As a predominantly Christian culture for several centuries, daily life in medieval Western Europe became closely entwined with religious practices. Food, in particular, reflected Christian beliefs and actions in both quotidian and extraordinary ways. What, when, and how people ate was partly determined by the liturgical year and the calendar of saints. Personal prayer and sacrifice was reflected by fasting and abstinence from specific foods. And every Church celebration, however solemn or joyous, was demonstrated by culinary practices. In my presentation, I will describe several of these, including:

• The Mass as a Eucharistic meal;

• The centrality and symbolism of bread and wine at medieval tables;

• The practice of fasting and abstinence to reflect personal and Church-mandated sacrifice and prayer;

• The importance of meat and fish recipes in celebrating the liturgical year;

• The production of specialty Christian foods, such as Communion wafers and convent-produced pastries dedicated to saints and religious orders; and

• The depiction of food and culinary practices in religious art, including literature, music, and visual art.

In everyday and extraordinary culinary customs, Christians in medieval Europe acted out their faith through food, continually shaping and understanding liturgical practices.

*ONLINE* Cooking Demonstration and Presentation at The Ohio State University’s Conference on “The Experimental Archaeology of Medieval and Renaissance Food.”

On February 11-12, 2022, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies will host its biennial celebration of Popular Culture and the Deep Past (PCDP) at the Ohio State University, with ‘The Experimental Archaeology of Medieval and Renaissance Food.’ As in past years, this event will feature a scholarly conference (with papers, round tables, and other academic events) nested within a Renaissance-faire-like carnival (featuring exhibits, gaming, contests, and activities of all kinds).

Celebrate the Medieval Institute's 75th Anniversary at every home football game this year! Join us this week for a talk on medieval food culture by culinary historian Sarah Peters Kernan, and enjoy a harvest feast.

*ONLINE* Institute of Historical Research Food History Seminar

In this seminar, I propose a new model in which to consider the development of cookbooks in medieval and early modern England. I propose a framework shaped not only by the food and structure of recipes, but also the networks of readers who copied, purchased, and used these texts. I will particularly focus on the shift from manuscript to print in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Reader networks ranged from professionals like medical practitioners, elite households, and middling class women. These groups and the overlaps between them reveal much about the changes in cookbooks throughout this period, such as the types of recipes contained within and the presentation of the recipes on the page. My conclusions were formed by an examination of over one hundred manuscript and printed cookeries in libraries across the United States and Europe and tens of digitized books and manuscripts. In carefully documenting diverse textual, codicological, and bibliographical features including dedications, ingredients, mise en page, marginalia, watermarks, and stains, I was able to identify several distinct groups of readers. Unraveling the web of cookbook readers in conjunction with concurrent changes in food trends and book production is important in demonstrating the growth of the cookery genre and the rapid expansion of readership in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This expansion of readership furthermore supports a broader claim in my research that a widespread audience existed for manuscript cookeries prior to the introduction of print and subsequent explosion in cookbook production. These early reader networks shaped the prodigious circulation of recipes among families and individuals in seventeenth and eighteenth-century recipe books and the parallel circulation and readership of cookbooks as printed texts.

In the modern Western world, coffee, tea, and chocolate are viewed as daily necessities, found everywhere from convenience stores to chain restaurants to artisanal markets. These three caffeinated foodstuffs—all originally consumed as beverages—first made their way to Europe in the sixteenth century, awakening a continent accustomed to alcohol. Over the course of three centuries, these drinks became popular in different pockets of Europe; geography, religion, class, gender, and politics highly influenced these preferences. In this lecture, we will examine the rise of coffee, tea, and chocolate in early modern Europe and the consequences of their popularity.