Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words

Description

In early modern culture, eating and reading were entangled acts. Our dead metaphors (swallowed stories, overcooked narratives, digested information) are all that now remains of a rich interplay between text and food, in which every element of dining, from preparation to purgation, had its equivalent in the literary sphere. Following the advice of the poet George Herbert, this essay collection "looks to the mouth", unfolding the charged relationship between ingestion and expression in a wide variety of texts and contexts. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words fills a significant gap in our understanding of early modern cultural history. Situated at the lively intersection between literary, historical and bibliographical studies, it opens new lines of dialogue between the study of material textuality and the history of the body. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents Notes on contributors Introduction 1 Carving for knaves 2 Reading, writing and cooking 3 The kitchen in the printing house 4 ‘To dream to eat Books’: bibliophagy, bees and literary taste in early modern commonplace culture 5 Skelton and the macaronic book 6 Spenser’s vomit: imitation, language, materiality 7 The Diet of Worms 8 Eating the book, or why we need to digest what we read Index