Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy: The Renaissance of Taste 9789048552023

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Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy

Food Culture, Food History before 1900 The expanding interest that food studies have elicited in the past few decades confirms the importance of a field that is still very much in the making. The history and cultures of food have been the object of wide-ranging methodological approaches: literary, cultural, economic, and material (to name just a few), and continue to elicit contributions from all the major disciplines. The series publishes monographs on the history and culture of food, and hosts contributions from different fields, historiographic approaches, and perspectives. Contributions cover a long chronological period running from the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century, respecting the distinctive time frames of food history. A similar criterion determines the wide geographic parameters that the series follows. As of the later Middle Ages, food and cuisine traveled with extreme ease not only within the European continent but increasingly to other parts of the world. The purview of this series thus comprises contributions including Europe, the Atlantic world, as well as exchanges with Asia and the Middle East. Series editor: Allen J. Grieco

Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy The Renaissance of Taste

Laura Giannetti

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Nicolò Frangipane, Allegoria d’Autunno, late sixteenth century. Pinacoteca d’Arte Antica- Civici Musei di Udine. Courtesy of the Civici Musei, Udine Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 803 4 e-isbn 978 90 4855 202 3 doi 10.5117/9789463728034 nur 685 © L. Giannetti / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

7

Introduction

11

1. Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning

29

2. Sixteenth-Century Food Wars

87

3. Attending Poetic Banquets

149

4. Femininity and Food Culture in Renaissance Italy

201

Index

253

Acknowledgements Like a recipe that is perfected over numerous trials, this study explored many intriguing possibilities, slowly growing into what I hope is an innovative, colorful, and tasty book. In the process it benefited from the help, encouragement, and moral support of many colleagues, friends, and institutions both in the United States and in Italy. The research for this book really began in 2008-2009 at Villa I Tatti when I was a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation Fellow and during subsequent visits over the years as a former fellow. The unparalleled richness of the Berenson Library there was particularly helpful as was the help and support offered by Michael Rocke and his knowledgeable staff of librarians who welcomed me back as a friend every time I returned. But VIT would not be the ideal place it is without its wonderful staff, cooks, gardeners, guardie, and all the people who work there and make a scholar’s life there so easy and pleasurable. More than a locus amoenus, it is the epitome of the ideal place to be for a scholar of the Italian Renaissance. Among the supportive Directors with whom I had the pleasure to interact over the years, deserving of special mention are Lino Pertile and the present Director, Alina Payne. And at the Villa I met for the f irst time Allen J. Grieco who over the years has been a source of constant support, help, and constructive criticism. He is a mentor with whom I disagreed sometimes, but from whom I learned much that forms the base for this work. He was the first to read the manuscript in draft and final form, and to encourage me to submit it to this series. After the initial research conducted at Villa I Tatti, support was provided by several research grants at the University of Miami, where I taught for many years. Particularly important were a Provost Research Award, a College of Arts and Science International Travel Fund, a General Research Award and the Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities in 2014-2015 which came at a crucial point in the gestation of this book. That semester leave from teaching and the monthly meetings with the other fellows and the Director of the Center, Mihoko Suzuki, was invaluable especially for the critical reading and comments of the other fellows and Mihoko. At The University of Miami my thanks go also to colleagues who have been supporters and friends over the years: especially Mary Lindemann, Mihoko Suzuki, Frank Palmeri, Suzanne Braswell, Viviana Diaz-Balsera, Michael Miller, Logan Connors, Dominique Reill, Ashli White, Eduardo Elena, Hugh Thomas, and Mojca Del Fabbro. They are all models of scholarship and warm friendship:

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I am very grateful to all of them and many others who contributed over the years there. The year 2016-2017 marked another milestone for bringing to fruition this book, when I enjoyed a yearlong fellowship at the Institute for Historical Studies, at the University of Texas at Austin. This was for me a special opportunity for exchanging my views with scholars working on a common theme, Food in History, outside my historical period, and my geographical focus. Crucial was the ongoing intellectual exchange with the other two IHS fellows, Michelle King and Xaq Frohlich, internal and external fellows, and professors and graduate students who attended and contributed to workshops and lectures. Particularly, I would like to thank Rachel Laudan, Douglas Biow, and the Director Seth Garfield and to express my gratitude to Courtney Meadow for her indefatigable organization regarding every activity at the Institute. Over the years I presented portions of my work as invited lectures. Perhaps most important were: the UCLA Annual Charles Speroni Lecture (2016), the University of Toronto Annual Emilio Goggio Lecture (2015), joint talks at Villa I Tatti and The European University Institute in Florence (‘Luxury and the Ethics of Greed’ organized by Catherine Kovesi) and a discussion organized by Valeria Finucci at Duke University (‘The Mediterranean Diet Premodern Food-Fashioning’) (2014), and finally a lecture at the University of Melbourne, ARC Center of Excellence/History of Emotions, ‘Pleasure, Desire and Greed in the Renaissance’ (2012). All were crucial in shaping my thinking and my writing. No research work would have been possible without the unflagging support of the Interlibrary Office at the University of Miami Richter Library, which procured for me the most difficult to find books and articles. As an Italian scholar I have always been a great admirer of American libraries for their eff iciency, organization, and willingness to help. I would like in particular to mention here the University of Texas at Austin Library, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Library. But during the pandemic year, stuck at home in Treviso, I found much help and support at my little local public libraries and I would like to thank especially the Biblioteca Comunale di Treviso and the Biblioteca Comunale di Montebelluna. In Venice the Ca’ Foscari Library and the Marciana Library in the early stages of my research were crucial for their rich collections of sixteenth-century books. Textformations’ expert hands helped transform my often Italian phrasing of English and style into a more readable book. I am particularly grateful to Amyrose McCue Gill for her expertise and constructive questions that

Acknowledgements

9

made it possible for me to finish this work during a particularly difficult period. Special thanks are due to Erika Gaffney, my editor at AUP, for her support and patience over this same period. Portions of this book (now in modified versions) appeared in journals and edited books. They are detailed in notes when necessary and briefly recorded here to thank the editors: – ‘The Forbidden Fruit or the Taste for Sodomy in Renaissance Italy’. Quaderni d’Italianistica, Vol. 27.1 (2006): 31-52. – ‘Renaissance Food-Fashioning or The Triumph of Greens’. California Italian Studies, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (2009-2010): 1-16. – ‘Of Eels and Pears: A Sixteenth-Century Debate on Taste, Temperance and the Pleasures of the Senses’. In Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler, 289-305. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2012. – ‘“Taste of Luxury” in Renaissance Italy: in Practice and in the Literary Imagination’. In Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy, ed. by Catherine Kovesi, pp. 73-94. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018. – ‘The Sausage Wars: Or How the Sausage and Carne Battled for Gastronomic and Social Prestige in Renaissance Literature and Culture’. In Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Jacqueline Murray and Nicholas Terpstra, pp. 160-179. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Thanking all the colleagues who over the years contributed in big and small ways to this book would be an impossible task but a special thank goes to: Alessandro Arcangeli, Deanna Shemek, Ken Albala, Joanne Ferraro, Sara Matthews-Grieco, Catherine Kovesi, Douglas Biow, Valeria Finucci, Jane Tylus, Konrad Eisenbichler, Nicholas Terpstra, Julia Hairston, Jacqueline Murray, Anne Leader, Sergius Kodera, Mario Casari, Camilla Russell, Danielle Callegari, Gerry Milligan, Marta Caroscio, Alison Frazier, Edward Muir, Lucia Re, Elena Brizio, Pina Palma, Molly Bourne, Massimo Ciavolella, Giovanni Dall’Orto, and Lauro Martines. In the end, I would also like to thank my sister Rita, brother-in-law Valentino, and niece Alice, who were always present and provided support and encouragement in the form of many wonderful dinners and many, many discussions of this book that tested their commitment to family. My long-term close friend Michela dal Borgo and her husband Sandro Bosato also have been unique and much appreciated pillars of support over the years and a special testament to the power of a friendship that has lasted

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since our University days in Venice as undergraduate students studying with Gaetano Cozzi. Finally, this book would have never seen the light of day without the constant support and guidance of Guido Ruggiero, companion in life and intellectual quests. If there is a human touch to this book, as I hope there is, in many ways it is a reflection of the many adventures, successes, and, of course, also set backs that we have shared over the years. This book is dedicated to him and to my mother Delma Peruch who was always proud of my work, and passed away as I was finishing it.

Introduction Abstract This study – which emerged from a casual interest in apparently insignificant accounts of dinners and dining in Italian Renaissance comedies – reveals and subjects to thematic and theoretical analysis the complex and conflicted world of food culture in sixteenth-century Italy as it developed in a wide range of literary texts. The literary imagination is here reconsidered from the perspective of food culture, a lens that exposes what I argue is a circular model of food and literary production in which practice influences both imagination and literature, which in turn impact the world of everyday life. The literary imagination of food thus becomes not only a way of exploring changes in the understanding of food and the notion of taste but also a driving force behind the Cinquecento turn that took place in both literature and food culture of the period. Keywords: food, taste, literature, Cinquecento, appetito, gusto

Over the last thirty years, the study of food, eating, and food culture in early modern Italy has become an exciting and significant new item on the scholarly agenda of historians, art historians, and literary critics. A summary of the evolution of this vast and rapidly changing field – which began in the 1960s and 1970s as a fairly traditional history of food and agriculture but is continuously emerging as a much more wide-ranging and inclusive material and cultural history – is beyond the scope of either this book or its brief introduction.1 What I offer here instead is a brief account of the paths that led me, in the course of a career spent reading Italian Renaissance 1 Interested readers can, however, find such a summary amongst the scholarly works that have been most important for this book, including Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance; Flandrin and Montanari, Food: A Culinary History; Montanari, Nuovo Convivio; Montanari, Il cibo come cultura; Gautier and Grieco, ‘Food and Drink’; Grieco, Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature; Capatti and Montanari, La cucina Italiana; Camporesi, Il paese della fame; Elias, Civilizing Process; McIver, Cooking and Eating; Albala, Cultural History of Food; Pilcher,

Giannetti, L., Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy: The Renaissance of Taste. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728034_intro

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FOOD CULTURE AND LITER ARY IMAGINATION IN EARLY MODERN ITALY

literature, to write about the Renaissance of taste as it appears in the literary imagination of sixteenth-century Italian authors. My interest in this topic emerged from an intensive and extensive, if not nearly exhaustive, reading of Italian Renaissance comedies – both the well-known and the virtually unknown – undertaken as research for my first book, Lelia’s Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy. Many of these comedies present a scene in which, around tables set for dinner, parasites,2 servants, lower-class characters, and old men in love3 discuss the properties and attractiveness of certain foods or dream of enjoying feasts of impressive abundance. These scenes seem primarily to serve an illustrative (and at times humorous) purpose: rather than being highly relevant to the plot, they tend to appear more concerned with giving a colorful, contemporary feel to the play’s characters and to the context in which they are operating. Perhaps because of their ‘minor’ or ‘marginal’ status in Cinquecento comedy, these food scenes have been little studied – although it is worth noting that, quite recently, a number of Pietro Aretino’s and Giambattista della Porta’s plays have received significant scholarly attention from the perspective of eating and food.4 In general, however, such critical analysis focuses on the ‘low’ character of the servants, who are excluded from the lavish dinners their masters enjoy, or on the equally low character of the gluttonous parasites, who constantly seek to wrangle invitations to dinner: as reflections of a traditional vision of the ‘world upside down’, such scenes are usually discussed tangentially, seen as comic relief less worthy of serious study.5 Nevertheless, these scenes clearly refer to the broader social and cultural world of the day, in which food and food culture played a meaningful role. ‘Cultural Histories of Food’; Gentilcore, Food and Health; Nicoud, Les régimes de santé au moyen âge; Varriano, Taste and Temptations. 2 Parasites, in the comedies of the Italian Renaissance, are the rather unsavory characters derived from Latin literature (Plautus in particular) who are constantly hungry and always looking to eat for free. See for instance Stragualcia in Gl’Ingannati (Intronati) and Pasifilo in I Suppositi (Ariosto). 3 On old men in love and aphrodisiacal foods in comedies, see Giannetti, ‘The Satyr in the Kitchen Pantry’. 4 On food and consumption in Aretino’s comedies, see Biow, In Your Face, pp. 63-91 (for parasites and food in particular, see pp. 71-84). On della Porta, see Kodera, ‘Bestiality and Gluttony in Theory and Practice’; Beecher and Ferraro, introduction to The Sister; Weintritt, Culinary Professions. 5 For the world-upside-down topos, see the foundational studies: Cocchiara, Il mondo alla rovescia; Casali and Capaci, La festa del mondo rovesciato; Burke, Popular Culture; Zemon Davis, Society and Culture; Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe. More recently, see: Robert-Nicoud, The World Upside Down, pp. 1-15.

Introduction

13

Sixteenth-century comedies are of course not the only texts that have intriguing and suggestive insights into the relationship between literature and food culture. Though from a slightly earlier period, the mock-heroic poems Morgante (1483) by Luigi Pulci and Baldus by Teofilo Folengo (1517) had already become a significant source for literary scholars of food culture, with good reason. Pulci’s Morgante and Margutte are the giant and half-giant protagonists of a poem in which the main adventures are more culinary than military. Baldus opens its send up of the knight-errant tradition with a mock invocation of fat Muses who live on top of a high mountain, busily grating cheese and cooking tagliatelle and gnocchi; it is there that Folengo, looking for divine inspiration, declares that he has found his macaroneam artem (art of making macaroni or gnocchi).6 Morgante and Baldus have most often been studied as poems of ‘fat eating’,7 although recently some have reassessed the treatment of food excess and abundance in Baldus8 and have advanced political interpretations for Morgante.9 In contrast with this literature of excess and gluttony there is a significant literary tradition that focuses on dearth and misery – two sides of the same coin in a food culture of hunger and frequent lack. Plays written by actor and playwright Ruzante along with popular poetry produced by the prolific cantastorie (literally ‘singer of tales’, hereafter translated as ‘storyteller’) Giulio Cesare Croce feature ever-famished servants, soldiers, and peasants on an eternal quest for food and survival.10 Taken together, these works seemed to exhaust the two major kinds of food representations in sixteenth-century Italian literature: Cuccagna – Cockaigne, or the Land of Plenty – contrasted with dearth; lavish court 6 ‘Sed prius altorium vestrum chiamare bisognat, o macaroneam Musae quae funditis artem’ (Ma prima bisogna invocare il vostro aiuto, o Muse che scodellate l’arte macaronica); Folengo, Baldus, vol. 1, pp. 5-6. 7 Il grasso mangiare is an expression often used in Italian literary criticism to indicate the commonly occurring scenes in mock epic poems where characters voraciously eat all sorts of food, especially meat. See for instance the f igure of the cook – the half-giant Margutte – in Morgante and the banquet scene at the French court in Baldus. 8 Mario Chiesa, the most recent editor of Baldus, underlines how positive characters in the poem often enjoy restrained meals. See Chiesa, introduction to Folengo, Baldus, p. 22. An example is the simple rustic meal offered by Berto Panada, a peasant in Cipada, who gives refuge to Guidone and Baldovina after their flight from Paris. 9 See Chiesa, introduction to Baldus, and Palma, Savoring Power, pp. 89-15. On Baldus, see also Woodhouse, ‘Teofilo Folengo’. On the voracious appetite of Morgante and Margutte in Pulci’s poem, see Garrido, ‘Le theme de la “grande bouffe”’. 10 As an introduction to Ruzante and the theme of hunger, see Carroll, Angelo Beolco; Zancarini, ‘El mal de la loa chez Ruzante’; Henke, ‘Comparing Poverty’; Henke, Poverty and Charity; Daddario and Zerdy, ‘When You Are What You Eat’; Rouch, introduction to L’Eccellenza e Trionfo del Porco.

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banquets contrasted with simple, humble meals.11 As I read and reflected further on texts less studied from the perspective of food culture, however, it became clear that Cinquecento literature offered a much more complex picture worthy of deeper study. At the same time, the potential richness of this material carried with it a significant methodological problem: to base a study on single authors, their distinctive poetics, and the specific ways they were influenced by food culture seemed to imply that literature and food culture were two separate worlds that might sometimes cross paths in a given text. According to a long-standing narrative of sixteenth-century food culture, dining and dining practices crossed the threshold of literature via a process that mirrored Norbert Elias’s Civilizing Process, wherein literary writing on food evolved from a kind of naturalism and materialism in Pulci’s fifteenth-century Morgante to a more ‘civilized’ sixteenth-century world of Ariostean and Tassian knights and their feasts; from Folengo’s fat and funny Muses to the good manners of Italian courtiers so famously depicted in Castiglione’s Cortegiano and della Casa’s Galateo. Against my readings of Cinquecento literature, however, this narrative seemed unconvincing – especially when I turned to the work of historians on the many and diverse aspects of sixteenth-century food culture related to class and social standing; medical learning and dietary regimes; the ontological, metaphorical, and symbolic status of many foods; ideas about moderation and restraint; the embodied or material experience of eating; gender and sexuality; taste and the pleasures of the senses. Moreover, reading beyond both the literary and the food culture canons made it evident that there is yet more to explore: so-called ‘minor’ works of sixteenth-century poetry and prose, comedies, private letters, diaries, dialogues, and collections of lesser-known novelle. This diverse literature, embedded in and interacting with various contexts and discourses, uses playful and skeptical stories involving food culture to show how notions of medical food culture imported from the past – the Greek and Roman as well as the medieval worlds – were no longer trustworthy; to address issues around social hierarchies, rules, and prejudices; to deal with the ongoing conflict between experience and practice on the one hand and acquired ancient wisdom on the other (in particular via powerful examples of the discrepancy between food practices, ideals, and taboos); to explore sexuality and gender through a kind of ‘embodied imagination’ – the materiality of the felt experience of tasting fruits and vegetables. Ultimately, 11 On Cuccagna, see Boiteux, ‘L’immaginario dell’abbondanza alimentare’. For an overview of the theme of excess and gluttony, see Varotti, ‘Abbuffata’.

Introduction

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the corpus of materials under discussion here reveals a highly articulated constellation of food discourses that resonated with a contemporary ethos as well as with a medical and gastronomic culture – and, importantly, with people’s experiences, everyday language, and practices. What we might call the literature of food discourse – dietary manuals, cookbooks, and commentaries written in the vernacular that were printed and distributed widely – were in constant circulation and became known to less educated readers and to even semi-literate readers, as well as to literary authors who engaged with them in multiple ways in their own work. This book thus explores simultaneously the deeply interrelated worlds of literature and food culture, exposing their many common themes, preoccupations, and mutual influences. My approach to the literary texts discussed in this book is broadly cultural, enabling consideration of an expansive number of genres and texts as well as concentrated interest in what I think of as the Renaissance ‘food imaginary’. It is a truism to affirm that literary texts are neither solely fiction nor a straightforward echo of reality; to explore the area of interaction between the two can spark some stimulating surprises, which I hope will happen with this book. Of course, though speaking of cultural circulation and exchange in the Italian Renaissance is relatively commonplace, I would like to stress the relevance of these concepts for the present study, which seeks to dismantle binary thinking in terms of a simple conversation between a ‘lower’ culture of food and a ‘higher’ literary culture12. Instead, what emerges forcefully and fruitfully from the widely flung readings that inform this volume is the circular nature of sixteenth-century exchanges between food culture, which brought many issues to contemporary literature, and literary texts on and about food, which in turn contributed compellingly to changing perspectives in food culture. The eclectic methodology developed herein thus foregoes focusing on individual authors in an attempt to recognize, confront, and analyze the complex and intertwined significance of different types of sources (theoretical, prescriptive, descriptive, and imaginative) 12 The reader will find in this book few references to Mikhail Bakhtin’s rather ahistorical and all-inclusive treatment of the grotesque and carnivalesque body; of the relation between high and low; and of Carnival and Lent – all of which, until not long ago, seemed a necessary aspect of many studies of sixteenth-century food culture and literature. Bakhtin’s analysis of the meaning of food in Gargantua and Pantagruel has indeed been used to study the grotesque appetite of Margutte and Morgante in Pulci’s poem, a work well known to Rabelais. See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 341. As more recent work has shown, however, the voracious appetite of the two giants is more complicated and can be read, for example, as a critique of Marsilio Ficino’s philosophy of high love and beauty (Palma, Savoring Power).

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operating in dialogue with each other. Also avoided here is recourse to the broad theories of Louis Marin and Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose foundational works on food as a sign exemplifying ideologies and attitudes as well as upon the transformation of nature into culture through the act of cooking are well known and have long been seen as suggestive and theoretically valuable.13 While the literary narration of a meal may often be a symbolic or encoded form of communication, this was not always and not necessarily the norm. Similarly, Lévi-Strauss’s equation of raw food with nature and cooked food with culture may be an important concept but it needs historical grounding, qualification, and analysis, and cannot therefore be used as a preamble suitable for every occasion. Instead, I would like to underline how important the works of Ken Albala, Alberto Capatti, Allen Grieco, and Massimo Montanari have been as the foundation for my inquiry and writing, supplemented by recent critical studies concerning the history of the senses, sexuality, gender, and material culture. This book is centered on the sixteenth century, with necessary references to the previous two centuries, because the Cinquecento was a period of significant change in the way food was understood. A crucial component of this shift in understanding was the printing press’s dissemination of health and food manuals written in the vernacular that were thereby made accessible to a larger public. Thus we have a new circulation of not only medical but also other understandings of food in the sixteenth century. We owe to Jean Louis Flandrin the initial explanation of what he called the ‘passage from dietetics to gastronomy’ – the shift from a conception of food as medicine to a conception of food as pleasure that this book explores – which recent criticism has qualified. According to Florent Quellier, who provides a good overview of the debate, the Galenic principles that dominated dietetics until the sixteenth century lost strength due to several factors. New studies on anatomy and digestion questioned the Galenic conception of the body and the ancient dietetic prescriptions; the growing importance of the taste of food over and above its healthiness, helped to move thinkers and eaters towards a conception of food as a pleasure.14 What I add to this vision is the way this transition was anticipated in the sixteenth century and the food culture of Italy. Another important development was the changing vision of social 13 Marin, Food for Thought; Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. 14 Quellier, Gola Storia di un peccato capitale, pp. 122-124. See also Leischziner, ‘Epistemic Foundation of Cuisine’, which argues for the slow but ongoing separation of cooking and dietetics owing to a fundamental shift in experimental sciences in seventeenth-century France. On changes in European court cuisine and notions of diet and health during the seventeenth century see Laudan, ‘A Kind of Chemistry’.

