Roman Community at Table during the Principate or Feast of Words

Roman Community at Table during the Principate

Author: John Donahu

"This book is indispensable both for ancient history and for food history, since it sets the moralizing literature of the Roman republic and empire within the correcting frame of epigraphy to clearly reveal the ordering of status and gender at meal times. Donahue offers fascinating reflections on public and private dining, doing for Roman politics what Pauline Schmitt did for the Greek polis. The Roman Community at Table during the Principate brilliantly ties meal times into the practices of Rome's Hellenistic predecessors and richly reflects the religious and cultural contexts of eating."
---John Wilkins, University of Exeter
"Donahue gives a riveting account of Roman communal dining in the civic sphere. Assembling scattered, difficult evidence, and employing apt cross-cultural comparisons, he skillfully constructs a picture of an activity central to public life in the Roman west, and of its social, economic, and ideological consequences."
---Matthew Roller, Johns Hopkins University

Ranging from the extravagant banquets of the emperors to the numerous feasts in cities and towns throughout the Western Empire, John F. Donahue's new study examines public feasting in Rome during the first four centuries of the Common Era. Taking as its starting point the development of feasting in ancient Greece and then in Rome, this study brings to the fore the importance of the publicly shared meal in ancient culture and its particular significance within the Roman Empire.
Previous studies have focused on the Roman feast largely for its structural and symbolic elements. Through a careful assessment of ancient evidence and modern comparative material, Donahue breaks newground by focusing on the "public" banquet, allowing the exploitation of a broad range of literary and epigraphic texts. The resulting treatment provides the first comprehensive examination of areas such as festal terminology, the social roles of benefactors and beneficiaries, the kinds of foods offered at feasts, and the role of public venues in community banquets.
Donahue's unique study relies on over three hundred Latin honorary inscriptions to recreate the ancient Roman feast. Illustrations depicting these inscriptions, as well as the food supply trades and various festal venues, bring important evidence to the study of this vital and enduring social practice. This book reveals the integral place of feasting in ancient culture as well as the unique power of food to unite and to separate its recipients along class lines throughout the Roman Empire. It will be of interest not only to classicists and historians of the ancient world, but also to anthropologists and sociologists interested in food and social group dynamics.

Interesting book: Poder Curatico de la Orina or Autism

Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance

Author: Michael Jeanneret

The banquet gives rise to a special moment when thought and the senses—words and food—enhance each other. Throughout history, the ideal of the symposium has reconciled the angel and the beast in the human, renewing the interdependence between the mouth that speaks and the mouth that eats. Michel Jeanneret's lively book explores the paradigm of the banquet as a guide to significant tendencies in Renaissance Humanist culture and shows how this culture in turn illuminates the tensions between physical and mental pleasures. Ranging widely over French, Italian, German, and Latin texts, Jeanneret not only investigates the meal as a narrative artefact but enquires as well into aspects of sixteenth-century anthropology and aesthetics. 

Booknews

Jenneret (French literature, U. of Geneva) explores the paradigm of the banquet as a guide to significant tendencies in Renaissance Humanist culture and shows how this culture in turn illuminates the tensions between physical and mental pleasures--between the mouth that speaks and the mouth that eats. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Part I - Pleasure and the norm 
1. Humanism on holiday
The feast of the gods
The al fresco meal
Conviviality
The head and the stomach
2. Ceremonies and manners
Civility
Manners and Mannerism
The pomp of princes
Officers of the mouth
3. Rules for the appetite
An archaeology of the table
Diet
Medicine v. cookery
Part II - When the fable comes to table
4. Table talk
Convivial speech
A mouth full of words
Philologists or logophiles?
5. Eating the text
Storytelling while eating
'Our after-dinner entertainers'
'My salad and my Muse'
The marrow bone
Metaphors of bibliophagy
6. Classical banquets
Philosophy at meal time
Satire and its cooking
Greedy grammarians
7. Something for every taste
The copious and the varied
Erasmus: feasting on words
Guillaume Bouchet: stuffings
Giordano Bruno: the failed banquet
8. Dog Latin and macronic poetry
Dog Latin, cooks' talk and gibberish
Folengo and the ars macaronica
Muses with greasy hands
'My country is a pumpkin'
9. 'The centre of all books'
'Monarch of ecumenical symposia'
'You only talk about sex'
'Edible syllables and letters'
'I've never seen people talk so much'
Conclusion
Imitatio/Mimesis
Writing and nature
Paradoxical metaphors
Naturalizing the narrative?
Writing in action
Bibliography
Index