuses upon the reality and the metaphor of bread, that staff of life which is the symbol of survival but which, taken on its own, was equally the marker of object poverty. We live today in a society in which the eating of bread has become a dietary irrelevance – no-one now recommends it as indispensable for the needs of life or health – and simultaneously therefore a cultural fossil. Bread nowadays carries few connotations, except archaically (as in ‘Give us this day our daily bread’). Precisely the reverse was true in pre-modern times. Bread marked the divide between life and death. Bread stood for the body within Christian symbolism. Making, breaking, and distributing bread carried profound connotations of friendship, communion, giving, sharing, justice – indeed, literally, companionship. Different sorts and qualities of bread marked status, and were connected with ‘ingrained’ notions of nutritional value, good and bad taste and tastes, distinct occasions, seasons, times of the year, rituals and ceremonials. When Marie Antoinette politely suggested to the French mob that they should go and eat cake, she indirectly acknowledged that the want of bread was the severest blow which the people could sustain.
Various of these themes have been dealt with in their specialized ways by historians of nutrition and diet, economic historians, historians of religious ritual, secular etiquette and manners, and so forth. The great triumph of Camporesi is to interlink them all. His powerful imagination enables him to recreate the central importance of hunger as a moving force in history – both as what we might call a real ‘gut’ drive, and as the stimulus to fantasy, to rebellion, to utopias – the idea of a land of Cockayne, where none will any longer be hungry. The promise of food moved peasants to revolt more than the abstractions of justice, and the ritual world of Carnival depended upon its guarantee of release through bingeing. Not least, he suggests, the fact that so much food was mouldy and rotting, coupled with peasant use of herbs and vegetables with narcotic qualities, constituted a physiological cause for intoxicating fantasies: the ‘delusions’ of the past were toxicologically produced by hunger, or by the food people ate.
In Camporesi’s breathtaking vision, covering several centuries of early modern peasant society, and focusing chiefly but not exclusively on Italy, real social history and l’histoire des mentalités fuse; not with the exemplary rigour that Annales history has often demanded, but with a tremendous flair and imaginative insight which is apt to disguise the fact that Camporesi is also immensely erudite in the byways of research.
Camporesi is not, however, an easy writer. Partly this is a problem of the relative unfamiliarity of his source materials and range of cultural reference for English readers. His central topics – Carnival, the Counter-Reformation Church, the popular stories of saints and heroes – do not haye their blazingly obvious equivalents in the actual lived-world of early modern England. This may, in part, be an optical illusion due to the orientation of English history-writing. Socio-cultural historians have concentrated on the religious politics of popular culture in early modern England – the roots of the Levellers and the Diggers, as it were – but, despite pioneering work by E. P. Thompson, popular customs and beliefs remain under-researched. Simon Schama’s recent Embarrassment of Riches (London, 1987) – a study of the fabric of urban living in the golden century of the Dutch republic – shows how a ‘bourgeois’ and ‘Protestant’ culture manifested surprisingly many of the features of the world depicted by Camporesi, not least the semiotics of food, drink and consumption as a whole.
Nevertheless, real difficulties are presented by Camporesi’s work. He covers a vast amount of ground in a grand sweep. He encompasses many centuries, emphasizing the longue durée from the high middle ages through to the building of the modern, mass state in the nineteenth century. He habitually juxtaposes popular songs and tales, learned theology, the lives of the saints, graffiti, official sumptuary laws, the vernacular lore, books of etiquette and the like. His aim in such juxtapositions is partly to provoke. It is, more importantly, to make points about the very absence of sharp cultural boundaries in earlier centuries. Yet there may remain a residual uncertainty about the quality of his sources or the weight of inferences from them. Does a reference in a sermon necessarily indicate that a practice was common on the street? It is often impossible to tell, and Camporesi does not stop to discuss such interpretative issues down to the last iota. To those readers who may feel unsure as to exactly how to locate Camporesi’s exploration of the alimentary imagination of earlier centuries within wider key scholarly concerns, it may be worth addressing certain issues individually.
Food and the Body
Much of Camporesi’s work presupposes the powerful presence of a popular discourse concerning the operation of the body, its physiological functions, the conditions under which health could be maintained or sickness would set in. One might think that such questions were reserved for discussion by doctors, and that it was but rarely that people at large addressed themselves to these matters. But that would be a mistake. Recent research into the history of conceptions of the body, into the metaphorical meaning of the organs and into the histories of health and disease, amply bear out Camporesi’s perception that lay culture had deeply entrenched and often prominent visions as to the functioning of the body. Above all, right across the cultural spectrum, from the highest medical authorities down to common opinion, life was seen as a continual process of consumption, in which the energy and strength of the individual constitution depended upon constant supplies of adequate nourishment and stimulus from outside, and upon the equally efficient disposal of bodily wastes (without which, poisoning would set in).