Introduction

17

hierarchies in the urban world of the Italian Renaissance and the closely related conception of the hierarchy of food. Formerly based on the medieval Great Chain of Being and traditionally fashioned as a social and cultural discourse, changes in hierarchies had implications reaching far beyond dietetic recommendations. Literary works of the period, when considered from the perspective of food culture, all portray an imagined order of things that goes beyond traditional scholarly interpretations of reversals and the upside-down world to respond to a series of specific historical concerns and developments. In fact, the literary imaginary of sixteenth-century Italy played a significant role in the complex social debates that spawned major changes in the perception of food, diet, and the meaning of meals, as well as their relation to class and social standing. Over time these texts contributed to a changing view of food and eating, helping to reverse traditional negative perceptions of types of foods and practices considered sinful – such as gluttony – while promoting a novel idea of taste. According to the intellectual tradition inherited from the ancient world, taste, along with touch, was considered a ‘material’ sense and was located at the bottom of the five sense hierarchy that saw ‘spiritual’ sight ranking at the top. In fact, prescriptive literature, food manuals, household books, and philosophical and religious works of the period seldom took taste into account; medical texts regularly rejected it, stressing that food was to be used as a medicine and not for pleasure; preachers recommended that women should not seek enticing tastes in food. Literature often agreed with this vision, especially in fanciful representations of gluttony and excess, where the focus was on greed and abundance, not on taste. Significantly, though, during the research for this book, I encountered more and more remarks about the importance of and instances of enthusiasm for a positive idea of taste – gusto in the language of the period – expressed in different forms in the literary imagination, whether in prose, poetry, or personal letters.15 15 One of the first instances of the usage of the word gusto in the gastronomical/medical realm is from the beginning of the fifteenth century in a letter written by the physician Lorenzo Sassoli to his patient, the Florentine merchant Francesco di Marco Datini. After advising his patient what to eat to preserve his health, Sassoli added an interesting note: ‘ma ben mi piacerebbe molto, se grande dispiacere non vi fosse al gusto, che in ogni vostra scodella voi usaste il zafferano’ (but it would please me well, if it be no great displeasure to your taste, that in every one of your dishes you were to use saffron); Mazzei, Ser Lapo. Lettere di un notaro, pp. 370-374 at 371. Thus, for Sassoli, even his medically recommended use of the costly spice saffron must bow to Datini’s personal taste. It is true that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, despite many recommendations for and against specific foods, one of the prevalent medical concepts related to food was that what tastes good to an individual is more nourishing, and thus healthier, for them. As Montanari explains, it was after all the flavor of a certain food that constituted the

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A recent study on taste in early modern Europe that focuses on France affirms that the discussion of taste was present in the works of cooks but claims that, outside of that ‘culinary universe, taste was left at the margins of knowledge’.16 Given the ambiguities of the concept of ‘taste’ in the English language, the present book privileges the word gusto as used by sixteenth-century Italian authors.17 In the texts studied herein, gusto refers to the gustatory act – the physical sensation in the mouth during the act of eating, that is, sensory taste – as well as to personal preference – the specific disposition of an eater and his or her ability to discern or judge food aesthetically. This book shows that, by the sixteenth century, gusto had already acquired a metaphorical sense in relation to food, though gusto as an aesthetic concept is most often linked (by contemporaries as well as by scholars of the period) to the visual, not culinary, arts. Vasari, for instance, affirmed that Michelangelo had ‘giudizio e gusto in tutte le cose’, indicating his ability to recognize artistic quality.18 The many letters exchanged by Pietro Aretino and some of his friends during the first half of the sixteenth century provide evidence of the early usage and development of the concept.19 Besides Aretino, who was a great innovator of both language and genres, many other authors of letters, dialogues, poems, and other writings studied in this book employ primary means of recognizing its usefulness for the body consuming it, in accordance with the degree of pleasure it brought to the palate. Sassoli’s preoccupation with Datini’s taste seems compliant with this dictum. See Montanari, Il formaggio con le pere, pp. 93-94. 16 See von Hoffmann, From Gluttony to Enlightenment, p. 172. 17 The Italian word gusto does not here refer to the Italianate English word used to indicate enthusiastic enjoyment. 18 Milanesi, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, p. 272. 19 See for instance the letter written to Aretino by Francesco Perrocco and Alessandro de la Salla: ‘Certo che I vostri bei concetti quali frutti del vostro felice ingegno, sono paruti diversi, aguzzandoci hora l’appetito, il mordace e acuto dele vostre vive e vere riprensioni hora empiendoci il molto delle vostre lodi, hora dilettando il gusto quel saporito e dolce delle vostre amorevoli dimostrationi’ (Indeed your fine thoughts – fruits of your blessed genius – are different, now stimulating our appetite, now, with the biting acuity of your lively and true understandings, satisfying us to the utmost with your praises, now delighting the palate with the flavor and sweetness of your loving gestures); Libro secondo delle lettere scritte al signor Pietro Aretino, pp. 338-339. Hieronymo Fracastoro thanks Aretino for a gift of poems using the term: ‘Posso dirvi che a me furon gratissimi per molto che io poco gusto abbia de le cose di questa lingua’ (I can tell you that I found many of them very pleasing as someone who has little taste for the things of this tongue); Libro secondo delle lettere scritte al signor Pietro Aretino, pp. 429-430. See also the letter by Aretino to his friend Gianfrancesco Pocopanno: ‘I frutti del vostro ingegno e del vostro orto mi son stati si soave amo a l’intelletto e al gusto, che altro tale non ho provato fin qui’ (The fruits of your genius and of your garden were a truly pleasing bait for my intellect and my taste than any others that I have tried until now); Aretino, ‘Letter to Messer Gianfrancesco Pocopanno’, p. 614.

Introduction

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the word gusto in relation to food and to physical as well as aesthetic sense beyond the visual arts.20 This volume demonstrates how the concept of gusto emerged as a significant, even revolutionary idea in the culture and society of sixteenth-century Italy – a century earlier than is normally recognized. The process, again, was circular: the food cultures of Italian courts and wealthy cities such as Rome, Mantua, and Venice appear to have been the driving force behind a new, deeper, and fundamentally positive vision of the sense of taste in everyday practice. That vision and practice were picked up by and reinforced in the literary imaginary, where the older emphasis on abundance and on greedy eating lost ground to a focus on a certain discernment and a taste for food that was unusual and pleasurable. If we think of taste as a historically constructed concept instead of as, primarily, an intellectual concern of aesthetics and philosophy, it becomes clear that taste had a more wide-ranging and practical historical impact that turned on specific social and cultural contexts. Gusto, then – as will become clear in the following chapters – is a revolutionary concept in a society and during a historical period where famine and lack of food were the norm for many, whether poor or rich, and where fear of hunger and its disruptive social repercussions found solace and relief in dreams of abundance, even gluttony. It is surprisingly revolutionary that notions such as appetito and gusto del mangiare are even to be found in 20 Outside of Aretino’s circle, see for instance Benedetto Varchi: ‘L’orazione del Pandolfini fu da molti tenuta una cosa bella quanto alle parole e al modo di recitarla; ma molti, che per mio giudizio erano di miglior gusto, la chiamarono una filastrocca’ (Many people considered Pandolfini’s oration to be as beautiful in its language as in its delivery; but many, who had better taste to my mind, called it a nursery rhyme); Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, p. 529. Giovanni Strozzi, in his ‘lettione’ on Dante, explains his usage of the word: ‘A me basta per il presente luogo haverlo dimostro in parte, quale dice il Poeta essere tale, che chi lo rimira non può essere che non gusti Iddio; vuol dire che non può essere che non contempli e non intenda Iddio aggiugnendo allo intendere che s’intenda con piacere, e è quello che noi diciamo fruire e godere. Conciosiache per gustare come abbiamo detto, questo ci si denoti, presa ottima e corrispondente similitudine dal gusto; imperoché, si come per il gusto noi vegniamo in cognizione dei sapori, e ne pigliamo diletto […] così per l’intelletto conosciamo Iddio, che non si può comprendere d’alcuno senso’ (For me it is enough to have clarified here in part what the Poet says about this, which is that whoever sees Him cannot but taste God; that is to say, that he cannot but contemplate and understand God, and more than that understanding, to delight in that understanding, which is what we call to enjoy and to relish. This being the case, to taste, as we have said, here denotes a complete and corresponding reception similar to taste; however, whereas through taste we become aware of flavors, and we derive pleasure from them, through intellect we become aware of God, who cannot be understood through any [human] sense); ‘Lettione di Giovanni Strozzi’, c. 51r. The word gusto appears in a wide variety of contexts in poems by Francesco Berni and in letters by Isabella d’Este and Suor Maria Celeste Galilei (see Chapter 4).

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multiple texts in an historical period where many lived with the real fear of starvation, and famine was a regular black cloud that cast a shadow over both the poor and the rich.21 The literature explored in this book includes many instances of lower class characters appearing interested in food that tastes good – especially in meat and luxury foods reserved for the rich – a phenomenon that traditional criticism has tended to overlook.22 Here, therefore, the literary imagination is revealed to envision people with few means – even nuns in convents – advancing demands (shown as legitimately theirs to entertain) for the pleasure to be found in good eating and, furthermore, demonstrating themselves to be capable of good taste. Montanari suggested years ago that we consider more carefully the ‘mechanism of taste formation’ in sixteenth-century Italy.23 This book argues that an important player in the functioning of this mechanism is literature.24 Indeed, the addition of an Italian literary dimension to Montanari’s perceptive suggestion calls into question – or at least suggests the need for a deeper historical perspective – on a widely accepted historical narrative that affirms there was no developing sense of taste and/or discussion of it until at least mid-seventeenth-century France. Jean-Louis Flandrin’s well-known notion of the ‘liberation of the gourmet’ is usually seen as a brand new paradigm through which traditional ideals of Renaissance dietetics and of a mostly medical vision of food were overthrown in favor of taste.25 As the discussions below demonstrate, however, this historiography may well need to be revised in light of the evidence provided by sixteenth-century Italian literature. What I suggest is a Cinquecento revolution in taste and food culture traced across the four chapters that follow. The first of these, ‘Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning’, considers the importance and usefulness of a significant range of foodstuffs. In the sixteenth century, prescriptive discourses concerning food and the traditional social classification of food itself – as exemplified by the hierarchical image of the Chain of Being – were taken up by the literary imaginary, which often reversed the social implications of specific foodstuffs in response to new understandings of what different social groups were supposed to eat. In the various texts analyzed, which 21 See for instance Chapter 2 on Ruzante and Chapter 4 on Moderata Fonte’s dialogue and letters by Suor Maria Celeste Galilei. 22 See Giannetti, ‘Taste of Luxury’, pp. 73-94. 23 Montanari, Il cibo come cultura, pp. 73-79 (‘Il gusto è un prodotto culturale’) and pp. 85-88 (‘Il gusto è un prodotto sociale’). 24 Montanari and Grieco were the first to show how the literary imaginary should be included in the study of early modern food culture. 25 Flandrin, ‘From Dietetics to Gastronomy’.

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consistently emphasize the growing importance of the sense of taste, we are presented with lower-class characters who are no longer intent on merely filling their bellies but want instead to eat well and with gusto – a term I use here to mean both pleasure and taste. With this in mind, the discussion focuses on what I call, with a nod to Stephen Greenblatt, the new ‘food fashioning’ of the period: the way in which food traditionally seen as a luxury reserved for the upper classes – and especially upper-class males – comprising, above all, fruit and roasted fowl, ‘descended’ from what might be considered – with excuses to the Muses of Poetry – the Parnassus of Food to garner a place at the metaphorical and real table of the up-and-coming classes emergent in the more socially complex urban world characterizing Cinquecento Italy. The reverse was also true, as the changing status of vegetables from rustic – literally low – food to much appreciated aristocratic delicacy became a distinctive trait of Italian cuisine and culinary culture from the sixteenth century on. In the second chapter, ‘Sixteenth-Century Food Wars’, the discussion moves to an analysis of the complex contemporary debate about food, morals, and beliefs, along with the concomitant obsessions about a healthy diet and moderation in eating. Some, including the playwright Ruzante (Angelo Beolco, 1496-1542), advocated formally for greater appreciation of good (higher quality, delicious) food – not just an abundance of it – for poor peasants; others made use of innovative poetic forms to offer learned and playful digressions on, for example, melons – a supposedly dangerous fruit – and the sensuous common meats, such as the lowly but tasty pork sausage. Literary exchanges – at times intensely polemical, at times humorously irreverent about temptation and restraint; discipline and the pleasures of the flesh – blossomed around suspect foods, catalyzing a cultural battle whose parameters included medical prohibitions of certain foods; religious associations between eating meat and lust; and popular lore regarding health and pleasure. While a moral and disciplinary impulse sought to control the discourse on food, especially in medical and dietetic treatises, a counter-argument was playfully advanced in sixteenth-century literature that defended and promoted a new appreciation of gusto and the legitimation of the idea of taking pleasure in eating.26 These ‘Food Wars’ were in some 26 The idea of taking honest pleasure in eating was first formulated in Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine. In the text’s dedicatory letter to Cardinal Roverella, Platina defends his work, which promotes pleasure in eating and physical well-being, from detractors whom he fears may accuse him of being a glutton, stressing the importance of self-control and moderation when eating to avoid succumbing to greed and gluttony. See Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health, pp. 100-103 (Letter to Father Roverella). During Platina’ s time, Lorenzo Valla’s

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ways just more among many wars that troubled sixteenth-century Italy, yet in opposing supporters of a moralistic and medical view of food with those keen to advance ideas about taste and food-related pleasures, this particular culture war helped nurture a positive and more complex vision of taste. Chapter Three, ‘Attending the Poetic Banquets: The Erotics of Food Poems and the Discovery of Taste’, takes up the rich literary production that uses food images to talk about eroticism, sexuality, and gender. Poems in terza rima – long considered playful, nonsense-style, and thus largely meaningless – and the prose production that commented on them, make use of humorous, mocking, and outrageous sexualized food images, in particular of vegetables and fruit, to rethink both sexual values and food practices in often quite radical ways. This chapter reconsiders this literature in relation to the medical-dietetic manuals that clearly influenced its clever word play and satire, the latter reflecting a traditional medical perspective that stigmatized many foods and contemporary conceptions of sexual identity and sexuality that the former regularly ridiculed with pointed wit and rejected with disarming humor. Relying primarily on the little-studied corpus of Bernesque27 poetry and prose, the chapter uses the critical concept of ‘embodied imagination’ to reconsider a contemporary imaginary that grows out of sensory and material perceptions of fruit and vegetables expressed in culturally specific language, references to material culture, and cultural abstractions.28 The imagination embodied in a carrot or a peach bespeaks a cultural vision that blends together their shapes, their nutritional characteristics, their metaphorical implications, their related history, and the physical sensations they elicit, in order to express, discuss, and often contest contemporary ideas and values. In the end, the embodied experience of eating and tasting fruits and vegetables – both literally and metaphorically – becomes a vehicle for conveying new and potentially radically innovative ideas about sexual and gastronomical gusto. The final chapter, ‘Femininity and Food Culture in Renaissance Italy’, begins with an analysis of the prescriptive and moralistic literature that dialogue De voluptate (1431) also discussed the Epicurean and Stoic concepts of voluptas and virtus and defended the senses and the sense of taste within the Christian tradition. For Valla, the fulfilment of pleasure is the fulfilment of true good (summum bonum). Platina, in contrast, does not seem to be interested in a Christian vision of pleasure. For a discussion of the notions of voluptas in Valla’s On Pleasure and Platina’s De honesta voluptate, see Palma, Savoring Power, esp. pp. 101-104. 27 Named for Francesco Berni (1497-1535), ‘inventor’ of a type of satirical poetry that became a successful genre in sixteenth-century Italian literature. 28 See Pilcher, ‘Embodied Imagination’.

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dictated behavior for women in the realm of food and cooking for the family, then turns to women’s voices in letters by Isabella d’Este and Virginia Galilei as well as in Moderata Fonte’s all-female dialogue The Worth of Women. The yawning gap that is revealed between these two kinds of sources on women’s food practices is remarkable. Evidently the social, symbolic, and cultural meanings of food for women, as understood in prescriptive literature, played a significant role in the realm of gender stereotypes that often served to strengthen a decidedly unequal gender (im)balance. This great divide between prescriptive literature and women’s voices, which has been traced so productively outside the realm of food studies by scholars of early modern writings by and about women,29 once again demonstrates that traditional prescriptive fears about women and their behavior when eating and drinking was far from everyday practice in sixteenth-century Italy – even as it alerts us to a much wider range of assumptions that underlie the dynamics of gender roles in the period regarding food, taste, and sense perceptions. The diverse sources investigated by this chapter are a window onto a complex world of imagined and real food where, despite medical and moral prescriptions, at least some women eat and cook what they like – literarily, what appeals to their taste with little regard for doctors’ orders or the worries of moralists – and where their pleasures in eating imply neither gluttony nor sexual excess but instead refined taste and gusto del mangiare (pleasure and discernment in eating). Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy: The Renaissance of Taste considers the complex cultural processes that brought food into a broader literary and cultural arena, granting it potential to have felt impact on contemporary thinking about a wide variety of social and cultural phenomena. The volume shows, for instance, how the Renaissance encounter between literature and food culture helped construct a kind of ‘food-fashioning’ in which status and wealth came to play less of a role in the imagining and partaking of food. The book also traces how the contemporary discussion about health and food lost significant ground to a new conversation about culinary taste and pleasure not just for elites but across the social spectrum. Fruitful interactions among literary and food cultures in Cinquecento Italy, most importantly, saw notions of taste/ gusto gaining a central place in contemporary culture. Though as a result of reading what follows a melon or a sausage may never be the same, I hope these pages give readers a genuine taste for a literary tradition – and the pleasures it offers – too long overlooked. 29 See Ray, Writing Gender; Cox ‘Female Voice’; Rosenthal, Honest Courtesan.

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Works Cited Primary Aretino, Pietro. ‘Letter to Messer Gianfrancesco Pocopanno’. In Francesco Erspamer, ed., Pietro Aretino: Lettere, vol. 1, letter 295, p. 614. Fondazione Pietro Bembo/ Parma: Guanda, 1995. Folengo, Teofilo. Baldus. Edited by Mario Chiesa. 2 vols. Turin: UTET, 2006. ‘Lettione di Giovanni Strozzi’. In Lettione d’academici fiorentini sopra Dante. Data in luce da Anton Francesco Doni. Libro primo, fols. 39-52. Florence: 1547. Libro secondo delle lettere scritte al Signor Pietro Aretino da molti Signori, Comunità, Donne di valore, Poeti e altri eccellentissimi Spiriti. Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1552. Mazzei, Ser Lapo. Lettere di un notaro a un mercante del secolo xiv con altre lettere e documenti. Edited by Cesare Guasti. Vol II. Florence: Le Monnier, 1880. Platina [Sacchi, Bartolomeo]. On Right Pleasure and Good Health. Edited and translated by Mary Ella Milham. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. Valla, Lorenzo. On Pleasure/De Voluptate. Translated by A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella De Panizza Lorch. New York: Abaris Books, 1977. Varchi, Benedetto. Storia Fiorentina. Edited by Lelio Arbid. Florence: A Spese della società editrice delle storie del Nardi e del Varchi, 1843. [Written 1543; first published 1721]

Secondary Albala, Ken, ed. A Cultural History of Food in the Renaissance. 6 vols. Oxford: Berg, 2011. Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. Beecher, Donald, and Bruno Ferraro. Introduction to Giambattista della Porta, The Sister, translated and with notes by Donald Beecher and Bruno Ferraro, pp. 46-50. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 2000. Biow, Douglas. In Your Face: Professional Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Boiteux, Martine. ‘L’immaginario dell’abbondanza alimentare. Il paese di Cuccagna nel Rinascimento’. In Ernesto di Renzo, ed., Strategie del cibo: simboli, saperi, pratiche, pp. 23-40. Rome: Bulzoni, 2005.

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Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. New York: Harper Torchbook, 1978. Camporesi, Piero. Il paese della fame. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1978. Capatti, Alberto, and Massimo Montanari. La cucina italiana, storia di una cultura. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1999. Carroll, Linda. Angelo Beolco (il Ruzante). Boston, MA: Twayne, 1990. Casali, Elide, and Bruno Capaci, eds. La festa del mondo rovesciato: Giulio Cesare Croce e il carnevalesco. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Chiesa, Mario. Introduction to Folengo, Baldus, vol. 1, pp. 9-31. Cocchiara, Giuseppe. Il mondo alla rovescia. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1981. Cox, Virginia. ‘The Female Voice in Italian Renaissance Dialogue’. Modern Language Notes, 128 (2013), 53-78. Daddario, Will, and Joanne Zerdy. ‘When You Are What You Eat: Ruzante and Historical Metabolism’. In Dorothy Chansky and Ann Folino White, eds., Food and Theatre on the World Stage, pp. 19-32. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. 2 vols. New York: Urizen, 1978. Flandrin, Jean-Louis. ‘From Dietetics to Gastronomy: The Liberation of the Gourmet’. In Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, eds., Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, pp. 418-432. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Garrido, Jean-Pierre. ‘Le theme de la “grande bouffe” dans le Morgant de Luigi Pulci’. In A. Charles Fiorato and A. Fontes Baratto, eds., La table et ses dessous, pp. 73-91. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999. Gautier, Alban, and Allen J. Grieco. ‘Food and Drink in Medieval and Renaissance Europe: An Overview of the Past Decade (2001-2012)’. In Food & History, 10.2 (2012): 73-88. [DOI: 10.1484/J.FOOD.1.103306] Gentilcore, David. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine and Society, 1450-1800. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Giannetti, Laura. Lelia’s Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Giannetti, Laura. ‘The Satyr in the Kitchen Pantry’. In Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, ed., Cuckoldry, Impotence and Adultery in Europe (15th-17th century), pp. 103-124. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Giannetti, Laura. ‘“Taste of Luxury” in Renaissance Italy: In Practice and in the Literary Imagination’. In Catherine Kovesi, ed., Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy, pp. 73-94. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018. Grieco, Allen. Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in Renaissance Italy. Florence: Villa I Tatti-The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; Milan: Officina Libraria, 2019.

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Henke, Robert. ‘Comparing Poverty: Fictions of a Poor Theater in Ruzante and Shakespeare’. Comparative Drama, vol. 41.2 (Summer 2007): 193-217. Henke, Robert. Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015. Kodera, Sergius. ‘Bestiality and Gluttony in Theory and Practice in the Comedies of Giovan Battista Della Porta’. In ‘Sex Acts in the Early Modern World’, special issue, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 38.4 (Fall 2015): 89-119. Laudan, Rachel. ‘A Kind of Chemistry’. Petits Propos Culinaires 62 (1999): 8-22. Leschziner, Vanina. ‘Epistemic Foundation of Cuisine: A Socio-Cognitive Study of the Configuration of Cuisine in Historical Perspective’. Theory and Society 35.4 (2006): 421-443. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Marin, Louis. Food for Thought. Translated by Mette Hjort. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. McIver, Katherine A. Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy: From Kitchen to Table. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Milanesi, Gaetano, ed. Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori scritto da Giorgio Vasari pittore aretino. Vol. VII. Florence: Sansoni, 1881. Montanari, Massimo. Il cibo come cultura. Bari: Laterza, 2004. Montanari, Massimo. Il formaggio con le pere. La storia in un proverbio. Rome: Laterza, 2010. Montanari, Massimo. Nuovo convivio. Storia e cultura dei piaceri della tavola nell’età moderna. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1991. Muir, Edward. Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Nicoud, Marilyn. Les régimes de santé au moyen âge. 2 vols. Rome: École Française de Rome, 2007. Palma, Pina. Savoring Power, Consuming the Times: The Metaphors of Food in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pilcher, Jeffrey M. ‘Cultural Histories of Food’. In Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Food History, pp. 41-60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pilcher, Jeffrey M. ‘The Embodied Imagination in Recent Writings on Food History’. American Historical Review, 121.3 (June 2016): 861-887. Quellier, Florent. Gola storia di un peccato capitale. Translated by Vito Carrassi. Bari: Dedalo, 2012. Originally published as Gourmandise. Histoire d’un péché capital (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010). Ray, Meredith K. Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

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Robert-Nicoud, Vincent. The World Upside Down in 16th Century French Literature and Visual Culture. Rodopi: Brill, 2018. Rosenthal, Margaret F. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992. Rouch, Monique. ‘Introduzione’. Giulio Cesare Croce. L’Eccellenza e Trionfo del Porco e altre opere in prosa. Edited by Monique Rouch, pp. 11-50. Bologna: Pendragon, 2006. Varotti, Carlo. ‘Abbuffata’. In Gian Mario Anselmi and Gino Ruozzi, eds., Banchetti letterari. Cibo, pietanze e ricette nella letteratura italiana da Dante a Camilleri, pp. 13-22. Rome: Carocci, 2011. Varriano, John. Taste and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Von Hoffmann, Viktoria. From Gluttony to Enlightenment: The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016. [Expanded, revised, and translated edition of Goüter le mond: Une histoire culturelle du goüt à l ‘époque modern. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2013] Weintritt, April Danielle. ‘Culinary Professions in Early Modern Italian Comedy’. PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018. Woodhouse, John. ‘Teof ilo Folengo, buongustaio compassionevole’. In Mario Anselmi, Bruno Bentivogli, Alfredo Cottignoli, Fabio Marri, Vittorio Roda, Gino Ruozzi, and Paolo Vecchi Galli, eds., Da Dante a Montale. Studi di filologia e critica letteraria in onore di Emilio Pasquini, pp. 419-429. Bologna: Gedit Edizioni, 2005. Zancarini, Jean-Claude. ‘El mal de la loa chez Ruzante. Compassion ou métier?’ In Adelin Charles Fiorato and Anna Fontes, eds., La Table et ses dessous. Culture, alimentation and convivialité en Italie (xiv-xvi siècles), pp. 125-139. Vol. 4 of Cahiers de la Renaissance italienne. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999. Zemon Davis, Natalie. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975.

1.

Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning 1 Abstract Prescriptive discourses regarding food and the traditional social classification of food itself were picked up by the literary imaginary in Renaissance Italy, often reversing them to create new and provocative ideals about the proper diet for different classes. Two traditional luxury foods – fruit and roasted fowl – thus descended from their original Parnassian culinary heights to command a place at both the metaphorical and real table for a much wider social spectrum, including especially the up-and-coming. The reverse was also true, in a way, as a growing appreciation of raw vegetables led to a change in their status from lowly food to aristocratic delicacy – a shift that became a distinctive trait of Italian cuisine and culture from the sixteenth century on. Keywords: prescriptive discourse, diet, class, luxury foods, lowly foods, delicacy

Introduction In a highly literary letter penned by Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) in 1537 and usually known as Il sogno del Parnaso, the poet recounts one of his dreams to a Venetian friend, Gianiacopo Leonardi.2 The central part of the dream takes place in a large kitchen where Aretino finds himself watching a cook tend a phoenix roasting on a spit, its rich smell permeating the room. Nearby, a group of very thin and hungry men are watching him, eyeing with envy the contented fatness of his body. Aretino, notorious gourmet ante litteram, interrupts the cook – who happens to be singing a poem by Francesco Berni (1497-1536) or Giovanni Mauro D’Arcano (1496-1536) to the beat of the 1 The title of this chapter is of course a playful reference to Stephen Greenblatt’s famous notion of Renaissance self-fashioning, referring here to the fact that discourses regarding food in early modern Italy (and Europe more generally) were fashioned as social and cultural. 2 The letter is analyzed in Giannetti, ‘Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning’.

Giannetti, L., Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy: The Renaissance of Taste. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728034_ch01

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turning spit – to taste a bite of the succulent meat. At this precise moment, the god Apollo makes an appearance and incites Aretino to eat. Recalling the punishment of ever-hungry Tantalus, which was quite often depicted in early modern visual representations of a glutton’s Hell, the god encourages Aretino to satiate himself with no reserve on the roasting meat, right in front of the group of hungry onlookers, in order to maximize their suffering.3 Why should these men suffer in this infernal kitchen with its delicious smells, and who are they? They are a group of famous contemporary poets, the Vignaiuoli, at fault (according to Aretino) for having fed the Muses of Poetry with ‘cabbage, herbs, and salads’. 4 Their predilection for ‘low’ poetry dedicated to humble objects and everyday foods like vegetables had Aretino damn them to an infernal kitchen where they are to starve while watching their ‘better’ enjoy his dinner of roasted meat. As the dream makes clear, the main representative of the Vignaiuoli, Francesco Berni, was one of Aretino’s fierce competitors in the troubled waters of the Italian poetic scene of the day. Italian scholars of Renaissance literature have considered the letter to be a paradigmatic example of Aretino’s flamboyant literary style, of his contempt for his contemporary fellow poets, and of his own self-promotion as a first-rate intellectual and writer, all of which is quite to the point. However, no one has yet focused much attention on what is actually happening in the kitchen: why, for instance, is the meat roasting on a spit a phoenix – a mythological animal – instead of one of the quintessentially Renaissance roasted meats: capon, partridge, or pheasant? Why should Aretino, a connoisseur notorious for his love of good food, dream of eating roasted phoenix? True to his reputation, Aretino was of course criticizing the Bernesque poetry so popular in his time, but it is interesting to note that he chooses to do so in the context of contemporary food culture. In his letter, which was written for publication, Aretino – perfectly aware of the complex discourse around food circulating in Italy – cleverly used that discourse to his own advantage. 3 ‘Mangia, aciò che quelle carogne quivi, le quali han pasciute tuttavia le mie sorelle di cavoli, d’erbe e d’insalata, abbin più fame’; (Eat, so that those bastards who were always feeding my sisters [the Muses] on cabbages, herbs, and salad might have more hunger); Aretino, Lettere, I, p. 586 (letter 282). Longhi has studied this letter and its food metaphors in the context of the poetic rivalry between Aretino and Berni; see Longhi, Lusus, pp. 57-94. See also Perrone, ‘Un sogno di Pietro Aretino’. Two recent studies that address the topic of food consumption in Aretino’s works – especially in his comedies and dialogues – are Biow In Your Face, pp. 63-91, and Palma, Savoring Power, pp. 265-315. For a woodcut of a Renaissance kitchen with roasting meat on the hearth, see Messisbugo, Banchetti (1960), p. 37. 4 On the Vignaiuoli, see Romei, ‘Roma 1532-1537’.

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It is not by chance, in fact, that he eats a roasted phoenix: roasted meat, as noted above, was traditionally a marker of high rank, but a phoenix? This dish was significantly out of the ordinary. As the mythological animal positioned at the top of the Chain of Being, the phoenix was symbolic of power and authority.5 I argue that, by choosing the phoenix as his dream dinner, Aretino was fashioning himself, as a writer and intellectual, after what he was about to consume. Using Apollo as his mouthpiece, similarly, he fashioned the Vignaiuoli in a negative light, denigrating them by identifying them with the ‘lowest’ vegetables on the Great Chain – a characteristically clever move given that vegetables were also a common subject of Vignaiuoli poetry. What Aretino portrayed, therefore, via the food culture of his day was his own personal vision of what we might call the Great Chain of Poetry, with himself at the top and his opponents at the bottom. Aretino’s use of the literary trope he disparagingly suggests is mere ‘salad poetry’ clearly shows how food discourse can be employed to signal social and cultural standing.

You are what you eat I will return to Pietro Aretino and his clever, imaginative ways of using food and food culture in his poetry. First, however, it is important to consider briefly how changing food discourse during the Italian Renaissance contributed in meaningful and often surprising ways to fashioning and refashioning social discourses around class, hierarchies of power, and cultural standing. A fifteenth-century novella by Sabadino degli Arienti (1445-1510) offers a suggestive window onto the issues involved. The tale relates a beffa, or clever trick, played by the Marchese Niccolò III d’Este (1383-1441) on his cameriere (manservant) Bondeno, the son of a peasant, who decides, oddly, that he wants to be a knight. The Marchese refuses his plea because Bondeno has not demonstrated the virtù nor any other special qualities necessary to becoming a knight, but promises 5 ‘The “highest” element fire (hot and dry) was believed to have inhabitants such as the phoenix and the salamander’; see Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, p. 111. The mythology surrounding the f igure of the phoenix is of course highly developed and detailed in classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature, with the creature symbolizing resurrection and renovation; life and death; and power over the passage of time. It was a popular image for sixteenth-century Venetian printers, often used on the frontispieces of their books; Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, for instance, had the phoenix as the emblem (impresa) of his printing press. On the symbolism of the phoenix as a global phenomenon, see Zambon and Grossato, Il mito della fenice in Oriente e in Occidente.

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nonetheless to give his servant a coat of arms. When the Marchese presents Bondeno with his coat of arms – to the knowing laughter of the entire court – Bondeno sees that, at its center, instead of the noble eagle he had hoped for, there stands a humble head of garlic. As the Marchese explains to the unfortunate upstart, he must first digest his garlic before seeking other honors. The underlying message is that Bondeno will always be a peasant ‘just as garlic will always be a rustic food even if it is sometimes artificially civilized by using it to fatten roasted geese’ – at least until he transcends his roots as a garlic eater.6 As this novella suggests, a complex and well-articulated ideology regarding certain types of food – along with their imagined properties and social connotations – was common fare in the culture of late medieval and early modern Italy. The origins of these commonplace cultural tropes can be traced back to the medieval Great Chain of Being. This concept reproduced the four Aristotelian components of the universe in a hierarchical order stretching from the lowest – earth – through water and air to the highest – fire – and classified different foods and animals, closely aligning them with each level of the hierarchy. According to this classification, fowl, game, fresh fruit, and certain types of fish – rare and expensive foodstuffs – appeared high on the Great Chain and were thus deemed appropriate foods for the rich and powerful, hence the roasted phoenix savored by Aretino in his dream.7 At the lowest level of the Chain, close to the soil, resided heavy but nutritious foods – legumes, scallions, root vegetables, garlic, and some kinds of dried meat – all destined for the lower classes. The social hierarchy thus replicated the natural hierarchy of elements; according to medieval physicians, people at the bottom of society had to eat the lowest, most earthbound foods in order to be healthy, while the nobility was meant to eat foods deemed the lightest – those that were situated farthest above the earth.8 On the prescriptive-dietetic plane, things were more complicated. Along with the Chain of Being, humoral theory – the ancient Galenic system of 6 ‘come l’aglio che sempre è cibo rusticano, quantunque a le volte artificiosamente civile se faza ponendose nel corpo de li arostiti pavari’; degli Arienti, Le Porretane, pp. 238-244 (novella xxvii) at p. 243. Grieco first analyzed Arienti’s novella in the context of the connection between vegetables, low social status, and the Great Chain of Being in Grieco, ‘The Social Politics of Pre-Linnaean Botanical Classification’. 7 On the Great Chain of Being, see the classic study by Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. On how the Chain was thought to order the natural world, see Grieco, ‘The Social Order of Nature’, and Grieco, ‘Food and Social Classes’, pp. 307-312; the latter includes a useful visual representation of the Chain on p. 308. These two studies and the others by Grieco that appear as sources throughout this chapter have been fundamental in shaping its argument. 8 Grieco, ‘Food and Social Classes’.

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medicine that enjoyed great popularity and prestige during the classical revival of the fifteenth century in Italy – also influenced theoretical conceptions of food. To keep in balance the different humors of the body, a good diet was necessary – one that partook of foods balancing the moist/ cold (water) and the moist/warm (air); the dry/hot (fire) and the dry/cold (earth), characteristics that recall both the four Aristotelian elements and the Chain of Being.9 Several encyclopedic works on types of foods from this period classified them in accordance with humoral theory.10 Once again, these texts insisted that only those involved in physical labor could tolerate eating ‘heavy’ foods such as beans, leeks, onions, and lentils – which were easily digested by their body’s heat – while leisured people should nourish themselves primarily with foods that were more delicate, airy, and dry, such as fowl and fresh fruit. In sixteenth-century dietary tracts and recipe books, the dichotomy persisted and the focus on social class and prescriptions, although not new, became yet more firm and specific.11 It is possible that the growing gap between rich and poor in the sixteenth century ‘prompted the evolution of food symbolism’12 especially in later authors like Baldassare Pisanelli (?-1586). This Bolognese physician, author of a famous and widely published treatise on food and drink – Trattato della natura de’cibi et del bere (1583) – represents a sort of bridge between the attention still given to humoral theory and that paid to the class connotations of food. While, according to the ancient physicians, a ‘low’ food could provide adequate sustenance for people doing heavy work, for Pisanelli and other later physicians and theorists, such foods were not only crude in nature but also of poor quality, though fitting for people who lacked the means to provide themselves with fare that was of better quality but less nutritious.13 However, Pisanelli wrote that ‘rustic’ people had to avoid ‘noble’ food – pheasant meat, for instance – as it would make them ill even were they to have the means to buy it. In contrast, upper-class, sedentary, and intellectual people who did not need to do any physical labor 9 The humoral physiological theories, which originated with Hippocrates’s and Galen’s works, greatly influenced how Renaissance physicians and medical writers evaluated food; see Albala, Eating Right, pp. 48-77. For a clear and concise explanation of the Galenic system of which the four humors and the four elements were part, see Lindemann, Medicine and Society, p. 69. 10 Platina, De honesta voluptate; Savonarola, Libreto; Benzi, Tractato utilissimo. 11 Albala, Eating Right, pp. 187-190. 12 Albala, Eating Right, p. 192. 13 Pisanelli, Trattato della natura de’ cibi. Another relevant treatise from the same period is Durante (1529-1590), Il tesoro della sanità; see esp. Chapter Six, ‘Avertimenti ne’ i cibi et nel bere’, fols. 48-324.

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could feast on birds, wildfowl, and fish, the most delicate and ‘light’ of all foods. In sum, a prescriptive system of Renaissance food-fashioning dictated that people had to eat according to who they were, with their ‘identity’ in this context largely determined by, first, where they stood on the social ladder and, second, the type of work they did, if any. Many novelle written in the fifteenth century illustrate, with humor, the difficulty of overcoming the gastronomic divide between social classes and the punishment that usually befell those who dared aspire to foods reserved for the social elite—or to elevate themselves above their social position by means of a different choice of food. Sabadino degli Arienti was particularly sensitive to the theme: he dedicated another tale from his collection Le Porretane to a peasant, Zuco Padella, who could not resist the succulent peaches that grew in the garden of his master, miser Lippo di Ghisilieri. Certainly, Zuco does not correspond to the image of a peasant who deserves to eat just garlic and onion; he wants to steal the peaches not out of necessity but because they are bellissime (very beautiful)14 – delicate and precious fruits that Lippo wants to keep for himself. Zuco’s plan to steal the peaches is driven by his desire to see who will win the ‘game’ between master and servant; Lippo is famous for taking inordinate pleasure in chastising discostumati villani (immoral peasants).15 So keen is Zuco to sample the peaches that he attempts to steal them several times over until he is finally caught in the act – with a trap for animals. His punishment is severe: Lippo throws boiling water over the wayward peasant, who loses some skin as well as his hair for three months.16 From that moment on, he is renamed Zuco Pellato (pellato as ‘peeled’ or ‘bald pumpkin head’) and the epithet will become the surname of his descendants and a constant reminder of his misdeeds. After meting out Zuco’s punishment, Lippo haughtily explains why his servant is not entitled to his fruit: ‘The next time stay away from the fruit of my peers and stick with yours: turnips, garlic, leeks, onions, and shallots along with sorghum bread’.17 These words emphasize yet again how the traditional classification of food was fashioned in the fifteenth 14 degli Arienti, Le Porretane, p. 329. 15 ‘Ello prendendo molto piacere de corregere altrui cum morali effecti, e specialmente li discostumati villani’; degli Arienti, Le Porretane, p. 328. 16 ‘E cussí cum sollicito passo giunti alla lupara cun l’acqua bollente, senza indusia gliela fece gettare dentro; la quale coprendo tutto Zuco Padella e scottandolo fieramente, cominciò a gridare’; degli Arienti, Le Porretane, p. 331. 17 ‘Un’altra volta lassa stare le fructe de li mei pari e mangia delle tue che sono le rape, gli agli, porri, cepolle e le scalogne col pan di sorgo’; degli Arienti, Le Porretane, p. 332 (my emphasis). The novella is quoted in Montanari, La fame e l’abbondanza, p. 109.

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century as a social and cultural discourse with implications well beyond dietetic recommendations. But while this novella has been interpreted as a traditional satire of ignorant peasants, Zuco Padella/Pellato does not fit the image of the rustic boor: a stupid garlic eater. Instead of an uncouth villano (peasant) he is a uomo dabene (respectable man) who sometimes goes to the osteria (tavern) to enjoy buoni ficatelli (tasty marinated livers) – not because he is a glutton but because he needs nutritious food to ‘sustain his body’.18 The harshness of his punishment forces him to change his name forever – a public reminder of his outrageous acts that was in tune with a culture of private vendetta, especially that of a landowner against a thief. In other literary examples, food choices and good manners could be more telling of a person’s station than wealth. In a fifteenth-century novella by Gentile Sermini (Pseudo-Sermini), the protagonist is a certain Mattano – a rich young man from the countryside who would like to hold political office in Siena.19 To achieve his goal, Mattano decides to invest a great deal of time and money in dealings with a group of young men from the city in an attempt to convince them that he is a good choice for public office. One day, these young city dwellers – who in fact see Mattano as uneducated and thus unfit for office – decide to teach him a lesson aimed at dissuading him from his misplaced and inappropriate political aspirations. Significantly, they ask a bishop’s cook, Dalphino, to judge Mattano’s table manners and food choices. Not surprisingly, Dalphino discovers that Mattano, among his worst culinary sins, is fond of rewarmed cabbage soup and of eating capons, pheasants, and birds stuffed with garlic. The cook is particularly explicit in singling out Mattano’s uncouth manners, which he calls ‘porcaggini villanesche’ – piggish peasant manners.20 By eating like a pig and mixing 18 ‘uomo dabene che voluntiera tocava el dato e mangiava, quando li veniva colto, e poteva, buoni ficatelli alla taverna: e non già per vizio della gola, ma per dare sostegno al corpo’; degli Arienti, Le Porretane, p. 329. ‘Ficatello’ or ‘fegatello’ indicates mouthfuls of liver from various animals, usually pig, that is marinated and roasted. Maestro Martino de Rossi and Platina both have recipes for fegatelli; in early modern literature, the fegatello appears as a rich and appealing dish in Pulci’s Morgante, in Folengo’s Baldus, and in several sixteenth-century comedies. 19 The novella (xxv) is included in its entirety, with comments, in an essay by Marchi, ‘Un paneretto d’ insalatella’ (pp. 109-120) from which I am quoting. Gentile Sermini is the name attributed by Apostolo Zeno in the eighteenth century to two anonymous codices containing novelle. Monica Marchi, author of their latest critical edition (see Bibliography), prefers to use Pseudo-Sermini instead of the conventional name; I follow suit. Pertici has advanced the hypothesis that the author is Antonio Petrucci, a member of a powerful Sienese family. See Pertici, ‘Novelle senesi in cerca d’autore’. 20 ‘e lui non è cittadino ma nato et allevato in contado, uso di panberrare la mattina due o tre volte et merendare et poi cenare la sera el paperotto con cicerchiate, cavolate riscaldate più

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low foods (such as garlic) with ones higher up in the foodstuff hierarchy (like capons and pheasants) make him entirely unfit for holding political office in Siena – despite all his money, Mattano’s tastes in food reveal him to be nothing more than a simple peasant. The tale ends with his supposed friends crowning him with mocking, carnivalesque titles, –‘Papa de’ Bartali and Priore de’Mugghioni’ (Pope of the Fools and Prior of Animals that Moo) – dress him up in animal skins, donkey ears, and a useless scepter made of cane (bacchetta di canna vana e votia) and, appropriately from a culinary perspective, offer him a banquet of dried fava beans, ram heads, and the ‘delicacies of turnips with leaves’ (delicatezza delle immonde rape).21 We learn from the narrator in an ironic postlude that Mattano held honorably, all his life, his less-than-flattering titles: a typical beffa capped with a baia or mattinata (the Italian form of the more famous French charivari) to shame the culprit. In Pseudo-Sermini’s tale, food is the medium through which we learn that there is no possibility for a rich peasant to acquire better manners from money: unlike Zuco Padella, Mattano is and will always remain a villano, incapable of separating rustic from refined foods. Arienti’s tale with Bondeno as protagonist complicates the picture, however, as we see therein a sort of opening up of the possibility of dignifying garlic itself – if not the person who eats it. As noted above, according to the narrator, garlic – a quintessential rustic food – can become refined – artificiosamente civile, or artificially civilized – when placed inside a roasted duck. This passing observation is puzzling, particularly because the author had just recounted a story that condemned, on moral grounds, the daring act of asking for a coat of arms by Bondeno, precisely through the symbolic power of garlic. Capatti and Montanari have suggested that Arienti’s remark points to a contrast between ideology and practice – between the theoretically low position of garlic as an unrefined peasant’s food and everyday practice, which saw garlic as a regular component of refined court cuisine.22 Indeed, several recipes contained in the oldest and most important cookbook written in Latin at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Liber de coquina (c. 1285-1304) and its Italian derivation, the Libro della cocina del xiv secolo, make frequent use of theoretically ‘lower’ ingredients such as onions and garlic. The addition of costly spices in recipes for most such dishes, however, volte […] et così vorrebbe el forte aglione con capponi, o fagiani, o starne’; Marchi, ‘Un paneretto d’insalatella’ pp. 114-115. For an analysis of the tale, see Grieco, ‘Meals’, pp. 251-252. 21 Marchi, ‘Un paneretto d’insalatella’, p. 120. 22 Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, pp. 42-43.

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seems to have qualified them as suitable for elites.23 Moreover, the most innovative Italian recipe collection of the fifteenth century – the Libro de arte coquinaria (1464-1465) by Maestro Martino de Rossi –testifies that vegetables and legumes were not at all excluded from the cuisine of elites, even though fresh meat remained the most important component of upper-class meals. In fact, lowly ingredients could be ‘elevated’ precisely by being cooked with more noble foods, as occurred with a rustic turnip soup made elegant by Maestro Martino de Rossi because of his use of ingredients like meat broth, pepper, and one of the most expensive spices of the time – saffron.24 The inclusion of a great number of vegetable recipes in the learned De honesta voluptate et valetudine (written in 1468; editio princeps c. 1473-1475) by the Vatican librarian and courtier Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, seems to represent the beginning of an appreciation of vegetables that becomes a distinctive trait of Italian cuisine and culture by the sixteenth century.25 Although distinctions among greens, bulbs, root vegetables, and other categories of food persisted through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, by the end of the sixteenth century the old hierarchical classification had begun to change significantly. Some rustic foods – primarily vegetables but also certain animal and dairy products previously endowed with negative connotations completed, over the course of the century, their ascent of the social ladder, becoming fashionable with and appealing to the upper classes. At the same time, foods traditionally most representative of refinement and wealth – fowl, birds, fish, and fresh fruit – descended the Great Chain of Being, becoming acceptable foodstuffs for the middle and even lower classes. How this came about historically and the role of literature in this complex transition is the subject of the following pages. 23 Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, p. 43, and Parasecoli, Al Dente, p. 99. The Latin Liber is one of the oldest medieval cookbooks, surviving in two codices conserved at the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris; see Zambrini, Il Libro della cucina del secolo XIV. Faccioli, L’arte della cucina in Italia, dates the manuscript (which is housed in the Biblioteca Universitaria Bologna, n. 158, Catalogo dei Manoscritti) to the beginning of the fifteenth century. For a modern edition of the Liber, see Sada and Valente, Liber de coquina. I have used the digital version available at the University of Giessen; see Thomas Gloning, 9/2002. On the relationship between ‘low’ ingredients and high cuisine, see Ribani, ‘L’impronta contadina sull’alta cucina del basso medioevo’. 24 Martino da Como, Libro de arte coquinaria, p. 34. For an English translation see Martino da Como, The Art of Cooking. 25 Platina, On Right Pleasure. Most of Platina’s recipes came from Maestro Martino’s cookbook. After the editio princeps (c. 1473-1475), the book was translated into Italian and other major European languages; it was reprinted several times in Latin through the mid-sixteenth century. For an overview of the extant manuscripts, the first edition, and later translations, see Milham, ‘La nascita del discorso gastronomico: Platina’. For a new translated Italian edition by Enrico Carnevale Schianca, see Platina, De honesta voluptate.