The healthy body was thus the body with an efficient through-put system. Its effective working was easily endangered. Many sorts of food would upset the system. Too much meat was potentially dangerous. For meat itself was corrupting flesh. If it remained too long in the stomach, it could itself engender corruption, for example breeding intestinal worms. But too much vegetable food was likewise seen as a potential health threat, for it was thought to be acidic, hard to digest, and often leading to wind, cholic, fluxes and dysentery. That is why bread was widely believed so desirable a food: solid and substantial, yet not subject to decay, and only hard to digest if its quality were poor. In her Geschichte unter der Haut (Stuttgart, 1987), Barbara Duden has recently studied the concepts of the healthy body held by a sample of eighteenth-century German country women, as revealed by their medical records. She finds that they believed that health largely depended upon proper diet, and that bread was widely seen as the safest nutritive staple, especially to be recommended when pregnant women began to suffer from pica, having longings for exotic foodstuffs. Likewise, in his The Body and Society (Oxford, 1984), the historical sociologist of food and health, Bryan Turner, has emphasized the associations in eighteenth-century English writings of a high bread-content diet with certain ideas of earnestness and responsibility. George Cheyne, a fashionable physician, argued that a diet rich in seeds would avert nervousness, hypochondria, stomach diseases and many of the other prevalent disorders of the day.
Consumption and the Consumer Society
The consumption of bread was thus essential for sustaining the constitution. But historians also acknowledge, in line with Camporesi’s perception, that food was a crucial item of social exchange. The better our understanding of the medieval economy, the more we grasp how sophisticated were the systems of exchange in operation, sometimes involving money, sometimes simply involving the bartering of goods in kind. Even amongst relatively self-sufficient peasant economies, items of diet such as salt would have to be purchased, and carried great exchange value, and thereby symbolic value. The miller’s services were needed. Often the baker was the only person in the village owning an oven: he would bake people’s bread and other dishes, as well as selling bread ready-made. Trading and marketing focused upon grain and bread.
Nothing secured or threatened socio-political stability so frequently three or four centuries ago as the operations of market arrangements for the buying and selling of grainstuffs and the sale of bread. Everywhere market regulations laid down in enormous detail the legal price for grain and bread (the ingredients, size and quality of a loaf). Typically grain could legally be sold only in the full market, between certain hours, under public view. Magistrates not normally sympathetic to popular aspirations would nevertheless ensure that market regulations upholding the price and quality of bread were sustained. Improper dealers in grain and traders in bread – those who hoarded or adulterated – were the bogeys of folklore, and were often attacked or prosecuted. Perhaps the most prominent form of social protest in early modern Europe was the grain riot or the bread riot – popular disturbances which often won some sympathy from the authorities.
Thus bread was at the heart of a complex transition from relatively autarkic economic conditions to market relations. Trading in grain and bread was central to the development of market relationships; yet trade in these commodities was too sensitive to be left to market forces. Thus bread was central to that struggle which E. P. Thompson has identified between the ‘moral economy’ and ‘political economy’, because maintenance of a fair price for bread was tantamount to saying that labouring people had the right to live. When the authorities were no longer willing or able to sustain adequate grain supplies, what typically resulted was either revolution – as in France – or famine.
Bread and Famine
As Camporesi emphasizes, the folklore and mythologies of early modern Europe were indeed haunted by the fear and threat of famine – of being what we colloquially call ‘starving hungry’, as a result of dearth and deprivation, or, worse still, literally starving to death. Obviously many poor people individually starved to death, but so did large proportions of the entire population of many regions in Europe in bad years right through the eighteenth century. Famines were the product of the concatenation of multiple circumstances. Obviously they could result from absolute failures of food production – from crises brought on by disastrous weather conditions. They typically also involved breakdowns in the market mechanism for getting food supplies to areas of gravest need. Sometimes war was to blame for this.
Yet in many ways the eighteenth century proved a turning-point. Those precise capitalist pressures which had traditionally been so greatly feared as the causes of shortfalls were in fact lubricating the market. In eighteenth-century England, famines killing off sizeable numbers of people had ceased to happen. Indeed, for a while, thanks to advances in capitalist agriculture, England became a grain exporting nation. In the nineteenth century, imperialism resulted in a mass importation of primary foodstuffs to Europe which ended the threat of mass starvation. The nineteenth century, the century of industrialization, was a century of poverty, but it was not a century of mass famine. The spectre of mass starvation began to retreat, and, with it, the centrality of food, and bread, to popular consciousness began to wane.