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Taste: Luxury, necessity, and the pleasure of eating26 A sixteenth-century Latin novella by Girolamo Morlini27 tells the story of the Aragonese king Ferdinand the First, who had a fig tree in his garden. The fruits were of such exquisite flavor and were so pleasing to his taste ( ficum fructus sciti saporis suoque gustui amenissimos producentem habebat)28 that he had ten bowmen jealously guarding his tree at all times, while every day the gardener brought him four precious figs in a golden cup.29 But since ‘lack is the cause of appetite’ (carentia est causa appetiti),30 one night a group of the kings’ courtiers decided either to taste the royal figs or die. With a clever, complicated, and dangerous stratagem, they succeed in eating all of the figs, leaving the tree completely bare. The story ends with a tautological remark: ‘This novella shows that when there is a desire for prohibited things, nothing is impossible for those willing and powerful’.31 Interestingly, there is no mention of any punishment on the part of the king: at the end of the tale, the courtiers simply enjoy the stolen figs with great pleasure. This story has much to say about the pleasure of eating. Ferdinand’s figs, served in a golden bowl (quadam aurea in cratera),32 were luxury fare: precious fresh fruits meant only for the rich and powerful, they triggered in his courtiers the irresistible desire to feel like a king consuming rare and succulent food. The courtiers were not motivated by traditional rationales for stealing food – necessity and gluttony – but rather by the desire to eat something special and refined, a desire so strong they were even willing to die for that desire (statuerunt fructus illos aut gustare aut mori).33 The king’s fresh figs, in other words, represented a ‘taste for luxury’.34 The notion of a ‘taste for luxury’ appears alongside the concepts of ‘distinction’ and ‘habitus’ introduced by Pierre Bourdieu in his study of consumption practices in 1960s Paris and Lille. The French sociologist’s work has been instrumental in discussions of how taste in food – among other things – is a 26 This section and the following two (‘The allure of fresh fruit’ and ‘A taste for roasted fowl’) rely on Giannetti, ‘“Taste of Luxury”’, pp. 73-93. 27 There are no documented dates for Morlini, who was a lawyer likely born around the end of the fifteenth century in Naples. He published his collection of 81 Latin Novellae in 1520. 28 See Morlini, Novelle e favole, pp. 316-321 (novella lxxii) at p. 316. 29 Morlini, Novelle e favole, p. 316. 30 Morlini, Novelle e favole, p. 316. 31 ‘Novella indicat de rebus vetitis inesse desiderium, volentibus vero et potentibus nihil difficile’; Morlini, Novelle e favole, p. 320. 32 Morlini, Novelle e favole, p. 316. 33 Morlini, Novelle e favole, p. 316. 34 The reference here is to Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique, pp. 177-178.

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crucial marker of ‘distinction’ in terms of social differentiation and how taste changes over time. It is Bourdieu who first theorized the basic opposition between what he calls ‘tastes for luxury’ (or for freedom; goûts de luxe or de la liberté) and ‘tastes for necessity’(goûts de nécessité).35 The former, he explains, are tastes experienced by individuals whose material condition of life is distant from economic necessity; they are therefore simultaneously tastes for freedom. The latter express the economic necessity that shapes the life of (most) other individuals. However, in Bourdieu’s view, it is not only economic necessity that shapes and determines a certain eating practice – such as choosing popular foods that are filling, satisfying, and inexpensive. Instead, he writes, ‘necessity can only be fulfilled because the agents are inclined to fulfill it, because they have a taste for what they are anyway condemned to’.36 Bourdieu developed his theory by observing a particular culture at a particular historical moment and transferring, tout-court, his twentiethcentury French insights to sixteenth-century Italian society and culture would be unwise. Nonetheless, the concepts of ‘distinction in taste’, ‘taste for luxury/freedom’, and ‘taste for necessity’ are useful in framing questions about the hierarchical position of foods and the ideology that informed them in Renaissance Italy. In this context, as we shall see, the representation of the world as a Great Chain was progressively abandoned over the course of the sixteenth century, even as prescriptive and dietetic texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries continued to insist on the necessity of observing a diet – based on this humoral and hierarchical classification – that conformed to one’s social position in order to maintain good health.37 At the same time as changes in consumption – both practical and conceptual – were taking place, it was of course economic and climate-related circumstances that almost always dictated what the lower classes ate and could eat – far more than could any dietician’s prescription, doctor’s advice, or Chain of Being ideology. Root vegetables and grains constituted the main element of the diet of the poor in both the city and countryside. As we have seen, however, in addition to the practical limits on what the poor could eat, a deep class prejudice was an integral part of the ‘field of cultural production’38 35 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique, pp. 177-178. 36 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique, pp. 177-178 (my emphasis). 37 For an overview of the shift from medieval dietetics to the new gastronomic model of the Renaissance, see Grieco, ‘La gastronomia’, pp. 143-155, which ends with almost fifty detailed analyses of the most important texts of gastronomic literature from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, beginning with Baptista Fiera, Coena seu de herbarum virtutibus (1489-1498) and ending with Johann Wilhelm Stuck, Antiquitatum convivalium (1597). 38 See Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Champ de production culturelle).

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of contemporary food and eating. According to the dictates of this prejudicial system, it was a physiological necessity for the poor to eat grains and root vegetables to maintain good health, not merely an economic necessity.39 Indeed, as briefly noted above, novelle written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries illustrate with harsh humor the difficulty, if not impossibility, of overcoming the gastronomic divide between social classes through, for instance, their imaginative and satirical envisioning of punishments often meted out to those who dared taste luxury foods reserved for the elite or who sought to elevate themselves through ‘noncompliant’ food choices. One of the most frequently cited literary examples of this attitude was written at the end of the sixteenth century by Giulio Cesare Croce (15501609). The tale Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo (pub. 1606) features a clever peasant protagonist invited to live at the court of Alboin, the first king of the Lombards. Bertoldo, ‘since he was used to eating coarse food and wild fruits, as soon as he began to taste all those delicate and refined foods [i.e., of the court], he fell gravely, fatally ill’. 40 The court physicians called in to see the patient recommended the same remedies prescribed to knights and noblemen – that is, yet more light, delicate, and refined foods. Bertoldo, however, with astute self-knowledge regarding his lower-class peasant body and the foods necessary for him to stay healthy, wisely asked instead for a pot of beans and onions along with turnips cooked in ashes. Unfortunately, the physicians were overconfident in their learned ignorance of the social realities of food and refused his request; thus, poor Bertoldo died, to the consternation of the king and his court. 41 Might we invoke here Bourdieu’ s idea that, for Bertoldo, his ‘taste for necessity’ was the only taste he could – literally – live with? Apparently, yes. In the realm of the literary imagination, it was not by chance that certain stories met with great success and circulated widely; they were well matched with the dominant social ideology. For Bertoldo, food consumption was about social hierarchy: the food he could afford had become the food he felt 39 ‘Doctors, dieticians, and the authors of novelle are often guilty of a significant inversion when they affirm that the great quantities of vegetables eaten by the poor are the result of a physiological necessity rather than a diet imposed on them for economic reason’; Grieco, ‘Food and Social Classes’, pp. 311-312. 40 ‘essendo egli usato a mangiar cibi grossi e frutti selvatichi, tosto ch’esso incominciò a gustar di quelle vivande gentili e delicate s’infermò gravemente a morte’; Croce, Le astuzie di Bertoldo, p. 148. 41 Montanari underscores that ‘il “sapere” dei medici (sono stati loro a teorizzare la differenza sociale della dieta) è diventato il “sapere” di Bertoldo. Ma quando lui cerca di metterlo in pratica […] i medici non gli danno retta’; Montanari, I racconti della tavola, pp. 182-184.

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comfortable with precisely because it was the food his body required. Looking at other tales like that of Bertoldo – of which there are many – it appears that the hegemonic food culture of the time had a strong social component that explained much more than one might expect at first. Bertoldo, we might say, had a ‘habitus’ of eating certain foods that derived from his class and economic position. His food preferences – his gusto – coincided exactly with what prescriptive and dietetic literature recommended for a villano, even a very clever one. It seems paradoxical that the court physicians could not see that Bertoldo’s self-prescribed cure of beans and turnips would have been more in tune with the medical and social classification – in which they themselves were trained – than were their recommended cures, which ignored the social realities at play. Bertoldo’s death confirmed the world view that assigned a certain diet to a certain class of people. To invoke Bourdieu again, we might ask further whether Bertoldo actually liked his turnips and beans or just needed them to regain his health. Did Bertoldo have a sense of taste or food preference that was not motivated by economic necessity and social position? Did the idea of gusto enter the discussion? For obvious reasons – most pressingly the scant number of sources – historians of early modern Europe have in general dedicated more attention to court menus and to luxury foods among the elite and wealthy rather than to the food choices of the lower classes. According to Jeffrey Pilcher, the attention devoted to elite dining has brought with it the ‘more or less implicit assumption that taste is a luxury reserved for the affluent’. 42 Was this indeed the case, however? Archival documents that describe in detail the meals of the poor are rare, though there remains the occasional autobiographical account. 43 However, shifting our attention to sixteenth-century literary sources rarely considered by food historians – comedies, less well-known novelle, poems, private letters, and prose commentaries – offers an intriguing and more diversified picture. As we shall see, in these sources, we find an appreciation of food related to taste that transcended class-based choices as well as the need to eat only to fill up an empty belly, as is related in literature on Cuccagna (Land of Cockaigne) and in the corpus of carnivalesque literature. Before delving into an analysis of these sources, however, we must specify what we mean when we discuss taste in early modern Italy and Europe. What does gusto mean? It may sound paradoxical considering the large amount of work that has been undertaken by food historians, but little 42 Pilcher, ‘Cultural Histories of Food’, p. 50. 43 Grieco, ‘Meals’, p. 251.

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scholarship has been devoted specifically to the study of taste in early modern Italy. 44 Jean-Louis Flandrin, the pioneer of food history for early modern France and Europe studied in depth the dramatic shift in taste that took place between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, suggesting that at least four developments were crucial: the rejection of heavily spiced medieval cuisine; a seventeenth-century turn toward a more green- and less meat-oriented cuisine for the French upper classes; the introduction of foods from the New World; and, finally, the dissociation of eating choices from medicinal precepts and moral or religious considerations. Capatti and Montanari dedicated one chapter of their La cucina italiana: Storia di una cultura to the specific cultural process of the ‘formation’ of taste in Italy between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century. They studied Roman and Arabic influences as well as spice-inflected cuisine, seen as a taste choice that had much to do with the ‘scientific imaginary’ of the period. They singled out the Italian preference for a sweet-and-sour (agrodolce) flavor; the triumph of sugar on the tables of the rich; the dominance of salty tastes for the poor; the ‘invention’ of a greener cuisine in the sixteenth century; the primogeniture of gelati and sorbetti in the eighteenth century; and, finally, the formation of a modern national taste after the nineteenth-century unification.45 Food historians have also taught us that taste is a historically charged and ultimately culturally constructed concept: the perception of a certain food can easily differ from one context to another and food preferences obviously change over time and from place to place. For the early modern period, Steven Shapin has explained taste as having an ontological, epistemological, and practical dimension: taste represented what people believed and understood regarding food; what they knew about the sensory experience of taste; and the practical/medical advice about food that was common knowledge shared by all.46 What this ongoing scholarly discussion on taste still lacks is a consideration of gusto as growing out of pleasure (or lack thereof) in eating – an idea that changed dramatically between the Middle Ages and the early modern period with the progressive ‘decline’ of the sin of gluttony and the rise of a positive vision of the pleasures of eating 44 The most important work here is Vercelloni, Viaggio intorno al gusto, a cultural study that analyzes the formation of taste in the contexts of food, fashion, and art from sixteenth-century Italy to contemporary Europe. See also Montanari, Il formaggio con le pere, esp. pp. 91-104. Freedman, Food: The History of Taste, is a global history of food and tastes, more than of taste in itself from prehistory to modern gastronomy. For a study of taste in the British literary tradition, see Gigante, Taste: A Literary History. 45 Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, pp. 99-143. 46 Shapin, ‘Changing Tastes’, esp. pp. 8-9 and p. 27.

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well and with discernment. This is not to advocate for a simple teleological narrative wherein a negative medieval vision of gluttony is replaced by a presumed Renaissance triumph of positive pleasure in eating. 47 In fact, a discourse on moderation and even frugality as a preferred mode of living was ubiquitous in the sixteenth century, as we shall see, and resonated well with religious reform ideals as well as with writings by European lay writers that stressed moderation in life and eating.48 Nonetheless, a consideration of the concept of pleasure and the role of taste in connection to food preferences and sense perception adds an important dimension to our understanding of the complexity of Renaissance food. Food and cultural historians alike agree that Platina, author of the fifteenth-century culinary bestseller De honesta voluptate et valetudine, was the ‘inventor’ both of a philosophy of eating and of the idea of eating for ‘honest pleasure’, a revolutionary idea at a time when pleasure could all too easily lead even a conscientious Christian to sin. 49 As is well known, the contemporary philosophical notion of the five senses, embraced by most early modern thinkers, echoes Aristotle’s treatment of the senses in his De anima (c. 350 BCE).50 In many ways paralleling the Chain of Being, this text influentially affirmed that the senses stood on a hierarchical ladder where each sense corresponded to a part of the human body and the location of the sensory organ involved. Sight and hearing occupied the highest places as spiritual senses, while smell, taste, and touch, considered animal and material senses, stood grouped together at the bottom.51 Learned early modern Italians, the most noted perhaps being Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), agreed that touch and taste occupied the lowest positions of the hierarchical sensory ladder, while other voices, such as that of Mario Equicola (1470-1525) defended touch in debates over the nature of love.52 Prescriptive and philosophical sources do not offer the last word on these distinctions, however, and visual, artistic, and literary representations of the 47 Vercelloni, Viaggio intorno al gusto, indicates that in the early modern period a number of traditional sins such as sloth and gluttony were ‘refashioned’ as virtues: sloth as leisure and gluttony as gastronomy. 48 For one specific sixteenth-century polemic on taste, gluttony, and temperance, see Giannetti, ‘Of Eels and Pears’. 49 Cowan, ‘New World, New Tastes’, p. 199. 50 Aristotle, De Anima, pp. 554-581. 51 See Giannetti, ‘Of Eels and Pears’, pp. 291-292. Some medieval philosophers, e.g. the anonymous author of the thirteenth-century manuscript Summa de saporibus, argued that only the sense of taste was able to reveal the essence of things; see Burnett, ‘The Superiority of Taste’. See also the discussion in Montanari, ‘Sapore e sapere’. 52 Moulton, ‘In Praise of Touch’.

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senses often did not reinforce this hierarchy – in particular, taste, smell, and touch acquired a higher position over time. A text like De honesta voluptate is a good indicator of the shift that was about to take place in the official taxonomy of the senses – a change in understanding and perception that slowly but surely helped to detach culinary gusto from considerations of social class, medical health, moral and natural philosophy, and religion.53 The negative stigma attached to the bestial senses – taste and touch in particular – lasted much longer in philosophical than in culinary thought, at least until Immanuel Kant’s call for upholding appetite in aesthetic judgments.54 However, it was exactly in the domain of food and appetite that the modern, positive senses of the word ‘taste’ were born.

The allure of fresh fruit In medieval times, what distinguished fruit as a luxury food for the wealthy – besides the ideology of the Chain of Being – was the fact that the lower classes, at least theoretically, could not cultivate fruit trees to provide fruit for themselves.55 The fruit harvested by peasants was the property of landowners and poor farmers did not have access to it for personal consumption (although some local laws permitted them to pick small quantities).56 The existence of local statutes that harshly punished the theft of fresh fruit seems to confirm that it was a highly sought-after food and that, perhaps it was such an enjoyable treat, the ‘ruling classes found it was difficult to reserve fruit for their own privileged consumption’.57 However, during the fourteenth and f ifteenth centuries – likely in connection with the demographic decline that resulted from the plague – many open spaces became available close to urban centers where fruit trees were planted, as well, of course, as in the gardens of seigniorial palaces.58 Over time, the increased cultivation of fruit trees across the Italian landscape helped to 53 This revolution was neither easy nor totally successful, for – as is the case with most cultural revolutions – older ways of understanding may have lost ground to new ways of seeing things but were never totally eliminated. See Ballerini, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10-11. 54 Kant, Analytic of the Sublime. While it seems obvious to us today that aesthetic awareness is called taste, for Kant it was not so. See Turner, ‘Leftovers/Dinner with Kant’. 55 For the Middle Ages, see Grieco, ‘Les utilisation sociales des fruits et legumes’. See also Grieco, ‘The Social Politics of Pre-Linnaean Botanical Classification’. 56 Rebora, Culture of the Fork, pp. 91-93. See also Gullino, ‘Alberi da frutta negli statuti comunali piemontesi’. 57 Rebora, Culture of the Fork, p. 93. 58 Naso, ‘Frutta e gastronomia’, p. 108.

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change consumption patterns, lowering the price of fresh fruit and making it more widely available. Nevertheless, – and in the face of the noted advice of doctors regarding the harmful cold and damp quality of fruit59 – its prestige among aristocrats never declined during the Renaissance. A study of archeobotanical data from the Vasca Ducale in fifteenth-century Ferrara compared what was discovered in the garbage dump area for the ducal palace with the frescoes by Francesco del Cossa in the Salone dei Mesi (Room of the Months) at Palazzo Schifanoia alongside Christoforo da Messisbugo’s cookbook for the court. The authors claim, convincingly, that the triangulations of this study help to define what luxury food was during this period;60 they found that the Este court consumed melons, pears, peaches, black mulberries, sweet cherries, pomegranates, apricots, figs, strawberries, and other fruits in great quantity. As might be expected, Messisbugo’s cookbook contains many recipes that call for the use of fruit, both raw and cooked, as well as of fruit seeds, which when candied with sugar became confetti. In contrast to that found at other sites from the period,61 the Este’s garbage reveals the presence of pomegranate (punica granatum) and apricot (prunus armeniaca) seeds, which the authors consider ‘signs of the noble status of the users of the Ducal Pit’.62 As they explain, the presence of the seeds of fruit species ‘exceptionally large in size’ and of exotic aromatic plants such as coriandrum sativum (coriander) marked the social status of the Este family.63 Fruit and pomegranate seeds increase in size (and quality) under careful cultivation, and the court is likely to have expressly selected and bred special varieties. These varieties were appreciated by aristocrats over the long term: years later, the Gonzaga marchioness Isabella d’Este wrote 59 Both ancient auctoritates and medieval regimina sanitatis had many reservations about fruit. The ancients, beginning with Galen, considered it dangerous because it generated harmful humors in the stomach; at best, they admitted fruit as a medicinal food to be used with care. Medieval regimina sanitatis presented this risky foodstuff with an eye to its bad and good effects on the body. Some varieties were recommended for nutrition or good flavor, for instance Savonarola, the Este court physician, proposed a ‘cucina medica’ for his lord that included fruit. See Savonarola, Libreto, pp. 55-77 (‘Di fructi’). On this topic see Nicoud, ‘I medici medievali e la frutta’, pp. 91-108. 60 Bosi et al., ‘Luxury Food’, p. 390. Messisbugo, Banchetti, composizioni di vivande; all fifteen subsequent editions were published in Venice. 61 Bandini Mazzanti et al., ‘Plant Use’, pp. 442-452. 62 Bosi et al., ‘Luxury Food’, pp. 395 and 397. 63 ‘In contrast to the other sites in Ferrara, Punica granatum was abundant, and Coriandrum sativum was the most abundant aromatic plant. These peculiarities, together with the presence of Prunus armeniaca and Dianthus superbus, can be convincingly regarded as signs of the noble status of the users of the Ducal pit.’ Bosi et al., ‘Luxury Food’, p. 397; see also p. 395.

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enthusiastically in her letters from Mantua about fruit and fruit cultivation; she frequently sent as well as received pomegranates, apricots, and peaches, along with other precious luxury foods as gifts to and from her relatives and friends all over Italy.64 In everyday life fresh fruit was a sought-after pleasure for all that was limited – in theory and in practice – for some. Perhaps as a result, this particular delicacy became something of a contested battlefield in literature from the period, where questions related to the consumption of fresh fruit were explored with great interest and abandon. Novelle, poems, and plays played with possibilities regarding who had the right to taste or savor fresh fruit. Writers asked whether it was fit only for the rich and noble as the Chain of Being, medical practitioners, advisory dietaries, and legal statutes (often punishing the theft of fruit) affirmed. Many authors (as we have already seen) recount tales wherein the allure of fresh fruit – a fragile, ephemeral, delectable food for the rich – resulted in much conniving thievery by peasants and servants, intent on stealing from their masters’ orchards and gardens with, in most cases, unhappy results and strict reminders to stick with their class-appropriate foods.65 Other writers suggestively open up a different vista in which the role of taste and individuals’ food preferences take precedence over considerations of class and status. Fresh figs – easily damaged, highly delicious – were in particular reserved for masters and aristocrats.66 In an ironic novella by Franco Sacchetti (c. 1332-1400) among his Trecentonovelle (c. 1393-1400), a clever priest’s servant who has to collect figs for his master steals the best for himself, handing over only those that are overripe.67 We learn in detail how this is achieved: by climbing the tree, choosing figs at the perfect point of maturation – characterized by the presence of a lacrima (tear) – consoling the weeping figs by reassuring them that they will not be consumed by the master, and, 64 See for instance the letter to her sister-in-law Elisabetta Gonzaga Montefeltro in November 1499, thanking her for the five hundred pomegranates she received while she was pregnant. In this letter, Isabella talks specifically about their excellent flavor: ‘Et havendone gustato me hanno parso li megliori manzasse già bon tempo’ (When I tasted them, they seemed to me the best I have eaten in a long time); letter dated November 23, 1499 to the Duchess of Urbino. ASM, AG, B. 2993, L. 10, fol. 95r. [IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive]. See English translation in d’ Este, Selected Letters, p. 137. A fuller discussion of Isabella d’ Este’s letters in this context appears in Chapter Four. 65 See the essay by Ribani, ‘Tra satira e realtà’. Ribani studies the relationship between archival documents on agricultural thefts in fourteenth-century Bologna and literary tales such as degli Arienti’s ‘Zuco Padella’. 66 According to Rebora (though he does not quote his source): ‘The f irst basket of f igs was intended for the Marquise, as were first-growth vegetables’; Rebora, Culture of the Fork, p. 93. 67 Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, novella cxviii, pp. 356-361.

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finally, proceeding to eat them. The servant then picks the figs that, he says, not even pigs would consume and puts them in a basket for the priest. Soon enough, of course, the master figures out that he has been duped by his servant, so he sends an altar boy (chierico) to witness the theft. The latter returns to confirm what has been happening in the orchard but insists that the servant was actually consoling the figs, making the whole thing la più bella novella (the most beautiful tale)68 he will ever hear. The priest agrees, but when the clever servant returns with another basket of split figs, he is asked why he did not bring any weeping figs. The servant, displaying excellent on-the-spot reasoning, explains that he brings figs that have already split in order to save his master from having to cut them open and eats the weeping figs because ‘cheerful things belong to masters, sad things to servants’.69 Therefore, he reassures the priest, he is careful to bring only happy figs ‘that were laughing most happily with their mouths open’.70 The priest acknowledges that the servant is a good advocate for himself and is well versed in Roman law (the main source, of course, of medieval Italian law). Nonetheless, the servant soon finds himself without a post, presumably so that his former master can keep his weeping figs for himself. It is worth noting that in this novella there is no comment on the servant’s low status nor on the importance that the foods he eats match his station, as in some of the other novelle we have considered to this point. Instead, the superior here recognizes his inferior’s cleverness and his awareness of what is good – at least regarding the taste of figs. It is this last point that opens up some new possibilities as here a servant – independent, apparently, of his social position – is at least recognized and perhaps even entitled to possess a sense of taste. It is for stealing – not for eating food forbidden to his class – that he is punished. Another revealing tale from the Trecentonovelle tells the story of a blind man, Minonna Brunelleschi, who helps his friends to steal peaches from the orchard of his neighbor Giovanni Manfredi.71 Minonna and Giovanni seem to share much the same social status: they are not poor (both possess a cultivated field) but neither are they members of the nobility. Minonna’s temptation to secure fresh fruit for himself arises from the fact that Giovanni grows peach trees in the vineyard that borders Minonna’s land. Despite 68 Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, p. 359. 69 ‘le cose allegre vogliono esser de’ signori, e le triste de’ fanti’; Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, p. 360. 70 ‘e che ridean di sì gran volontà con la bocca aperta’; Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, p. 360. 71 Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, novella xci, pp. 281-284.

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his blindness, he perpetrates an audacious theft, news of which spreads throughout Florence to reach the ears of Giovanni, who plans immediate revenge: an invasion of Minonna’s orchard with cabbages as the prize. Aware of being the victim of a revenge plot, Minonna retaliates with foxlike cunning: he and two friends sneak into Giovanni’s orchard to cut off and pack up all his garlic bulbs, replacing the stems as they go. It takes some time for Giovanni to understand that all his garlic has been stolen, but eventually he realizes what has happened. The two accuse each other of their respective thefts and continue to fight for the rest of their lives, complaining about their lost peaches, cabbages, and garlic nigh unto their deaths. This novella paints the non-traditional literary image of peasant characters who are neither sophisticated nor rich and who live on what their fields produce: mainly cabbage and garlic but also, strikingly, peaches.72 Minonna loves cabbage in particular, we learn, preparing it daily for his much enjoyed soups. At the same time, these two rustic characters know and appreciate quality fresh fruit, calling the peaches bonissime (very good). Interestingly, not only this ‘noble’ food but also the cabbages and garlic have conferred upon them aesthetic qualities: the former are belli (beautiful) while the latter is of smisurata bellezza (immeasurable beauty). Did the audience or readers of this novella realize the irony in the characters admiring the aesthetic quality of garlic and cabbage versus the current expectations in terms of quality for those vegetables? Certainly, these enthusiastic and positive details, although ironic, were not in tune with contemporary Galenic language, which described these lowly plants as raw and cold, devoid of superior nutritional quality, thus positioning them at the bottom of the Great Chain. In both of these novelle, written at the very end of the fourteenth century by a storyteller closely focused on the everyday reality of his time, we can see how taste – in the sense of the ability to distinguish what is good and worth eating – is a skill that even uncouth characters possess. While of course there is a comedic element here – Sacchetti might be read as making fun of the notion that lowly vegetables might possess aesthetic qualities – these two novelle hint that the commonly shared medieval attitude towards lowly characters – that their food choices, for instance, were always of the necessary sort – was becoming more malleable and less absolute. 72 Ribani notes that not only fruit but also humbler vegetables were stolen, since poverty and need were among the most common motivations for agricultural thefts. Often accusations could not be proven, and the resentment of landowners against peasants carried over into literary tales that constructed the negative image of the peasant-thief. See Ribani, ‘Tra satira e realtà’, pp. 455-456.

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The question of fresh fruit and its role in relation to taste and social class continued to attract the attention of novellieri throughout the Renaissance. A short tale from the late sixteenth-century collection Il Fuggilozio (1598) features a cheeky and uneducated rich peasant invited to lunch by Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici. To their surprise and amusement, the guest insists on peeling every fruit that appears at their exclusive table – even the rare and precious pera moscatella (muscat pear).73 When the Medici object that by doing so he wasted the best part, the peasant impudently retorts that, on his land, only the pigs did not peel their pears. This novella, which was written by Tommaso Costo (1545-1613), has been interpreted as confirmation of a class-based food ideology where only elites could appreciate certain types of fruit and the nuances of enjoying them properly. Nonetheless, this and other similar tales seem also to express fear that the lower classes might have access to – and perhaps even an inclination to aesthetically appreciate – the food of their masters. The peasant at Cosimo’s table, for instance, insists on his own standards of luxury, which allow him to throw away what his social superiors consider the best part of the pera moscatella and to compare his hosts to the pigs on his farm. Perhaps luckily for the peasant, the tale ends there. Costo’s tale has an antecedent in a f ifteenth-century collection of anecdotes, the so-called Detti piacevoli (1477-1478) by the poet Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494). In his version, Cosimo also offered a few, delicate pere moscatelle to a peasant who, accustomed to eating large wild pears, refused to eat something so small, claiming that such small fruit was only suited to feed his pigs.74 The century or so dividing these two tales may help explain what happened in literature to the cultural status of fruit between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Poliziano’s earlier novella, the peasant who throws the smallest pears to the pigs is entirely unaware of the standards of taste upheld by the Medici, perhaps relying on his unsophisticated knowledge about both pear varietals and predilections of the nobility for large fruit. As a moralistic condemnation more typical 73 Montanari, Il formaggio con le pere, pp. 99-100. These pears were a prized varietal, very small and highly perishable, that were known to the ancient Romans. The sixteenth-century botanist Pietro Matthioli mentions pere moscadelle in I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli sanese, medico cesareo, ch. 133 (‘Delle pere’), fol. 272; one appears in Arcimboldo’s painting Vertumnus. For images see: www.archeologiaarborea.com/pere 74 ‘Faccendo Cosimo far collazione a un contadino, gli fe’ mettere pere moscadelle innanzi. Ora, essendo colui avezzo a peracce grosse e salvatiche, disse: – Oh, noi le diamo a’ porci! -; allora Cosimo, voltosi a un famiglio, disse – Non già noi: levale via!’; Poliziano, Detti piacevoli di Angelo Poliziano, p. 9. See also Montanari, Il formaggio con le pere, pp. 99-100.

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of the end of the 1500s, Costo’s novella depicts the lower classes as having access to fresh fruit and deciding that, when it is not prepared to their taste, it is fit only for pigs. The rich peasant in this novella may know that pere moscatelle should not be peeled but has his own ideas regarding fruit and how it is best enjoyed. When the Medici lords chastise him for peeling all the fruit that comes to the table, including the precious pears, he retorts that, on his farms, everyone peels them – except for the pigs.75 What he is responding to, in other words, is that he has a different standard – equally legitimate in his view – for informed food practices. In sum, these texts may serve to reinforce a class ideology, but they also play with exploring the fanciful possibilities of social climbing and transformation through food as well as who knows and does not know what constitutes fine foods, and who controls that knowledge. The precious pear – along with other foods that experience a social ascent during the sixteenth century – makes its appearance in plays, poems, and letters as a delicacy welcomed on lower and middle class tables as well as at aristocratic banquets. Anton Francesco Grazzini (1503-1583), an author of comedies and novelle depicting everyday lower class life in sixteenthcentury Florence, recommends stocking even the humble pantry with pere caravelle76 and other fruit in season in his comedy Pinzochera (1582).77 Pears could be dried, used as flour, and kept for long time, but preserving them was perceived as a choice driven by necessity and poverty.78 That the Pinzochera servant stocked the pantry with fruit ‘in season’ – whether pears or otherwise– suggests that Grazzini knew well that fresh fruit indicated wealth and abundance. The advice – which seems obvious today – regarding seasonal fruit is a nod to luxurious fare now available even in plebeian pantries. In his other comedy Sibilla (also published in 1582), a dinner should 75 ‘un dì che in fine del desinare erano in sù le frutte, di che vennero a tavola molte sorti, il contadino ogni frutta, che mangiava la mondava prima, il che facendo anche delle pere moscatelle, quei due grand’ huomini non lo poterono soffrire, e dissongli, che tanta diligenza di mondare? Non vedi tu, che ne gitti via il meglio? E il contadino rispose, né miei poderi ognun le monda, fuor che i porci’; Costo, Il Fuggilozio, fols. 170-171. 76 ‘Caravelle’ or ‘carovelle’ pears are a late medieval variety of medium size and oval shape; see Matthioli, I Discorsi, ch. 133, fol. 272, and Carnevale Schianca, La cucina medievale, pp. 488-489. A ‘winter’ pear, the pera carovella was ready for consumption around the end of December. Renaissance comedies are often set during Carnival time, so the mention of pere carovelle in Grazzini’s comedy as a ‘fruit in season’ may be just right. 77 ‘Io ho fatto ordinare alla cucina parecchi coratelle: un capon freddo v’è bellissimo, che con due paia di pippion grossi arrosto doverà essere à bastanza. Di poi raviggiuoli, pere caravelle, e altre frutta secondo la stagione’; Grazzini, La Pinzochera, fol. 13v (I.4). 78 Montanari, Il formaggio con le pere, pp. 62-63.

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end with ‘fruit and cheese in abundance and a beautiful salad’.79 In the early modern period, pears and cheese eaten together became a gastronomical duo summarized by a popular proverb: ‘Al contadino non far sapere quanto è buono il formaggio con le pere’ (Don’t let the peasant learn how good cheese is with pears.) As Montanari has shown, a supposedly low food, cheese, becomes ‘elevated’, as it were, when served with this particular fruit.80 Concluding dinner with cheese, fruit, and a ‘beautiful’ salad, as we see in Sibilla, is a theatrical depiction of a new fashion81 in which even the servants know what they have to do to end a good dinner well. It was not only sixteenth-century comedy that celebrated the power and appeal of fresh fruit. The first gourmet ‘tourist’ guide to Italy, Ortensio Lando’s Commentario delle più notabili e mostruose cose d’Italia e d’altri luoghi (1548), exalted the fruit savored in the city of Piacenza by comparing its taste to that of a perfettissimo fagiano (most perfect pheasant).82 These two types of food – fruit and roasted fowl, which as we have seen were symbolic of social affluence and indicative of class distinctions – were offered, as Lando describes, even in the more modest inns and taverns of early modern Italy. Thus, we see planted – in a variety of literary sources – a seed of the idea that a ‘taste for luxury’ was not just the purview of the affluent. Would-be gourmet Pietro Aretino, while no aristocrat, knew and appreciated the pleasures of eating with discernment and particularly extolled roasted meat, fresh fruit, and raw greens in his writings. In a celebrated missive (1537) to his editor in Venice, Francesco Marcolini, Aretino dwells on the primizie (early fruit and vegetables) Marcolini used to send from 79 ‘frutta e formaggio a josa e insalata bellissima’; Grazzini, La Sibilla, fol. 17v (II.5). 80 Montanari, Il formaggio con le pere. 81 Many sixteenth-century authors discuss whether salad should be served at the beginning or the end of the meal. Felici attests to its use at either time: ‘ci sonno di quelli che indifferentemente l’usano la sera e la mattina’; Felici, Lettera sulle insalate, p. 68. Massonio, a generation later, indicates that salads are generally served ‘nel fine della cena’ (at the end of dinner); Massonio, Archidipno over dell’insalata, p. 395. The discussion about the right moment at which to serve salads revolved around their properties: did they prepare the stomach before the meal or stimulate appetite after the stomach was full? On this point see discussion in Carnevale Schianca, La cucina medievale, pp. 311-312. 82 Ortensio Lando (c.1510/12-1556/59) ‘mi ricordo aver mangiato con esso, mentre in Piacenza fui, certe poma dette calte e un’uva chiamata diola, e ritrovarmi consolato come se mangiato avessi d’uno perfettissimo fagiano’ (I remember, while I was in Piacenza, having eating certain fruits called calte and a type of grape called diola with him, and finding myself as satisfied as if I had eaten a perfect pheasant); Lando, Commentario, p. 12. Lando’s work is a gastronomic tour de force that analyzes the Italian culinary scene of his time; his Commentario describes dishes that were apparently common but seem unknown to contemporary cookbooks; see Moroni, ‘Libri di cucina a Venezia e nel Veneto’.

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his orchard: not surprisingly, pere moscatelle, apricots, melons, plums, grapes, and peaches figure prominently.83 In a letter of the same year to Gianfrancesco Pocopanno, Aretino thanks his friend for sending him a gift: a sonetto accompanied by a basket of the most prized fruit of the period: pears. The language of food dominates this brief letter: the gift is well received, Aretino writes, as it offers the fruit both of his friend’s clever wit and of his orchard. Both are agreeable to mind and gusto (taste): ‘The fruit of your wit and your orchard have been such a pleasant food to my mind and my taste that I have never felt anything similar. Surely the sonnet is sweet […] but the pears […] exceed the excellence of any flavor and sauce’.84 Flandrin has suggested that in France a new emphasis on taste and the idea of ‘distinction through taste’ – even more than good manners – were crucial components of the new elite culture of the seventeenth century.85 Montanari has argued, however, that a similar development is to be found earlier, in sixteenth-century Italy. For him, the medieval proverb de gustibus non est disputandum – which refers to natural instincts in eating, thus affirming that all tastes are legitimate – came to be reversed in the Cinquecento as taste or buon gusto as a cultural phenomenon became something to be discussed and even learned.86 Some people were considered more capable than others to judge what was good and what was not, but this ability was no longer seen exclusively as an inherited skill reserved for a specific social class. It is in this context, Montanari explains, that the 83 ‘e così sarò a gustar le pere moscatelle, le arbicocche, i meloni, le susine, l’uve e le pèsche’; Aretino, Lettere, I, pp. 287-289 (letter 137). 84 Giannetti, ‘Of Eels and Pears’, pp. 302-303. ‘I frutti del vostro ingegno e del vostro orto mi sono stati sì soave cibo all’intelletto e al gusto, che altro tale non ho provato sin qui. Certamente il sonetto è dolce, ma le pere […] trapassano il segno d’ogni sapore e d’ogni sugo’; Aretino, Lettere, I, p. 614 (letter 295). My emphasis. 85 Flandrin, ‘Distinction through Taste’. 86 Montanari, ‘Sapore e sapere’. For a philosophical and aesthetic view of the concept of gusto in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see D’Angelo, ‘Il gusto’, pp. 20-23, and Vercelloni, Viaggio intorno al gusto, esp. pp. 20-25. It is not by chance that the visual representation of taste also begins to change in this period: from a donkey in Thomas Cantimpratensis’s Liber de Natura Rerum (c. 1228-1244), p. 106 (see Sanger and Kulbrandstad Walker, ‘Introduction: Making Sense of the Senses’, p. 5) to a basket of fruit and a peach in Ripa, Iconologia, fol. 448: ‘Donna, che con la destra tenga un cesto pieno di diversi frutti, e nella sinistra un persico […] si dipinge con varietà de frutti, perché questi, senza artificio, diversamente dal gusto si fanno sentire e il persico si prende spesso à simile proposito da gli Antichi’ (A woman, who in her right hand holds a basket full of various fruits and in her left a persico [northern Italian dialect for ‘peach’; can indicate the fruit as well as the tree] […], is painted with a variety of fruits because these can be sensed by taste in different manners without any trick, and the peach was often considered in this respect by the ancients).

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hypothesis that a peasant could enjoy and appreciate his master’s food is no longer unthinkable. Returning briefly to the novelle discussed thus far, we have seen these texts simultaneously confirm traditional ideas about food and status and reimagine conventional knowledge, opening up new ways of conceptualizing both. While often read by scholars as ‘merely’ comic and escapist in a world-upside-down mode, this literature and its explorations around food and social order demonstrate yet another manner in which Renaissance literature interacted with deep concerns about social order, hierarchies of power, and moral values, in this instance also introducing novel ideas about sensory perception, taste, and the pleasure of eating. What does it mean that so many different literary genres included discussions of food in the context of social hierarchies? This focus was of course a symptom of resistance to the changes Italian society was experiencing, but my contention is that literature about food and consumption was also an important vehicle for reflecting on and influencing change. Sixteenth-century comedy, for instance, could reach a large and socioeconomically diverse community thanks to its everyday language and popular public performances on makeshift stages, in squares, and, later on, in more formal theaters. The printing press assisted with the dissemination of so many other genres as well, including mock-epic and popular poems, letters, dialogues, novelle, and prose commentaries. As a whole, they all contributed greatly to the changing ideologies and epistemologies with which food culture was invested.

A taste for roasted fowl Surpassing even fresh fruit as luxury food par excellence during the Middle Ages were roasted fowl and birds, meats reserved for members of higher social strata – the rich, the noble, and important holders of political offices. Meat in general possessed a complex ontological status during this period. In the taxonomy of the Chain of Being, all birds were linked to the element of Air, and yet their individual status varied greatly: birds that live partially in water, like ducks and geese, were considered of lowlier status; above them were placed capons and chickens; higher still were the precious songbirds, as well as powerful predators like the eagle and falcon.87 The meat of quadrupeds (veal, mutton, and pork) was another matter: these animals lived on the earth yet had a different – and higher – status than plants while 87 Grieco,‘Food and Social Classes’, p. 310.

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lacking the prestige of meat associated with Air.88 While they in fact did not have a firm place in the hierarchy of the Great Chain, an internal hierarchy placed veal on top, mutton in the middle, and pork at the bottom.89 How did this idealized vision of meat relate to everyday reality? During the High Middle Ages in Italy, the noble table first saw the triumph of big game gained through hunting but later the preference was directed toward smaller game such as pheasants, quail, and partridges as well as for farm animals like geese and capons.90 Heartier and fattier meat – like pork – was left to peasants, who consumed it in dried or salted forms. Peasants in the countryside ate pork in quantity in part because pigs offered a wealth of uses from all their parts, not just for eating.91 City dwellers also enjoyed pork in the form of sausages but strove to differentiate themselves from residents of the countryside by eating ‘lighter’ meats like mutton, poultry, small birds, and fish.92 The link between the consumption of certain kinds of meat – in particular fowl and birds – and high status appears in a wide range of sources from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries and with increasing frequency over time: private correspondence, literary works, medical and dietary manuals, and sumptuary laws all mention this relationship.93 Once again, however, we find a complex discourse that is neither uniform nor unquestioning. Sources oscillate between affirmations regarding the necessity of eating such food for the upper classes and moralistic condemnations of those same eating habits as sign of excessive luxury, gluttony, and greed. Gluttony – eating in excess and with a lack of temperance – was linked to the desire for luxurious, rare, and expensive food, which implied the other vices of greed and pride. The complexity of the discourse on the sinfulness of (over)eating and, especially, the consumption of certain luxury foods, was ubiquitous in moralizing literature from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, but other kinds of documents offer different perspectives. 88 In a recent version of the article ‘Food and Social Classes’ Grieco suggests that ‘quadrupeds were, in fact, considered to be located at the top of the element earth’. See Grieco, ‘Food and Social Classes’ in Grieco, Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in Renaissance Italy, footnote 19, p. 117. 89 Grieco, ‘Food and Social Classes’, p. 311. 90 Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, pp. 76-77. 91 Croce, L’Eccellenza e Trionfo del Porco, p. 21, lists the uses of a pig’s bristles: making brushes, sewing, and leatherworking. Hog lard/fat (assungia/songia) was used for making candles and ointments. 92 On the consumption of fowl for specific groups and situations in fifteenth century urban centers see Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’ pp. 114-117. 93 Grieco, ‘Food and Social Classes’, pp. 304-307.

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One well-known example may help highlight the complexity of this discussion in relation to meat.94 The Sienese brigata spendereccia (spendthrift brigade – a group whose members willingly decide to throw away their wealth) in Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXIX) is maligned for its most extravagant culinary custom – the costuma ricca of flavoring roasted game with cloves or cooking meat over a bed of cloves, one of the most expensive spices sold in Italian and European markets of the time. It is unclear whether the tale recounted to Dante, the pilgrim, and attributed to a certain Capocchio really came to pass, though there is a medieval legend about a group of rich food lovers in Siena who spent, over the course of a single year, all the wealth they possessed on sumptuous banquets, thus ending up in the beggars’ hospital.95 In any case, Dante’s take on the legend is of interest here because the episode is not set in the circle of the Gluttons, as one might expect, but rather in that of the Alchemists, where Capocchio was being punished for his sins. According to Dante, then, the sin of the brigata spendereccia turned on its members’ astonishing ability to so profligately waste their wealth, driven by a desire to distinguish themselves among their rich young peers in order to gain status and prestige. This depiction, which clearly touches on the related sins of pride and greed, does not fit a traditional image of gluttony in the sense of excessive, unrefined eating, wherein grasping, pig-like diners indiscriminately stuff their faces with huge quantities of food. Instead, these spendthrift gluttons’ ‘taste for luxury’ (and for clove-roasted fowl) warns against an excessive desire for fine foods that can transform the rich into beggars and condemn them to Hell. Poetry is not the only medieval medium that relegates lovers of roasted fowl to Hell, though most others do so for gluttony, not spend thriftiness. Visual sources from the fourteenth century frequently depict the vice of gluttony by linking it to the eating of roasted fowl. Taddeo di Bartolo’s 1396 fresco Gluttons in Hell in the Cathedral of San Gimignano is a representative example of a common trope. The scene shows a group of the damned seated at a table with their hands tied behind their backs by various demons. The diners are hungrily eyeing a roasted bird set far enough from them on the table that they can see it but not eat it – a suitable punishment of unfulfilled temptation for the very food that made them gluttons in the first place and caused their damnation.96 The same image appears again in a 1431 fresco 94 Barolini, ‘Sociology of the Brigata’, pp. 4-22. For a discussion on gluttony, spending habits, and the brigata spendereccia, see esp. pp. 9-11. 95 Barolini, ‘Sociology of the Brigata’, p. 11, quoting Divina commedia commentator Francesco da Buti. 96 On the San Gimignano fresco, see Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, pp. 117-119.