Hunger, Hallucination and Fantasy
One of the most startling claims in this book is Camporesi’s view that much of the population of earlier Europe was living in some sort of drugged condition. This, he suggests, was sometimes the effect of mere hunger, producing dazed or stupefied states. Sometimes it was the result of eating tainted bread, made from mouldy, verminous flour, or stale food whose condition had deteriorated. Sometimes it was through accidental or deliberate adulteration – mixing flour with mash, bran, potatoes, vegetable leaves or chemicals to make it go further or to transform the taste. It was also thanks to consuming all manner of fermented drinks, mushrooms, distillations and the like, and applying or sniffing lotions, oils, essences, etc.. Such intoxication – the equivalent perhaps of betel-chewing in Asia or the use of coca leaves in South America – perhaps inured populations to lives of toil, tedium and general hopelessness; perhaps also provided hallucinatory experiences which stimulated that vision of the tangibility of the supernatural which is so central to early modern religious experiences; and perhaps accounts for bizarre phenomena such as witchcraft possession and religious convulsionism.
Camporesi’s is a rather startling claim, difficult to assess. Should we treat this as a flight of fancy, an ingenious suggestion, or does it contain a deeper truth? It should at least be clear that Camporesi is not here offering a crude reductionist resolution – he is not suggesting for a moment that we can simply explain away the religious and occultist consciousness of earlier times by referring to mere chemical hallucinogens. Nor is he necessarily saying that our forebears were leading their lives any more under the influence of artificial stimulants than we do nowadays with our diets of tea and coffee, cigarettes and alcohol. Camporesi’s point, as I take it, is that historians need to address themselves to the myths by which people live, and the totality of the conditions which support these collective fantasies. Many factors must inevitably be involved in creating and reproducing the most ingrained beliefs – the brainwashing power of education, of all the media continually active in the transmission of images – songs, incantations, paintings. Many of these are drummed into the mind in infancy, almost subliminally; many sink deep into consciousness through repetition, through association (the dark, rich, incense-laden air of the church with its ritual – the equivalent for earlier ages of television or the rock video nowadays), through habituation. Consciousness-affecting drugs and food may be a further element amongst many others. Just as ‘junk food’ is today claimed to produce subtle alterations to the mind, so the junk bread of the past may have disturbed body and mind, while producing subtly altered mental states which enabled the poverty and deprivation the better to be borne.
It would be easy for the stolid Anglo-Saxon reader to feel suspicion of, and resistance towards, Camporesi’s alluring theses: they join together what are commonly kept asunder in academic scholarship; they are undoubtedly speculative; Camporesi’s vision moves too fast to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ with a scholarly footnote (though the visible apparatus of learning is impressive indeed). Above all, he invites us to confront the strange. And instead of scaling down the strange into the familiar, he invites us to see everything as strange – not least, by implication, the set of values within which we ourselves are operating, our own culinary fantasies, our obsessions about size and weight and dieting, which lead to the diseases of our own age – anorexia, bulimia – which are every bit as weird as the flagellomania of the past. Camporesi’s history defamiliarizes, but it does not wallow in the exotic for its own sake. Rather it insists that we make the heroic act of understanding which is necessary if we are to understand our own past – and our own present.
Roy Porter
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London
Introduction
The flight of the ragged and starving masses of the modern era into artificial paradises, worlds turned upside down and impossible dreams of compensation originates from the unbearability of the real world, the low level of sustenance, dietary deficiency and (for contrast) excesses; these inspired an unbalanced, incoherent and spasmodic interpretation of reality. This resulted in the construction of a model of existence different from the one elaborated in the same period by rationalist intellectuals like Galileo, Bacon and Descartes, who laid down a firm foundation in the construction of a world machine: a mental and physical ‘works’ regulated by a coherent mechanical and logical apparatus, a perfectly and inexorably self-adapting system of fittings and attachments.