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painted by Beato Angelico depicting the Last Judgment, now in the Museum of San Marco in Florence. Here, too, a group of men and women are seated around a table, forced by demons standing behind them to look at plates of roasted fowl with their hands tied behind their backs. These representations of an infernal table reserved for gluttons regularly depict their desire for this particular kind of meat. According to Grieco, contemporary viewers would have recognized not only the image but also the fowl portrayed in it, which was, as we have seen, luxury fare that primarily rich gluttons could afford. Churchgoers in fifteenth-century Siena were also listening to San Bernardino’s strictly worded sermons condemning the cravings of rich young men for starne (grey partridges) and capons as sensual foods representing vain desire for luxury.97 The linking of gluttony with pride, greed, vanity, and spend thriftiness in addition to wealth in some medieval literature and iconography sent a message that gluttony, exemplified by specific types of food and especially meat, was a sin that not everyone could afford.98 What, however, did the wealthy eat in everyday life? Grieco, Montanari, and Capatti have studied various sources – travel accounts, letters, private memoirs – where the connections between eating a certain food and one’s social status seem straightforward. Often cited are the letters of Ser Lapo Mazzei, a Florentine notary, who at the beginning of the fifteenth century corresponded extensively with the merchant Francesco di Marco Datini (c. 1335-1410) who lived in Prato. In one letter, Ser Lapo refuses a gift of partridges from his friend, telling him that he cannot eat them because he no longer holds public office. As Grieco explains, the Signori (Priors) of Florence were ‘required to eat great quantities of partridges and fowl in general’,99 essentially as a way of demonstrating their political and civil power. The rulers of Florence were at the top of the social hierarchy and, correspondingly, had to eat what was at the top of the nutritional ladder. If preachers were wary of the consumption of rich foods like fowl, doctors believed, in alignment with Florentine mores, in the nutritional superiority of birds. Lorenzo Sassoli, the personal physician of Francesco di Marco Datini, advised him to eat chickens, grey partridges, pigeons, veal, castrated lamb, and young goat, all of which, this medical expert held, were particularly good for the body.100 In wintertime, Sassoli suggested, Francesco should add turtle 97 Bernardino da Siena, Le Prediche volgari, II, pp. 45-46, quoted in Vitullo, ‘Taste and Temptation’, p. 106. See also Callegari, ‘Grey Partridge’, pp. 182-184. 98 On the social consciousness of food in Dante’s poetry see Callegari, ‘Grey Partridge’. 99 Grieco, ‘Food and Social Classes’, p. 305. 100 ‘E principiando della carne, vi lodo e polli, starne e pippioni, vitella, castrone e cavretti. […] Le carni le quali mi dispiacciono per lo vostro uso sono paperi, anatra, castroni non compiuti,

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doves.101 Unfortunately, we do not know if Francesco heeded this advice, but it was commonly offered to the wealthy by physicians and authors of dietaries. Michele Savonarola (c. 1385-1466), who lived at the Este court in Ferrara and was the personal physician of Borso d’Este, dedicated to his patron a slim volume that addressed both the medical and the gastronomic. The Libreto de tute le cosse che se manzano (c. 1450-1452) reminded Borso, for instance, that ‘lepore non saria carne da signore’ (hare is not a meat for lords).102 Savonarola unambiguously believed in the hierarchical classification of both food and society, and thus distinguished meals for courtiers and lords from ‘meals for peasants’: hare, living close to the ground and being pesante (heavy, or rich) in flavor was not an appropriate food for one at the level of his lord. On the other hand, he found that the meat of a young goat – fare suited only to ‘delicate folk and not [as] a peasant meal’ was ideal for Borso.103 A few years later, the celebrated Platina, in his effort to construct a notion of pleasure in eating, agreed that fowl were a type of food ‘more delicious than others’ and accepted the contemporary notion that they were better suited to the tables of kings and princes than of men of low status.104 Indeed, the actual consumption of fowl on the table of the elites was common at banquets and ceremonies; many archeological sites are proof ‘to the number of birds that ended up on the tables of Medieval and Renaissance Europe’.105 One possible explanation for the increase of consumption of birds on the tables of the rich and powerful is linked to a profound change in the rural environment. The deforestation and the carne di porco e massimamente non fresca’ (and beginning with meat, I recommend you eat chickens, grey partridge and pigeon, veal, castrated lamb and young goat. […] The meats I do not approve for your use are young geese, duck, castrated lamb that is too young, pork, and especially pork that is not fresh); Mazzei, Lettere di un notaro, p. 371. 101 ‘che delle tortole voi usiate quanto potete, perché dalla natura, fra l’altre carni, hanno singular virtù nel confortare la memoria e sentimenti’ (you should consume as much turtle dove as you can, because among the other meats [provided] by nature it has the unique ability to support memory and emotions) and ‘l’altra si è, che vitella in ogni modo che voi potete voi ne mettiate in corpo, perché compensando ogni sua virtù, non potreste usare per uno cibo la più sana vivanda’ (the other [meat] is veal, which you should put into your body, [prepared] in any way you can, because considering all of its qualities you cannot find a healthier food); Mazzei, Lettere di un notaro, p. 372, quoted in Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, pp. 77-78. 102 Savonarola, Libreto, p. 111 (‘De le lepore e conigli’). 103 ‘la megliore carne de quatro piedi è il capreto, specialiter di domestici, siché è carne da delicati e non pasto da villano’; Savonarola, Libreto, p. 107 (‘Capreto’). 104 The original Latin in the fifth book— ‘De avibus esculentis’ (On edible birds) – reads: ‘cum et his obsonia fiant ceteris suavioria et regum ac principum mensis quam humilium et minimi census hominum magis convenientia’. Platina, On Right Pleasure, p. 242. 105 Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, p. 110.

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subsequent creation of open fields for growing grains might have provided a better suited habitat for birds – where they could feed on wheat and other grains – to be hunted and eaten at upper class tables.106 Montanari hypothesizes that this type of alimentary ideology became particularly strong between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, a period of extensive geographical and social mobility among inhabitants of towns and the countryside. This new, more extensive movement incited a need to limit access to the world of privilege that had at one time been easier to defend, resulting in the progressive closure and aristocratization of society and culture, a phenomenon particularly evident in growing distinctions among foods and alimentary choices. As elegant manners and the art of living well became the new markers of social difference, up-and-coming social groups tried to imitate the elaborate meals of the aristocracy, a practice that sumptuary laws attempted, in turn and with limited success, to make illegal, in a vain desire to legislate the social categorization of food. This was the case across the full length of the Renaissance and beyond. Sumptuary laws in Venice by the fourteenth century were already beginning to regulate the number of courses served at banquets.107 During the sixteenth century, sumptuary laws in Milan specifically prohibited the consumption of peacocks and pheasants, while in Venice they regulated the number of wild birds, Indian cocks, and hens as well as the amount of meat consumed in every banquet.108 Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at the diaries of the Venetian Marin Sanudo and at contemporary banquet menus reveals how ineffective such legislation often was. In 1521 at the home of Ser Marco Antonio Venier, lord of Sanguanè (Sanguinetto), for instance, a party was given by the company of the Ortolani, a compagnia della Calza that organized the event in honor of the prince of Bisignano. Supper consisted of twenty-two courses: ‘Peacocks, pheasants, partridges, wood grouse, etc., dressed, with gilded bread, gilded oysters – even the wax candles were gilded’.109 When – in sixteenth-century comedies, comic prose, and poetry – parasites, servants, errant knights and other lowly characters describe their meals – whether imagined, desired, or consumed – it is meat and, especially, roasted fowl that features in their monologues. In contrast to negatively valenced representations of Hell in church frescos and of the 106 Grieco, ‘From Roosters to Cocks’, p. 110. 107 Smith, ‘Family and Domesticity’, III, p. 147. 108 Moyer, ‘“The Food Police”’, p. 62. 109 Labalme and Sanguineti White, Venice Città Excelentissima, pp. 290-291. In Venice, wedding banquets and Carnival celebrations usually offered partridge and pheasant; see esp. the section ‘Fashion, Taste, and Sumptuary Laws’, pp. 303-309.

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vices in prescriptive literature, for characters in these texts there was no negative stigma attached to roasted meat. Indeed, often a happy conclusion was in store for them when they succeeded in enjoying their anticipated meal. Given its ambiguous status, why was roasted meat such a favored dish on both real and imagined tables? Perhaps most importantly, roasting and baking were not common ways of cooking: they implied the availability of wood and an oven. In fact, commoners had to bring their bread or meat to specialized shops with ovens for cooking.110 In this way too, therefore, roasted meat both signified and required affluence, just as we saw in the case of the spendthrift Inferno characters, who were wealthy enough to have ovens in which they could essentially roast away their wealth via the costuma ricca of meat cooked over a bed of cloves. In popular sixteenth-century comedies, it seems that every good meal had to include, at the very least, roasted capons. Invariably, a variety of small birds, pheasants, and grey partridges followed, as we see in Lodovico Dolce’s comedy Fabritia (1549) in a list that recalls, albeit in more modest numbers, the type and varied courses of meat found in sixteenth-century upper-class banquets.111 In the comedy Amor costante (1544) by Alessandro Piccolomini, the servant Panzana (a name that means Big Belly and/or Big Lie) and the parasite Sguazza (Wallower), engage in a delighted conversation about the birds and capons they have just bought for dinner. They note how lucky they are that their masters are madly in love and do not care about paying for their servants’ sumptuous dinners, as they spend all their time writing and discussing love poetry. Clearly a waste of time, Sguazza observes, looking at the capons in his hands: ‘What difference does all this make to me? Let’s posit an example: If I’m certain these are capons, what do I care what they’re called? All I care is that I’ll eat them’.112 The servants continue to laud the joys of tasting delicate stews, and various sapori (sauces) as well as the pleasures of enjoying meat in all its incarnations. Not surprisingly, for Sguazza the ideal meal consists of capons, pheasants, and various birds accompanied by wine. In the end, he and Panzana agree that great happiness does not come from loving women but only from the pleasures of excellent eating. 110 Parasecoli, Al Dente, p. 117. In a number of novelle by Sacchetti (Il Trecentonovelle: cxxiv, clxxxv, clxxxvi), servants bring the meat for roasting to the local oven, where often someone switches the meat for less choice cuts or steals it along the road. 111 Dolce, Fabritia, fol. 17v (II.1). See for instance the comedy given in Ferrara in 1529 by Messisbugo to honor the wedding of Ercole d’Este with Renata di Francia. 112 ‘Che mi fa, a me, questo? Poniam caso: s’io so certo che questi son capponi, che m’importa saper come si chiamano? A me basta ch’io me li mangiarò’; Piccolomini, Amor costante, p. 355 (II.8).

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The account of a banquet enjoyed by the parasite Ingluvio (Devourer) in the comedy La vedova (1592) by Niccolò Buonaparte reveals Ingluvio’s similar appreciation and knowledge of the elaborate meals consumed in a courtly environment. He lists several of the courses he partakes of: chicken in sauce; quail and turkey followed by a broth poltriglio (with various meats and vegetables); and roast kid stuffed with the most expensive fowl, all accompanied by special bread from Mestre, sweetmeats, and wine from Milan and Friuli.113 The parasite Mascellone in the comedy Fantesca (1556) by Girolamo Parabosco also exhibits sophisticated knowledge of recipes for meat in particular. During a discussion about the superiority of eating well over drinking well, Mascellone details for Ghiribizzo the cooking scene in a tavern, including capon and a pheasant roasting on a spit, served piping hot on a clean plate with two oranges cut in four parts.114 Humorous descriptions of food often evoke comparisons with and the vocabulary of war, as when the character Ghiribizzo compliments Mascellone: ‘Many people think you are a soldier and they aren’t far off, because I can’t imagine there is anyone better than you at knowing how to use the spit to pierce warblers, thrushes, and partridges’.115 Flights of the imagination in comic descriptions of capons have them dressed as knights with spurs, fat as hogs and older than a Sybil.116 Certainly, these characters insist, the anticipation of the pleasures of eating cannot be satisfied by the prospect of eating rustic whole grain bread: only partridges and pheasants will do – or, even better, an entire well-ordered banquet table, complete with courses.117 The parasite Lecardo (Pot Licker) in the comedy Il Saltuzza (1551) by Andrea Calmo imagines that he would organize a banquet like a brave captain who deploys his army. The infantry regiment that comes first would be composed of salads, prosciutto, and wine; the light cavalry that follows would include boiled chicken and kids; the armed knights – roasted capons, partridges, pheasants, and peacocks would make up the centerpiece of the banquet-army. A motley group of 113 Buonaparte, La vedova, fol. 38 (II.10). 114 Mascellone to Ghiribizzo: ‘e che tu ti vedessi posto innnanti uno piatello ben pulito, uno fagiano tolto al’hor alhora dello spiedo, con due narranze tagliate in quattro parti’; Parabosco, La fantesca, fol. 29 (II.1). 115 ‘molti t’hanno per huomo armigero, e non s’ingannano di molto, ch’io non credo che si tovi huomo che sapia meglio di te adoperar uno spiedo, pieno però di beccafichi, di tordi e di pernice’; Parabosco, La fantesca, fol. 28 (II.1). 116 See the servant Turchetto’s monologue: ‘duo para di caponi con li sproni da cavaliere, grassi come un bel porco, et più antichi della Sibilla’; Dolce, Fabritia, fols. 21v-22r (II.8). 117 See Mascellone’s monologue: ‘ma io non ho però fame di pan di fava, o di miglio, non. Il mio humore è il fagiano’; Parabosco, La fantesca, fol. 79 (IV). On Mascellone’s comment see also Chapter Two p. 99.

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looters – sauces, mustards, and sweet oranges – would follow, along with a rearguard of cheeses, fruit, jams, and cakes. Finally, the officers – wine, marzipans, and confetti – would bring the meal to a close.118 A few decades later in an entry on cooks, Tommaso Garzoni in La Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1585) employs a more aggressive image of banquet as bloody battle, with cooks in the role of captains, carrying spits as halberds on their shoulders when they enter the battlefield – the kitchen – all dirty and greasy. Teeth are the storm troops that strike the first blow; jaws do their job of making a noise as frightening and vigorous as that of a battlefield. The battle goes on for hours, until the glorious paladins of the round table win the final victory.119 Descriptions of banquet-armies and battles with food; succulent and precious meats roasting on a spit; and knights and giants in mock-heroic quest for food have been viewed by scholars as a classic component of the comic and burlesque side of sixteenth-century literature. This is a genre in which every kind of reversal is possible: servants can eat luxurious foods and discuss, knowledgeably, their flavors and qualities; parasites have their social services rewarded with invitations to aristocratic banquets; even errant knights and giants display a degree of refined taste. It is usually argued that at the end of these comedies, however, everyone returns to his or her fixed position at the table – and in society. I would like to suggest a different view: these literary works portray an imagined order of things and a social hierarchy that reflects not simply humorous reversals and a world upside down – a long popular rhetoric – but also a set of specific sixteenth-century concerns. These texts 118 Calmo, Il Saltuzza, pp. 155-156 (V.9). The entire description is as follows: ‘Oh, come saprei ordinar bene una mensa se mi ci venisse dato il carico! Ponerei le vivande ordinariamente, come fa un valoroso e prodo capitano di uno essercito. A prima giunta io ci farei venire in loco di fanterie l’insalata, il rafano, il presciuto lesso, lengue e salsicie, con diversi boccaloni de preciosi vini invece de’tamburi; le cavaglierie la carne de vitello, le supe grasse, gli polastri e capreti allessi; gl’uomini d’arme lomboli, caponi, pernice, galli d’India, fasani e pavoni arrostiti; gli ragazzi, saccomani, venturieri la salsa, la mostarda, gli cedri, le melarance, il sapor d’uva, le pomele d’oliva; c’è poi il retroguardia con le bagaglie, cioè il caseo, le fruta, il codognato, le torte; viene poi il gubernatore, coletrale, collonelli, intendando la malvaggìa, le ostriche, il marzapano e il confetto; di le arteglierie e arcobusi non parliamo, perché elle doppo il pranzo si scroccano di sotto e di sopra senza remissione, e godi finché’. 119 Garzoni, La Piazza universale, II, pp. 1094-1106 (Discorso xciii, De’ cuochi); see esp. p. 1104. In mock-heroic poems, game more than fowl is the main protagonist. In Morgante, the knights Dodone and Rinaldo describe in detail how they cook meat on a spit from a deer they had captured earlier, being careful to not overcook it. In Baldus, roasted meats of various kind are the protagonists of a banquet (regalis coena) at the French court; thirty tranciatori (carvers) work hard to prepare roasted capons, kids, and hares for the guests and serve the meat with sauces and other rich dishes. See Folengo, Baldus, I, pp. 101-115.

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called upon traditional social classifications of food to reverse themselves and played with the possibilities of a new and developing style of eating as well as new social implications about how the social hierarchy operated in relation to what the different classes ranked along it were supposed to eat. Texts that experiment with addressing these concerns have an awareness of and resonance with the contemporary culture of food found in early modern cookbooks, recipe collections, and upper-class banquet menus. Moreover, they display an increasing emphasis on refined table manners and, most importantly for this discussion, on the growing importance of taste.120 Increasingly, denizens of the lower classes are imagined as no longer interested in merely filling their bellies; they, like all people, want to eat well and enjoy the pleasures of tasty food. What had once been unimaginable, therefore, was becoming imaginable and, gradually, was entering the realm of the possible – not only in literature but in society itself.

The triumph of greens As discussed above, in sixteenth-century literature two luxury foods – fresh fruit and roasted fowl – often descend from the Parnassus of Foodstuffs to take a place at the table of up-and-coming and lower classes while never losing their appeal for the upper classes. The reverse, as we shall see, was also true: an appreciation of vegetables among the cultured and the upwardly mobile status of these earthy foods – from lowly foodstuff to aristocratic delicacy – becomes a distinctive trait of Italian cuisine and culture from the sixteenth century on.121 Historically, of course, what people ate (for members of all social classes) was primarily the result of their economic position in society, the offerings of the local climate, and the practical possibility (or impossibility) of procuring certain foods. The best example is perhaps fruit: though despised by doctors, as we have seen it remained a precious commodity, was cultivated with care, was protected by law, and was certainly enjoyed by the rich with their orchards and, whenever possible, by those with fewer resources: merchants, farmers, even peasants. The poor reputation of vegetables in prescriptive texts, similarly, has some doubt shed upon it already in the very first Italian cookbook – the Liber de coquina (c. 1285-1304) – produced at and for the fourteenth-century Angevin 120 Albala, Eating Right, pp. 215-216. At the same time, the negative stigma related to gluttony and its moralizing discourses largely disappeared. 121 This section is loosely based on Giannetti, ‘Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning’.

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court in Naples. The Liber begins with a number of different recipes for preparing cabbage. Though aimed at an aristocratic audience, the volume specifies that cabbage can be prepared in a ‘delicate’ manner as a side dish for meat made for the signore and his courtiers’.122 The Tuscan version of the volume adds yet more recipes with vegetables, including different kinds of bulbs and onions, even giving privileged space to turnips and chickpeas.123 By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, virtually all Italian recipe books contain a large section on vegetables.124 Particularly important are Maestro Martino de Rossi’s Libro de arte coquinaria (1464-1465) and Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine. Maestro Martino’s cookbook is divided into six sections dedicated to meat, fish, side dishes, sauces, pies, fried food, and egg dishes. Although it lacks a specific section for vegetables, cabbage, chickpeas, cauliflowers, mushrooms, fennel, and various legumes constitute the basis for soups and pies; even if they are not the main part of the meal, vegetables have reached the tables of the elites. The first printed cookbook, De honesta voluptate et valetudine by Platina, which is largely a translation of many recipes found in the Libro de arte coquinaria, reserves the third book to nuts, bulbs, herbs and spices and the first part of book four to various salads and seasonings of herbs. In particular, it helped launch the new Italian fashion of preparing salads with different aromatic herbs (lettuce, borage, calamintha nepeta [Calamint], fennel, parsley, chervil, chicory, rosemary flowers, etc.) always to be dressed with oil, vinegar, and salt. At one point, perhaps wary of the lingering negative reputation of vegetables, he adds: ‘Their wild toughness demands eating and chewing well with the teeth’.125 Tough or not, several chapters in the tenth book of De honesta voluptate concern vegetables prepared in varied and sophisticated ways.126 122 ‘Caulles delicatos ad usum dominorum prepara cum albumine ovorum et feniculo et cum omnibus carnibus’. Liber de coquina, I, 6. See also Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, pp. 41-43. 123 See Möhren, Il libro de la cocina. Un ricettario tra Oriente e Occidente, pp. 135-136, 140-144. 124 For an interesting study of the first medieval recipes for salads, see Carnevale Schianca, ‘Insalate medievali’, pp. 85-136. In earlier periods, salads were a mixture of herbs and various meats. Massonio, in his seventeenth-century treatise on salads, explains the difference between what he calls ‘true salads’ (made of herbs and flowers), served at the beginning of the meal, and the herb, fruit, and flower salads mixed with cold cuts of various sorts of meat that were served as a ‘nutritious food’ throughout the meal. See Massonio, Archidipno overo dell’insalata, quoted in Benporat, Cucina e convivialità italiana, pp. 240-241. 125 ‘Sale multo inspargi atque oleo inungi debent, aceto deinde superfuso, ubi paululum resederit, earum silvatica durities comedenda ac bene dentibus conterenda sunt.’ See ‘Conditum Pandodapum’ in Platina, On Right Pleasure, pp. 216-217 (my emphasis). 126 Various salads (lettuce, endive, mixed, and portulaca/porcellana, or purslane) and dressings open the fourth book with the recommendation that they should be eaten at the beginning of

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Significantly, Platina’s book was a gastronomical treatise written for the elegant papal court of Sixtus IV (1471-1481) and its cardinals, especially his nephew Pietro Riario, a papal diplomat who used splendid banquets that were renowned for their luxury and extravagance to build political alliances for the pope.127 Based just upon the surprising number of vegetable recipes in a book aimed at such an exclusive audience, it might be argued that the cardinals were keen to eat less meat with an eye to a lean ecclesiastical diet, even though Platina’s vegetables recipes are anything but light and humble. While recipe books, as Ken Albala succinctly reminds us, ‘are rarely if ever accurate descriptions of what people actually ate at any given time and place’, they can help us understand evolving food ideology and can serve as ‘a way of thinking about the world that is part of a larger aesthetic, political or social mind-set’.128 Certainly, volumes like Platina’s indicate that the emerging food ideology of the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries in Italy was relying less and less on the old hierarchical classification that considered vegetables a despised food, good only for uncouth villani.129 Scholars have wondered why this transition occurred and have offered several explanations. Grieco sees the abandonment of medieval food ideology as a complex process that involved the close observation of plants and animals in the context not only of what ancient authorities had to say about them but also of the ‘new’ botanical and zoological sciences. A new appreciation of vegetables among elites (like cardinals’ courts) was likely, he adds, an important source for the diffusion of this new food fashion.130 Capatti and Montanari also reflect on the long culinary process that ennobled many low foods and led to their use in recipes where the main ingredients were precious spices and costly meat and fish. Via their position at the edge of the plate, Capatti and Montanari suggest, foods like vegetables were able to cross social boundaries (a process they term trasversalità) in alimentary the meal. See the entry ‘Portulaca’ an herbaceous plant used in salads in Carnevale Schianca, La cucina medievale, p. 534. 127 On the role of Cardinal Pietro Riario, see de Silva, ‘Princely Patronage on Display’. One famous banquet organized by Riario took place in 1473 to mark the passage through Rome of Eleonora d’Aragona, daughter of the King of Naples, on her way to Ferrara to meet her future husband, Ercole d’Este. For a description of the banquet (which included candied fruit covered with gold leaves), see McIver, Cooking and Eating, pp. 141-144. Benporat, Feste e banchetti, pp. 167-171, includes the letter written by Eleonora describing the banquet. 128 Albala, ‘Cookbooks as Historical Documents’, pp. 229 and 231. 129 See Benporat, Cucina e convivialità italiana, for multiple examples (from chronicles, descriptions, letters, and stewards’ cookbooks) of banquet menus for public festivities and private dinner parties in the sixteenth century. 130 Grieco, ‘La gastronomia’, esp. pp. 147-148.

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practices and habits, a phenomenon that helped undermine rigid medieval food ideology.131 Following the lead of recipe books, prescriptive literature, dietary tracts, and scientific manuals began slowly to register a new appreciation of vegetables and greens, and a wide range of literary works picked up the theme, contributing greatly to the new positive perceptions of these foodstuffs. Salads and raw greens appear as protagonists of short poems132 and letters,133 and make a few appearances in meals consumed in less wellknown epic poems like Baldus.134 In the ‘Dedicatory Letter’ to his brother, Pseudo-Sermini calls his book of novelle a ‘paneretto d’insalata’ (a little basket of salad); the Italian diminutive -etto adds grace and delicacy to the image of the basket. To justify his work’s lack of a Decameron-like frame or order, he calls it an insalatella meschiata (delicate little mixed salad), again a gracious diminutive that conveys creativity instead of disorder.135 131 Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, pp. 42-43. 132 See, for instance, the ‘wedding’ poem MARIDAZZO | DI MOLTE SORTI | D’HERBE,| Fatto in vn’Insalata del Mese di Maggio, | Nel quale si vede l’ingegno di ciascuna nel maritarsi. | Con vna frottola d’alcuni Innamorati, che vanno | vendendo Salata. Del Croce, a humorous composition by Croce for a ‘marriage’ of herbs that cites many different types. The second part of the maridazzo is a frottola – a poetic musical form similar to the fourteenth-century ballata. See also the series of strambotti (poetic musical compositions) dedicated to ‘La Pastorella’ by degli Alessandri da Sassoferrato where a shepherdess picks not flowers but salad and blackberries: ‘la pastorella mia se stava un giorno / de fuora al campo a coglier le muriche’ (my shepherdess was one day / out in the field collecting berries, p. 5), and ‘Giva cogliendo la mia pastorella / per un fiorito prato l’insalata’ (my shepherdess went gathering / salad in a flowering field, p. 10). In the seventeenth century, see the ludic prose by Accademia della Crusca member Chimentelli (1620-1668), ‘La cicalata delle lodi dell’insalata’, pp. 44-52. Salad also appears in the visual arts: a painting of unknown authorship (though sometimes attributed to Caravaggio) and unconfirmed date (early 1600s?) in the church of the Cappuccini in Recanati in the Marche represents the Holy Family eating a frugal dinner of wild chicory; for this reason, the painting is usually called ‘Madonna dell’insalata’. 133 See Aretino’s letters cited in this chapter. 134 For salads prepared by different characters in Folengo’s Baldus, see Messedaglia, Vita e costume della rinascenza, pp. 228-230. The most famous description is of the salad prepared by Berto Panada: ‘Aveva già mescolato l’insalatina con varie erbe, vi cosparge il sale, spruzza l’aceto, e stilla poche gocce dal fiasco dell’olio che riserva appositamente solo per condire le insalate degne di tanto onore’ (Once he had tossed the salad with various greens, he sprinkles the salt, splashes the vinegar, and pours a few drops from the bottle of oil that he reserves especially for dressing only those salads worthy of such an honor); Folengo, Baldus, II, p. 137. Previously the word insalata in the diminutive form appeared in the first novella of the Decameron when Ser Cepparello, during his false confession, admits ironically to his sin of gluttony: ‘molte volte aveva desiderato d’avere cotali insalatuzze d’erbucce’ (many times he had wished to have such little salads of greens). In Cepparello’s mind salad was a food so ‘low’ that he really did not sin at all. 135 See Marchi, ‘Un paneretto d’insalatella’, p.77.

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Salads become fashionable The following pages concentrate specifically on the new fashion of salad in the sixteenth century that appears literally and metaphorically in contemporary literature, often embedded with unexpected meanings.136 To begin, I turn to two texts that are not strictly literary but represent instead an early modern perspective on what we might call the world of plants and the imagination. I refer to two treatises on herbs written between the second half of the sixteenth and the early decades of the seventeenth centuries, both of which are notable for their everyday language, their narrative style, their caution in repeating traditional medical clichés, and the weight they give to personal experience. The first is a heroic defense of salad from the mid-sixteenth century found in a ‘letter’ in the form of a booklet written by Costanzo Felici (1525? -1585), a botanist and physician from the Marche in central Italy. He wrote in response to a 1565 request by his friend, the famous scientist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), for advice on salads. Aldrovandi, who had a passion for all sorts of salads, asked Felici to list and discuss all the herbs that could be eaten, either raw or cooked. After a preamble that humorously plays on the difficulty of such a complex subject, Felici makes the more serious claim that talking about food means talking about specific cultural and geographic identities. Appearing to distance himself from nationalistic chauvinism, he first explains to Aldrovandi how food choices and tastes differ and how the same food can be considered poison in one country and good to eat in another.137 He then proceeds to make a triumphant case for Italian supremacy in the case of salad specifically: l’insalata è nome de’ Italiani solamente, avendo la denominatione da una parte del suo condimento, cioè dal sale, però che si chiama così un’erba, o più miste insieme, o altra cosa con condimento d’olio e sale138 136 It is important to clarify here that I am not discussing the vegetarian diet that Marsilio Ficino, Erasmus, and Leonardo da Vinci adopted in accordance with the precepts of the neoPlatonic movement and other philosophical considerations. These figures appreciated a light, plant-based diet for its perceived positive effects on the mind, but their insistence on asceticism and moderation had little in common with the new sixteenth-century appreciation of vegetables as a delicacy, a sign of refined manners, and a symbol of attention to flavor and good taste. 137 ‘perché son certo non vi poter satisfar in parte alcuna, perché l’erbe (si puol dir così) sonno infinite e di paesi molti e gli omini innumerabili e li gusti diversi, che in un loco piace una cosa e in un altro un’altra diversa si costuma per cibo, e dove una pianta è veneno altrove poi è cibo, e poi ancora più particularmente ad uno piace un’erba che l’altro la proibisce e danna; e così malamente potremo venire in cognitione di cosa tanto confusa’; Felici, Lettera sulle insalate, pp. 67-68. 138 Felici, Lettera sulle insalate, p. 68.

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Salad is a name invented solely by Italians, and it comes from salt, a part of its dressing; thus every raw green, or mixture of raw greens, or something else dressed with oil and salt is called salad.

Platina had indeed defined what a salad was and how to prepare it 139 a century earlier in the context of his much broader cookbook project; here, instead, Felici dedicates an entire, if small, treatise to salads and raw greens, thus bestowing them with a privileged space beyond the one increasingly being made for them on the table. This tract, entitled Lettera sulle insalate e piante che in qualunque modo vengono per cibo all’uomo (A Letter on Salads and Plants that in Some Way Can Be Food for Men), reverses more traditional negative judgments of raw greens, presenting in a positive light the everyday practice of growing salads and herbs, fruits and vegetables that enter in the composition of salads,140 as an activity appropriate not just for rustic folk.141 The treatise in fact recounts his direct observation of his growing vegetable garden – a decidedly non-aristocratic pastime and point of view. Rather than focusing on rational classification or theoretical subdivision in a more Aristotelian mode, the essay’s main thrust is a narrative and entertaining one in which personal digressions, actual observations, popular proverbs, and medical advice go hand in hand with gastronomy, attention to taste, and descriptions of the color and odor of plants – all seasoned with irony and humor. If ancient auctoritates appear from time to time, they do not command the narrative: practice and taste are what count.142 For instance, salt is used on salads to dry the greens and improve the flavor; the same happens when vinegar is poured on salad. This type of dressing, along 139 For Platina a salad was anything that was dressed with vinegar and oil and eaten raw or cooked (‘Addo etiam lactucas et quicquid crudum vel coctum ex aceto et oleo assumitur’). See Platina, De honesta voluptate, book 1, p. 122. He dedicates a section of Book IV to the preparation of various salads and recommends that they be eaten at the beginning of the meal, preferably in the summer. On salads as part of the ‘order of the meal’ see Grieco, ‘Meals and Mealtimes in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy,’ in Grieco, Food, Social Politics, pp. 51-53. 140 In the last part of the letter, Felici introduces various fruits (among them citron [cedrone], gooseberry/thorny grape [uva spina], strawberries, apricots, figs), herbs (basil, sage, rosemary), vegetables (asparagus, fennels, artichokes, squash), and bulbs (garlic, onion, red radish) that are used in the composition of salads. 141 He attributes to women the ability to recognize and collect different herbs directly from the field; Felici, Lettera sulle insalate, pp. 91-92. 142 Felici quotes Martiale (Epigrame 13) to discuss beet roots and greens, but then writes: ‘E con questo medemo accenna sia ancora un cibo da gente vile, ma per la varietà del suo condimento si è trovato cibo grato a tutte le tavole’ (And with this he means that it may still be a food for low people, but because of the variety of its dressing it has become a food appreciated on every table); Felici, Lettera sulle insalate, p. 94 (my emphasis).

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with oil, makes salad ‘molto grata al gusto’(very pleasing to the taste).143 The Lettera sulle insalate is a gastronomical treatise as well as a literary composition that alternates descriptions of edible plants with advice on how to prepare them according to the season and to individual taste, celebrating the superiority of the culture that possesses and deploys such knowledge and good taste.144 Felici’s discourse seems also particularly invested in countering – through observed experience – the presupposition that consuming raw food was indicative of a bestial nature or of backward, rustic behavior. Given that the primary purpose of Felici’s narrative is to exalt the Italian culture of salads, clearly he (and any sympathetic Italians he may have had as readers) would not have subscribed to the opinion of some non-Italian contemporary writers (and, indeed, of Claude Lévi-Strauss) that the raw and the cooked correspond to degrees of civilization. The cultural stigma attached to foods like vegetables and greens eaten raw was quite vivid in northern Europe; indeed, Felici refers expressly to the opinion held by people ‘beyond the mountains’ that ‘Italian gluttons’ had adopted animal feed – greens eaten raw – as their favorite food.145 Felici’s Lettera provides one example of how a certain food may function as a cultural and even ideological signifier, something even more forcefully expressed in another treatise on herbs and vegetables written a few decades later in England. Giacomo Castelvetro (1546-c.1616), an Italian Protestant exile living in England after having escaped the Roman Inquisition, was interested in many of the same themes a little more than a generation later; he wrote his poetic tribute to Italian vegetables, entitled Racconto di tutte le radici, di tutte l’erbe, et di tutti i frutti, che crudi o cotti in Italia se mangiano (Account of All the Roots, Plants, and Fruits, that, Raw or Cooked, Are Eaten in Italy), 143 Felici, Lettera sulle insalate, p. 94. 144 Attention to gusto is common in the treatise. See, for instance, the following examples from Felici, Lettera sulle insalate: ‘il sale vi pongono […] acciò mordicando il gusto’ (they put salt on it […] so as [to make] the taste [more] biting, p. 68); ‘l’uva spina, grattissima al gusto’ (thorny grape, most pleasing to the taste, p. 107); ‘l’ aglio si usa crudo e cotto […] che così insieme aiuta il gusto’ (garlic is used raw and cooked […] both of which together enhance flavor, p. 74); ‘il rafano o ravanello o radice […] incitando il gusto assai’ (the radish or red radish or radish root [radish] […] rather inciting taste, p. 75). On radishes, see Chapter Three pp. 181-190. 145 ‘Basta a dir che ‘l desiderio vostro per ora si è che, piacendo a voi tanto il cibo dell’insalata così detta, vulgare cibo quasi proprio (come dicono oltra montani) de’ Italiani ghiotti quali hanno tolta la vivanda agli animali quali si mangiano l’erbe crude’; Felici, Lettera sulle insalate, p. 67. These assumptions were reproduced in literature of various genres; English theatre, for instance, almost invariably represented Italian figs, ‘sallets’, and melons as dangerous, alien foods. See Olsen, ‘Poisoned Figs’, and Giannetti, ‘Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning’.

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in 1614.146 Clearly a direct response to English writers who condemned salad and vegetables as dangerous Italian novelties and temptations, Castelvetro’ s work reviewed with longing the great variety of fruit and vegetables produced in Italy during each of the four seasons. As a grateful guest of a carnivorous country, he responded to the fears of his English hosts by recalling, from Felici, the old Italian proverb on how to make a good salad, which he labeled the legge insalatesca (salad law): ‘A salad must be well salted with little vinegar and plenty of oil’.147 He also felt the need to reassure his audience that this dish was loved in Italy not only by the poor but also, significantly, by the rich.148 Castelvetro’s Racconto aimed at redressing the bad reputation suffered by salads and vegetables in England by illustrating their intrinsic goodness and healthiness while at the same time using them to represent his home country as a paradise lost; thus issues of cultural and national identity run through this work as well. His section on salads, perhaps echoing Felici’s Lettera, concludes by noting with pride that Italians give much more attention to taste than do other peoples: Don’t do as the Germans and other foreign peoples do, who, as soon as they have washed the salad a little, throw it in a pile on the plate and throw on top a little salt and almost no oil but way too much vinegar, without ever tossing it, having no purpose but to please the eye, while we Italians hold pleasing the palate in much higher regard.149

The Racconto includes short anecdotes that range from the gastronomical to the comical, medical, and botanical,150 often complemented by observations 146 See Firpo, Gastronomia del rinascimento, pp. 131-176, and Castelvetro, Racconto di tutte le radici. For an English translation, see Castelvetro, The Fruit, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy. 147 ‘insalata ben salata, poco aceto e ben oliata’; Castelvetro, Racconto di tutte le radici, p. 7 See also the same, likely common, proverb ‘l’insalata ben salata, pocc’aceto e ben oliata’; Felici, Lettera sulle insalate, p. 69. 148 The Racconto was written in Italian for readers that were appreciative of Italian language and culture. Castelvetro, as religious expat, made a living in England teaching Italian to aristocrats. See the entry on Castelvetro by Riley in The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. 149 ‘non fare come i Tedeschi e altre straniere generazioni fanno, li quali, appresso avere un po’ poco l’erbe lavate, in un mucchio le mettono nel piatto e su vi gittano un poco di sale e non molto olio, ma molto aceto, senza mai rivolgerla, non avendo eglino altra mira che di piacere all’occhio; ma noi Italici abbiam più riguardo di piacere a monna bocca’; Castelvetro, Racconto di tutte le radici, p. 7. 150 See for instance the famous ‘piacevole novelletta’ (pleasing little tale) on truffle hunting at the end of the racconto. Castelvetro patiently explains – to a mystif ied Swiss baron who journeyed to Italy and witnessed Italian gentlemen following pigs around in the woods – that

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on the importance of taste. While introducing the topic of ‘the green salads’ (le verdi insalate) that are eaten in the spring, Castelvetro affirms that they possess three qualities: they are pleasing to the eye, flavorful to the palate, and (no less importantly) healthful for the human body.151 His preference is for insalate di mischianze, in which different types of herbs and flowers come together to form the queen of salads – provided that they are washed, prepared, and dressed in the right way.152 The traditional four-humor theory and food hierarchy only occasionally make an appearance, related as if they were a given background – an expected part of a commonly shared culture that prospective readers would know. For this exiled literato, not these traditional notions of food but the colorful image of Italian vegetables, raw and cooked, represented his cultural identity and his country —a land of good taste. By the time Castelvetro completed his work in London in 1614 153 the image and perception of raw vegetables and salad had changed greatly in Italy.154 While a more observation- and experience-oriented botany and science played a major role in this changing perception, sixteenth-century literature they were looking for a culinary treasure: the truffle; Castelvetro, Racconto di tutte le radici, pp. 26-28. 151 ‘Quanto grate, gustevoli e sane sieno nel principio di questa tutta ridente stagione le verdi insalate a pieno non si può esprimere e questo per due speziali ragioni credo avenire. L’una è per essere ormai le cotte dell’inverno venute a rincrescimento non picciolo; l’altra è per apportar queste verdi molto piacere agli occhi, assai gusto al palato e (che monta più) non già poca salute a’ corpi umani’ (It isn’t possible to fully express how welcome, tasteful, and healthy these green salads are at the beginning of this delightful season, and I believe this is the case for two specific reasons. The first is because by then the cooked vegetables of winter have become quite undesirable; the other is because these greens bring pleasure to the eye, flavor to the palate, and (what counts more) no small amount of health to the human body); Castelvetro, Racconto di tutte le radici, p. 6. 152 Castelvetro dedicates a few lines here to the importance of washing salad thoroughly to eliminate any sand. He also stresses how the person in charge of washing the greens should have clean hands before and during the operation. The paragraph on mesclun salad critiques foreign cooks who do not know how to wash and prepare a salad; see Castelvetro, Racconto di tutte le radici, pp. 6-7. Like Felici before him, Castelvetro seems to want to counter the denigration salad and other raw vegetables have suffered due to the opinions of northern Europeans, especially the Germans and English. 153 Trinity College Library at Cambridge holds three manuscript versions of the Racconto. 154 Another sign of the widespread consumption of raw greens in Italy came in 1627 with the publication of Archidipno overo dell’insalata by Massonio (1554-1624), a treatise that reviewed all the types of greens that could be served at the beginning or at the end of a meal. As Albala has aptly summarized, in Massonio’s treatise ‘the projected audience became the ordinary household, and dietary recommendations were forced to take into account ordinary eating habits, often entirely bypassing the ancient authorities’; Albala, Eating Right, p. 43 and pp. 265-266.

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in circulation before most botanical treatises contributed to it as well. These imaginative texts employed the image of salad as a metaphor embedded with different and at times quite unexpected meanings, helping to pave the way to a more widespread appreciation of salad greens and a more vegetableoriented food culture. The science of botany and a more general enthusiasm for increasingly evidence-based investigation, of course, played a larger role in these changes, but literary culture initiated and spun creatively off of the moment, contributing in an under-recognized way to changing perceptions. The salad green image appeared with increasing frequency in the literature of the time as a sign of refined manners, renewed attention to taste and physical pleasure, and ultimately a sign of cultural and social superiority. Once again, Pietro Aretino reflects on and reinforces the changing perception of ideologies around food and class. Salad makes an appearance in his works on the first day of his provocative dialogue Ragionamento (1534) in which the protagonist, Nanna, teaches her daughter Pippa the arte puttanesca (art of whoring). Good table manners, Nanna insists, are a crucial component not only in the education of the perfect courtier but also in that of the aspiring courtesan. Salad – here neither a raw and thus uncouth food appropriate only for the unsophisticated nor a dish apt to refine and clarify the mind of humanists and clerics – is represented as a common part of meals for the rich. To wit, ‘salad greens, a nest of birds, a bunch of strawberries, or suchlike delicacies’ are considered among the gentilezze – things noble to eat – in the second day of the dialogue, during which Nanna narrates to Antonia the life of married women.155 Anticipating some of the preoccupations later expressed by Castelvetro, Nanna tells Pippa: And when you reach the salad, don’t dive in like a cow into clover; but bite off tiny mouthfuls without smearing the tips of your fingers with oil, and carry them to your mouth, which you should not lower to lap the food off the plate, as I have so often seen certain wenches do.156

Though Pippa is not destined to become a refined cortigiana like Veronica Franco (1546-1591), she still had to learn how to eat a salad with grace and composure – even, one might say, with a certain castiglionesca sprezzatura. 155 ‘insalate, una nidiata di uccellini, un mazzetto di fragole o simili gentilezze’; Aretino, ‘La seconda giornata’, p. 123. English translation from Aretino, Aretino’s Dialogues, p. 76. 156 ‘Venendo la insalata, non te le avventare come le vacche al f ieno: ma fà i boccon piccin piccini, e senza ungerti appena le dita pónitigli in bocca; la quale non chinarai, pigliando le vivande, fino in sul piatto come talor veggo fare ad alcuna poltrona’; Aretino, ‘In questa prima giornata’, p. 21. English translation from Aretino, Aretino’s Dialogues, p. 170.

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Aretino here links the act of eating salad – and the act of eating in general – in a refined and elegant manner to Pippa’s self-fashioning as an attractive, sexually appealing cortigiana capable of fitting into upper-class society.157 Other writers of the period picked up and ran with Aretino’s interest in salad and raw greens, which were destined to become a new literary fashion. In 1535, the poet Francesco Maria Molza (1489-1544), a member of the Vignaiuoli – the academy so despised by Aretino – dedicated to salad, its history and its etymology, a long and playful poem imbued with erotic meaning.158 Molza in fact wrote his salad poem for entry into the Vignaiuoli, a group that produced a rich array of food poems. The mythical origin of the alimentary predilection of this academy was explained by translator and poet Annibal Caro (1507-1566), who allusively nicknamed himself Ser Agresto da Ficaruolo (Sir Rustic of Fig Land) in a commentary, the so-called Della Figheide del Padre Siceo or Comento di Ser Agresto da Ficaruolo sopra la prima Ficata del Padre Siceo (1539), on a poem about figs also written by Molza.159 According to Caro’s imaginative reconstruction, Francesco Berni, founder of the academy, was thrown out of the garden at Parnassus due to his lack of reverence for the Muses of poetry. He soon returned in secret, however, with the help of maidservants who gave him access to a nearby orchard. There, he had his friends join him, and together they enjoyed all sorts of fruit and vegetables, hence their famous food poems in terza rima.160 The metaphor of the orchard – where vegetables of phallic shape, round fruits with their echoes of bottoms and breasts, and fresh salads with their sexual references to youthful women (as discussed in Chapter Three) flourish year-round – enjoyed great success in letters, poems, and other literary genres of the period. This Bernesque poetry, which playfully 157 Washing hands before dinner, eating and drinking with moderation, and not talking or making noise while eating are the most important pieces of advice. Nanna reassures Pippa: ‘tu acquisterai fama de la più valente e de la più graziosa cortigiana che viva’ (you will achieve fame as the most talented and gracious courtesan who lives); Aretino, ‘La seconda giornata’, p. 21. 158 For an analysis of the capitolo, published in Il primo libro dell’opere burlesche, see Chapter Three, pp. 177-181. On the Vignaiuoli and their poetry, see Romei, ‘Roma 1532-1537’. 159 Caro, ‘Commento di ser Agresto da Ficaruolo’. On La Figheide: comento, see Scrivano, Ritratto di Annibal Caro, pp. 41-62. 160 ‘Dipoi s’ingegnò tanto, che rubò la chiave del cancello alla Madre Poesia lor Portinara; e misevi dentro una schiera d’altri Poeti baioni, che, ruzzando per l’orto, lo sgominarono tutto, e secondo che andarono loro a gusto, così colsero, e celebrarono, chi le Pesche, chi le Fave, chi i Citriuoli, chi i Carciofi’ (After he gave it great thought, finally he stole the key [to the gardens] of Mother Poetry their Gatekeeper; and he let in a horde of other playful Poets who, cavorting through the garden, took it entirely over. And according to their whims, they picked – and celebrated – one Peaches, another Beans, another Cucumbers, another Artichokes); Caro, ‘Commento di ser Agresto da Ficaruolo’, p. 93.

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overturned the lyrical Petrarchan canon with clever metaphors of a wider range of sexual practices and a mock pedestrian emphasis on the everyday and the superficial, saw its great success confirmed by the multiple editions published by Venetian presses at mid-century and by its many imitators.161 As we have seen, despite its popularity (or perhaps because of it), this type of poetry encountered the scorn of Aretino in his letter Il sogno del Parnaso. This is not the only place in Aretino’s opus in which he disparages the Vignaiuoli: another letter, this time to the courtier Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano (1502-1570), argues against literary imitation and in favor of originality, directly attacking Berni and his circle of friends by stating that anyone who is hungry (for poetry) shouts ‘bring us something other than salad’!162 Aretino thus repeats his earlier accusation, emphatically associating ‘low’ food like salad with what he saw as superficiality in the poetry of Berni and Molza. The context of contemporary food culture serves Aretino well here. In a letter that is in part about the fashioning of his name and fame, he seeks to elevate himself above the other poets using the image of a specific food. While salad is on the rise as a fashionable food (and is a food that, as his letters attest, he adored), it is still commonly held to be lacking in nutrition. Transferring this concept to a critique of his rivals’ poems, Aretino confirms that ‘salad poetry’ – superficial, hollow, non-nutritive poetry –will not satiate a hunger for real poetry. Evidently, Aretino was adept at using contemporary food culture however it suited him, whether to prove false the supposed sophistication of Berni and the Vignaiuoli, who dedicated their poems to prosaic topics such as salads, the plague, and even fleas, or to demonstrate his main characters’ knowledge of elegant foods. Significantly, attacks like that of Aretino against the Bernesque poets were common in the literary world of the day and were frequently deployed against Aretino himself. In the spurious dialogue Vita di Pietro Aretino del Berna, falsely attributed to Berni, who was already dead when it was published in 1538, Aretino was said to deserve, instead of a laurel crown, one of cabbage, lettuce, and radicchio.163 This may well have been more 161 The topic of food and sexuality is the focus of Chapter Three. For a list of the editions of Opere burlesche (several dedicated to various types of food) published in the sixteenth century, see Marzo, Studi sulla poesia erotica del Cinquecento. 162 ‘“Portàtici altro che insalata!” gridan color ch’han fame. Che vi par di quei che si credettero trottar per omnia secula coi capitoli dei cardi, degli orinali e de le primiere, non si accorgendo che sì fatte ciancie partoriscono un nome che muore il dì che egli nasce?’; Aretino, Lettere, I, pp. 621-622 (letter 300). 163 Albicante, ‘Vita di Pietro Aretino del Berna’, pp. 57-96; see p. 63 and p. 82 for the descriptions of lettuce and cabbage crowns.