Meanwhile, at the lower level of ‘civil’ society – in the subordinate world of instrumental and ‘mechanical’ beings, tyrannized by their daily use of ‘vulgar breads’, in which the mixture of inferior grains, often contaminated and spoiled by poor storage, or, as happened not infrequently, mixed (sometimes deliberately) with toxic and narcotic vegetables and cereals – the troubled rhythm of an existence verging on the bestial contributed to the formation of deviant models and delirious visions. The dichotomy between the ‘bread of princes and great masters’ and the ‘bread for dogs’1 (effectively described by Giovanni Michele Savonarola, ‘most excellent physician’ at the University of Padua in the second half of the fifteenth century) is transformed into a dietary metaphor of the two different cultural systems that find their focal point in bread. Bread – a polyvalent object on which life, death and dreams depend – becomes a cultural object in impoverished societies, the culminating point and instrument, real and symbolic, of existence itself: a dense, polyvalent paste of manifold virtue in which the nutritive function intermingles with the therapeutic (herbs, seeds and curative pastes were mixed into the bread), magico-ritual suggestion with the ludico-fantastical, narcotic and hypnotic.
Among the most common and popular foodstuffs that permitted the transition from a human condition on the verge of the unliveable to a drugged and paranoid dimension was poppyseed bread (the poppy was cultivated in vast areas of Europe with what today would be called industrial methods). It was a bread disguised and flavoured, and in addition spiced with coriander seeds, anise, cumin, sesame-seed oil, and all the possible delectable additives available in the ‘vegetable kingdom’, with which man dwelled in a close intimacy, today unthinkable. In areas where it was cultivated, even the flour of hemp-seeds was used in the kitchen to prepare doughs and breads which ‘cause the loss of reason’ and ‘generate domestic drunkenness and a certain stupidity’.2 One could doubtless regard this as having been directed not so much from above (as is sometimes supposed), as desired and sought by the masses themselves, consumed as they were by disease, hunger, nocturnal fears and daytime obsessions.
The collective journey into illusion, followed by ‘domestic drunkenness’ – with the help of hallucinogenic seeds and herbs, arising from the background of chronic malnourishment and often hunger (which is the simplest and most natural producer of mental alterations and dream-like states) – helps to explain the manifestation of collective mental delirium, of mass trances, of entire communities and villages exploding into choreal dancing. But it could also be the path which allows us to catch a glimpse of a two-sided mental model of the world, born under the ambiguous and equivocal sign of dualism, conditioned by a hallucinated and altered awareness of reality, where the layers are overturned, the universals reversed, the world ending up head-over-heels, with head on the ground and feet in the air. The result of an altered measuring of space and time, based on a non-Euclidic geometry and a magical, dreamlike perspective where the relations and proportions are regulated by different instruments of verification and measure from those employed in the cultural areas where classical logic predominates, which are none the less not able to separate themselves totally from contamination introduced by the ‘culture of hunger’.
At this point it appears evident that poverty and low subsistence levels ‘influenced the categories of logic once again shown to be non-universal and, instead, generated by cultural conditions’ (A. M. Di Nola). Poverty also attacked the sense of time which in a world of destitution never leads into the future (inheritance of the rich), unless ironically, but is consumed in the present, or in the obsessive repetition of an ever-identical past, recurring immutably, on a fixed date, like a constant nightmare.
As with the curse and nightmare of decayed flesh and destroyed spirit, so with the worms that consume the bowels even before death can overtake the body. These were the almost permanent guests of an infected social body, and this ineradicable obsessive belief in mass infestation, having become a repulsive metaphor, was projected on to the ‘verminous populace’ of tramps and beggars, the voracious worms of the granaries of the rich. But the global projection of a widespread demonism, an evil contamination (in the guise of repulsive insects, and using the mask of the foul animalcula), also took possession, invading and bewitching the pauper’s body and soul in the name of Satan.
The spectre of this vampirish society of people possessed becomes visible, fleeing the painful recognition of the brevitas vitae and the fear of death, while trying desperately and cruelly to prolong life by sucking yound blood, opening and closing the veins of its own and others’ bodies. This society is possessed by a corporeal culture neurotically sensitive to the internal circulation of the humours and convinced of the absolute primacy of good human blood, its ‘marvellous properties’, which – if distilled in an alembic to become the ‘elixir of life, that is, life-giving fire’ (as written in Secreti diversi et miracolosi by an anonymous author who passed himself off as the great Gabriele Fallopio)3 – not only cures every infirmity, but retards death and restores youth.
The purging of the blood and the ridding of impurity (‘the evil tempers,’ recalled Levino Lennio, ‘mix with the humours’4) were the decisive moments of every therapeutic activity based on the expulsion of corruption and evil, since ‘the dismal and black humour in the blood generated horrible spirits and, if the blood is not purged, it causes lycanthropy and fears and ugly thoughts, such that one sees men rave and become spellbound in foul and filthy places, among graves and corpses, because the infected spirit desires things similar to itself’.5