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than a play on the traditional poetic laurel crown of Petrarch, for Aretino had written another letter recounting a dream wherein he is granted by a friend a series of crowns, each made with different plants, according to the different works he composed.164 Included are quite a variety of greens, from the bitter ruta (rue) to the obvious laurel. In the dialogue, however, the characters, Berni, and his friend and follower, the poet Mauro (Giovanni Mauro D’Arcano, 1489-1535), crown Aretino with salad – which is not, obviously, an ennobling crown – noting that he deserved it especially for his attack on court life, Ragionamento delle corti (1538). Not only Aretino’s attack against the Vignaiuoli but also this infamous Bernesque attack are thus noteworthy for how they confirm that there was an ongoing discourse on food that used the images of lettuce, greens, and other common vegetables to indicate low, unsophisticated poetry, even as these vegetables were elsewhere (even in Aretino’s own works) gaining literary and gastronomical status.165 In fact, even if in his ‘dream’ letter Aretino reserved a Dantean punishment for the Vignaiuoli who had written on raw greens and salads, it appears that in his everyday life he actually appreciated all sorts of raw greens and other vegetables. He even wrote other poetic letters about the pleasures of eating them. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, it is well known that Aretino loved receiving a wide range of gifts from his admirers. Such gifts enabled him to lead a comfortable and leisured life during his Venetian years: from embroidered shirts to elegant glasses and perfumed soaps, he received all sorts of presents, as he recounted to potential gift givers in his letters. Food gifts were among his favorites: quail, other kinds of birds, sausages, cheeses, and, especially, fresh-picked fruit and a wide variety of greens. In one elegant letter written in 1537 to his publisher Francesco Marcolini, for instance, Aretino’s description of his salad gift compliments its taste, aesthetic appearance, and smell in a crescendo of the senses. Marcolini’s baskets of insalata di mescolanza elicited such a response in Aretino’s household that he relates with amusement how the female servants wanted to steal all the beautiful baskets with the salads they contained.166 In the letter, both the 164 Aretino, Lettere, I, pp. 575-589 (letter 282). 165 On Aretino’s biographers, see Romano, ‘I biografi dell’Aretino’. 166 ‘Voi cominciaste con i fiori de gli aranci ad aguzzarmi l’appetito, nel condirgli come le mie fanti condiscono i caccialepri, la pimpinella, il dragone, con l’altre di più di cento ragioni erbe, che mi si presentano in alcune panerette e in alcuni canestrelli si ben tessuti coi giunchi, che è forza, ne l’accettar de la mescolanza, torvi e le panerette e i canestrelli, onde la donna vostra ne debbe far tanto rumore in non riavergli, quanta festa ne fanno le mie in torvigli’; Aretino, Lettere, I, pp. 287-289 (letter 137). Beautiful baskets with fruits appear a few decades later in a celebrated painting by Vincenzo Campi, Still Life with Fruit (c. 1580), and in Caravaggio’s famous

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sight of the baskets and the smell of the flowers mixed with the herbs helped to stimulate the appetite; this desire for fresh produce is closely related to taste, particularly that for the primizie [first-fruits] (strawberries, cherries, almonds, and cucumbers) that Marcolini regularly sends to Aretino. The letter, which constitutes a sort of multisensorial treasure, towards the end recounts the pleasure of receiving and using new drinking glasses, oil for the skin, and soap, along with stecchi da denti (toothpicks). Touch also, along with smell and taste, is undergoing a renaissance here. Once again, as in the dialoghi puttaneschi discussed earlier, the portrayal of salad baskets that opens a letter dedicated to Aretino’s depiction of simple but refined indulgences of the senses, appears as more than a detail in his letters – it is a sign of elegance, evolved taste, and refined manners. When, in the fall of 1537, regular presents of summer salad greens, ‘i tributi de l’insalatucce’ from his friend Girolamo Sarra ceased, Aretino wrote him a letter of bitter complaint. Sarra was still sending him citronella [Lemon balm] an aromatic herb that Aretino complained he disliked intensely but would eat, unhappily, until spring, when he hoped his friend would again supply him with the ‘food salary’ and ‘enticement of flavor’ (le paghe del cibo e l’appetito del gusto) more suited to his refined taste for greens.167 This letter is a very apt example of the close attention Aretino devoted to his senses – in this case, his taste for greens. As if describing a musical composition, Aretino praises Sarra’s ability to balance the bitter and sharp tones of some herbs with the sweetness and smoothness of others to create such a masterpiece of taste that even Satiety would enjoy a bite of the resulting salad.168 In this letter, too, issues of cultural and social identity emerge. Aretino declares with confidence that the city of Florence invented salad, like all other elegant things that had their origins there: from table settings with floral decorations to the cleaning and polishing of glasses, and the preparation of the many delicacies that made Italian cuisine famous. Anticipating Fruit Basket (c. 1595-1600) as well as in many paintings of market scenes, for instance, Francesco Bassano the Younger, The Great Market (c. 1580). 167 ‘Tosto, fratello, che i tributi de l’insalatucce mi cominciarono a venir meno, recandomi io con la fantasia in sul fatto de l’indovinare, sono andato astralogando la cagione del vostro ritenermi le paghe del cibo e l’appetito del gusto. Ma, s’io avessi premuto i pensieri al torcitoio che trae l’olio de l’olive, non averei cavato mai che da voi mi fusse tolta cotal provigione per conto de la citronella, la qual diletta a la vostra gola tanto quanto dispiace a la mia.’ See Aretino, Lettere, I, p. 450 (letter 217). 168 ‘Io guardo in che modo voi temprate l’acro di queste erbe col dolce di quelle. E non è poca dottrina il saper mitigar l’amaro e l’acuto d’alcune foglie col sapor, né amaro né acuto, d’alcune altre, facendo di tutte insieme un componimento si soave, che ne assaggiaria la sazietà.’ See Aretino, Lettere, I, p. 451 (letter 217).

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both Felici and Castelvetro, however, Aretino in the end gives his readers a more down-to-earth suggestion for dressing a salad alla Genovese with garlic, anchovies, and capers. For such a dish, he comments, he would trade even a feast of the wild birds his great friend, the painter Titian, often brought him from the mountains of Cadore. The letter also stresses his taste for strong flavors, a new fashion indeed, in its exaltation of another salad ingredient then on the rise – wild radicchio, a spicy bitter leaf often red and white rather than green that was common at the time (and is so still today) in the Veneto.169 The letter, quite surprisingly, closes with an exclamation: ‘It certainly boggles my mind how poets don’t drop their drawers to sing the virtues of salad’!170 This question seems to call for another: Had Aretino already forgotten his deprecatory ‘salad poetry’ label for the Vignaiuoli? Or had he adopted, in his Venetian salad days, ‘greener’ rhymes? What is clear, in any case, is that Aretino felt quite free to fashion his food discourses to suit his present needs – and his poetical diatribes. The cultural discourses that surrounded this simple food in early modern Italy and Europe were complex and rich, ranging from ideas of national character and class identity to notions of medicine and health; manners and taste; gastronomy and sexuality. The word insalata became more and more popular and affirmed its rich metaphorical range, as if it could describe any mixture of different things. This figurative sense appears for example in the title to a Mantuan city chronicle written in the second half of the sixteenth century, La insalata: cronaca mantovana dal 1561 al 1602. Even before the author’s introduction, the text nods to the literal meaning of its title: a ricetta ‘Per Far Una Saporita et Bella Insalata’ (How to Make a Flavorful and Appealing Salad) listing herbs, flowers, fruits, and different dressings, together with a final motto that playfully declares ‘Leva carnevale resta la quaresima’ (Taking away Carnival leaves [only] Lent).171 Thus in sixteenth-century Italy a salad, pace Shakespeare, was not simply a salad. It had become much more than a dish it had also gained significant 169 While discussing radicchio’s sharp taste, Aretino relates how, during dinner, a guest – a haughty pedant – refused to eat it and asked for tasteless lettuce and endive instead. Aretino invoked the god of gardens, Priapus, to punish the pedant appropriately for his lack of taste (and his sexual preference for boys). 170 ‘Certo io stupisco come i poeti non si sbrachino per cantar le vertù de l’insalata’; Aretino, Lettere, I, 451 (letter 217). 171 Vigilio, La insalata, p. 34. During the same period, in Spain, ensalada came to signify a new type of musical composition characterized by a variety of styles, irregular meter, and humorous verses. I would like to thank the musicologist Klaus Pietschmann, a Harvard Villa I Tatti Fellow, for suggesting this connection.

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status as a trope in Italian Renaissance literature that alluded to poetical play, the display of refined manners, good taste, and Italian botanical, agricultural, national, and cultural identity. The discourse of insalata was not univocal, as one could use it in defense of delicate and upper-class tastes or of an earthier gusto; it could serve both Bernesque poets and cutting anti-Bernians like Aretino. But the traditional link – established by Galenic medicine – between an ideal social hierarchy and the consumption of vegetables and greens had been significantly broken by the end of the sixteenth century, and a new food fashion had emerged that was truly a matter of taste – in all senses. The figurative arts readily registered changed perceptions about raw vegetables and greens, displaying them in all their color, beauty, and sensuousness in a new genre that came into its own in seventeenth-century Italian and European art: the still life.172 A painting by Felice Boselli from the second half of the seventeenth century is particularly significant as an illustration of this point.173 It shows a pretty, lower-class, young woman alongside a New World ara macao – a bird symbolic of luxury for wealthy people and their splendorous residences; in her hands, she holds a rapa nasone – a turnip root considered an earthy aphrodisiac – while curly lettuce is displayed in great abundance in front of her.174 This painting unites and blends, to novel effect, lower- and upper-class symbols, erotic and luxury items, raw greens and birds: a new Great Chain of Being, classes, and taste mixed together in a curious salad that one might perhaps, with some hubris, call ‘modern’.

Works Cited Primary Albicante, Giovanni Alberto. ‘Vita di Pietro Aretino del Berna’. In Occasioni Aretiniane (Vita di Pietro Aretino del Berna, Abbattimento, Nuova contentione). Testi proposti da Paolo Procaccioli, edited by Paolo Procaccioli, pp. 57-96. Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 1999. Aretino, Pietro. Lettere. Edited by Francesco Erspamer. 2 vols. Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1995. 172 Besides Caravaggio and Campi, two female painters are acclaimed – Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670) and Fede Galizia (1578-1630) – along with the Milanese artist Ambrogio Figino (1548-1608). See Varriano, Tastes and Temptations, esp. pp. 66-78. 173 The painting is in a private collection in Emilia-Romagna. A digital reproduction can be seen in Giannetti, ‘Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning or the Triumph of Greens’. 174 Felice Boselli was a well-known painter of still lives from Emilia-Romagna. For an analysis of his ‘Giovinetta che mostra una rapa’, see Frattarolo, ‘Scheda n. 70’, p. 197.

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Aretino, Pietro. Aretino’s Dialogues. Edited and translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972. Aretino, Pietro. ‘In questa prima giornata del dialogo di Messer Pietro Aretino la Nanna insegna a la sua figliuola Pippa l’arte puttanesca’. In Dialoghi, Vol. 2, Il Dialogo di Messer Pietro Aretino, edited by Guido Davico Bonino, pp. 15-97. Milan: ES, 1997. Aretino, Pietro. ‘La seconda giornata del capriccio Aretino nella quale la Nanna narra alla Antonia la vita delle maritate’. In Dialoghi, Vol. 1, Ragionamento della Nanna e dell’Antonia, edited by Guido Davico Bonino, pp. 103-156. Milan: ES, 1997. Aristotle. De Anima. Vol. 2 of The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon, pp. 534-603. New York: Random House, 1941. [Benzi, Ugo]. Tractato utilissimo circa lo reggimento et conservatione della sanità. Milan: Petri de Cornero, 1481. Bernardino da Siena. Le Prediche volgari. Edited by Ciro Cannarozzi. Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1934. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella. New York: Penguin Group, 2010. [First edition published 1982.] [Buonaparte, Niccolò]. La Vedova commedia facetissima di Cittadino Fiorentino. Florence: I Giunti, 1568. Calmo, Andrea. Il Saltuzza. Edited by Luca D’Onghia. Padua: Esedra, 2006. Cantimpratensis, Thomas. Liber de natura rerum. Edited by Helmut Boese. BerlinNew York: Walter de Gruyter, 1973. Caro, Annibal. ‘Commento di ser Agresto da Ficaruolo sopra la prima Ficata del Padre Siceo’. In Gli straccioni: commedia – La Figheide: comento – La nasea e la statua della foia. Dicerie di Annibal Caro, pp. 81-161. Bologna: Forni, 1974. [Anastatic reprint; originally published Milan: G. Daelli e Comp: 1863.] Castelvetro, Giacomo. Racconto di tutte le radici, di tutte l’erbe, et di tutti i frutti, che crudi o cotti in Italia se mangiano. London: 1614. www.liberliber.it [last accessed date: 15-3-2021] Castelvetro, Giacomo. The Fruit, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy: An Offering to Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Translated and with an introduction by Gillian Riley. London: Viking, British Museum Natural History, 1989. Chimentelli, Valerio. ‘La cicalata delle lodi dell’insalata’. In Prose fiorentine raccolte dallo Smarrito Academico della Crusca. Vol. 2, Orazioni e cicalate. Venice: Domenico Occhi, 1730. [Costo, Tomaso]. Il Fuggilozio di Tomaso Costo. Diviso in otto giornate ove da otto gentilhuomini e due donne si ragiona delle malizie di femine e trascuraggini di mariti. Sciocchezze di diversi. Detti arguti. Fatti piacevoli e ridicoli. Malvagità punite. Inganni meravigliosi. Detti notabili. Fatti notabili e essemplari. Con molte bellissime sentenze di gravissimi autori, che tirano il lor senso à moralità. Venice: Mattia Collosini e Barezzo Barezzi, 1601.

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[Text based upon: Mulon, Marianne: ‘Deux traités inédits d’art culinaire médiéval’. In: Bulletin philologique et historique ( jusqu’à 1610) du Comité des Travaux historiques et scientifiques. Année 1968: Actes du 93e Congrès national des Sociétés savantes tenu à Tours. Volume I: Les problèmes de l’alimentation. Paris 1971, 369-435; the text of the Liber de coquina on p. 396-420] Martino da Como [Martino de Rossi called Maestro Martino]. Libro de arte coquinaria. Edited by Emilio Montorfano. Milan: Terziaria, 1990. Martino da Como [Martino de Rossi called Maestro Martino]. The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book Composed by the Eminent Maestro Martino da Como, a Most Prudent Expert in this Art, Once Cook to the Most Reverend Cardinal Trevisan, Patriarch of Aquileia. Edited by Luigi Ballerini, translated and annotated by Jeremy Parzen. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Massonio, Salvatore. Archidipno overo del’insalata e dell’uso di essa. Trattato nuovo, curioso e non mai più dato in luce. Venice: Marc’Antonio Brogiollo, 1627. Massonio, Salvatore. Archidipno overo del’insalata e dell’uso di essa. Edited by Maria Paleari Henssler and Carlo Scipione Ferrero. Milan: EDI.ARTES, 1990. [Mattioli, Pietro Andrea]. I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli Sanese, medico cesareo et del Serenissimo Principe Ferdinando Archiduca d’Austria nelli sei libri di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo della materia medicinale. Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisii, 1568. [First edition in Italian 1544; in Latin 1554.] Mazzei, Ser Lapo. Lettere di un notaro a un mercante del secolo xiv con altre lettere e documenti. Edited by Cesare Guasti. Vol II. Florence: Le Monnier, 1880. Messisbugo, Christoforo da. Banchetti composizioni di vivande e apparecchio generale. Ferrara, 1549. Edited by Fernando Bandini. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1960. Messisbugo, Christoforo da. Banchetti, composizioni di vivande. Ferrara: Bulghat e Hucher, 1549. Möhren, Frankwalt. Il libro de la cocina. Un ricettario tra Oriente e Occidente. Heidelberg University Publishing, 2016. [DOI: 10.17885/heiup.123.151] Molza, Francesco Maria. ‘Capitolo dell’insalata’. In Il primo libro dell’opere burlesche, di M. Francesco Berni, di M. Giovanni della Casa, del Varchi, del Mauro, di M. Bino, del Molza, del Dolce, et del Firenzuola, fols. 200r-203v. Florence: I Giunti, 1550. Morlini, Girolamo. Novelle e favole. Edited by Giovanni Villani. Rome: Salerno, 1983. [Parabosco, Girolamo]. La fantesca comedia nova di M. Girolamo Parabosco. Venice: Stephano di Alessi, 1556. Piccolomini, Alessandro. ‘Amor costante’. In Commedie del Cinquecento, edited by Nino Borsellino, vol. 1, pp. 291-426. Milan: Rizzoli, 1959. [Pisanelli, Baldassare]. Trattato della natura de’cibi, et del bere del Signor Baldassare Pisanelli Medico Bolognese. Carmagnola: Marc’ Antonio Bellone, 1589. [First published 1586.]

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Platina [Sacchi, Bartolomeo]. De honesta voluptate et valetudine. Un trattato sui piaceri della tavola e la buona salute. Nuova edizione commentata con testo latino a fronte. Edited and translated by Enrico Carnevale Schianca. Florence: Leo. S. Olschki Editore, 2015. Platina [Sacchi, Bartolomeo]. On Right Pleasure and Good Health: A Critical Edition and Translation of De honesta voluptate et valetudine. Edited and translated by Mary Ella Milham. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. Poliziano, Angelo. Detti piacevoli di Angelo Poliziano. Edited by Tiziano Zanato. Rome: Istituto Enciclopedia Treccani, 1983. [Ripa, Cesare]. Iconologia overo descrittione di diverse imagini universali cavate dall’antichità & di propria inventione, trovate & dichiarate da Cesare Ripa Perugino, Cavaliere di Santi Mauritio & Lazaro. Rome: Lepido Facij, 1603. [First edition 1593.] Last accessed date 7-10-2020, from: www/catalogue.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/cb124579172. Sacchetti, Franco. Il trecentonovelle. Edited by Valerio Marucci. Rome: Salerno, 1996. Sada, Luigi, and Vincenzo Valente, eds. Liber de coquina. Libro della cucina del xiii secolo. Il capostipite meridionale della cucina italiana. Bari: Grafica Sud, 1995. Savonarola, Michele. Libreto de tute le cosse che se manzano. Un libro di dietetica di Michele Savonarola, medico padovano del sec. xv. Edizione critica basata sul Codice Casanatense 406. Edited by Jane Nystedt. Stockholm: GOTAB, 1982. Sermini, Gentile. Novelle. Edited by Monica Marchi. Pisa: ETS, 2012. Vigilio, Giovan Battista. La insalata. Cronaca mantovana dal 1561 al 1602. Edited by Daniela Ferrari and Cesare Mozzarelli. Mantua: Gianluigi Arcari Editore, 1992. Zambrini, Francesco, ed. Il Libro della cucina del secolo XIV: testo di lingua non mai fin qui stampato. Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1968. [Anastatic reprint of Romagnoli edition, Bologna, 1863.]

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Frattarolo, Eleonora. ‘Scheda n. 70’. In Fasto e rigore. La natura morta nell’Italia settentrionale dal xvi al xvii secolo, edited by Giovanni Godi, p. 197. Milan: Skira Editore, 2000. Freedman, Paul, ed. Food: The History of Taste. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. Giannetti, Laura. ‘Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning or the Triumph of Greens’. California Italian Studies 1.2 (2010). [DOI: 10.5070/C312008890] Giannetti, Laura. ‘Of Eels and Pears: A Sixteenth-Century Debate on Taste, Temperance, and the Pleasures of the Senses’. In Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, edited by Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler, pp. 289-305. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. Giannetti, Laura. ‘“Taste of Luxury” in Renaissance Italy: In Practice and in the Literary Imagination’. In Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy, edited by Catherine Kovesi, pp. 73-93. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018. Gigante, Denise. Taste: A Literary History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Grieco, J. Allen. ‘Food and Social Classes in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy’. In Food: A Culinary History, edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, pp. 302-312. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Grieco, J. Allen. ‘From Roosters to Cocks: Italian Renaissance Fowl and Sexuality’. In Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, edited by Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, pp. 89-140. Farnham, England, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Grieco, J. Allen. ‘La gastronomia del xvi secolo: tra scienza e cultura’. In Et Coquatur Ponendo. Cultura della cucina e della tavola in Europa tra medioevo ed età moderna, edited by Giampiero Nigro, pp. 143-155. Prato: Giunti Industrie Grafiche, 1996. Grieco, J. Allen. ‘Les utilizations sociales des fruits et legumes dans l’Italie medieval’. In Le grand livre des fruits et legumes: Histoire, culture et usage, edited by Daniel Meiller and Paul Vannier, pp. 151-154. Besançon, France: La Manufacture, 1991. Grieco, J. Allen. ‘Meals’. In At Home in Renaissance Italy, edited by Marta Ajmar and Flora Dennis, pp. 244-252. Exhibition catalog. London: V & A Museum, 2006. Grieco, J. Allen. ‘The Social Order of Nature and the Natural Order of Society in Late 13th-Early 14th Century Italy’. In Miscellanea Mediaevali 21.2 (1992): 898-907. Grieco, J. Allen. ‘The Social Politics of Pre-Linnaean Botanical Classification’. I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 4 (1991): 131-149. Grieco, J. Allen. ‘Meals and Mealtimes in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.’ In Allen J. Grieco, Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in Renaissance Italy, pp. 26-62. Florence: Villa I Tatti-The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; Milan: Officina Libraria, 2019.

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Grieco, J. Allen. ‘Food and Social Classes in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.’ In Allen J. Grieco, Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, pp. 104-117. Florence: Villa I Tatti-The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies; Milan: Officina Libraria, 2019. Gullino, Giuseppe. ‘Alberi da frutta negli statuti comunali piemontesi’. In Le parole della frutta. Storia, saperi, immagini tra medioevo ed età contemporanea, edited by Irma Naso, pp. 29-42. Turin: Silvio Zamorani–CESA, 2012. Labalme, Patricia, and Laura Sanguineti White, eds. Venice Cità Excelentissima: Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo. Translated by Linda Carroll. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Lindemann, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Longhi, Silvia. Lusus. Il capitolo burlesco nel Cinquecento. Padua: Antenore, 1983. Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936. Marchi, Monica. ‘Un paneretto d’insalatella in rime e in prose: il novelliere senese attribuito a Gentile Sermini’. In Per Leggere: i generi della lettura, 11.21 (2011): 61-120. Marzo, Antonio. Studi sulla poesia erotica del Cinquecento. Con appendice di testi. Lecce: Adriatica Editrice Salentina, 1999. McIver, Katherine A. Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Messedaglia, Luigi. Vita e costume della rinascenza in Merlin Cocai. 2 vols. Padua, Italy: Antenore, 1974. Milham, Mary Ella. ‘La nascita del discorso gastronomico: Platina’. In Et Coquatur Ponendo. Cultura della cucina e della tavola in Europa tra medioevo ed età moderna, edited by Giampiero Nigro, pp. 125-142. Prato: Giunti Industrie Grafiche, 1996 Montanari, Massimo. Il formaggio con le pere. La storia in un proverbio. Rome-Bari: Giuseppe Laterza & Figli, 2008. Montanari, Massimo. I racconti della tavola. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2014. Montanari, Massimo. La fame e l’abbondanza. Storia dell’alimentazione in Europa. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2003. [First published 1993.] Montanari, Massimo. ‘Sapore e sapere: il senso del gusto come strumento di conoscenza’. In I cinque sensi (per tacer del sesto): Atti della Scuola Europea di studi comparati, Bertinoro, 28 agosto/4 settembre 2005, edited by Francesco Ghelli, pp. 71-78. Florence: Le Monnier, 2007. Moroni, Salvatore, and Maria Paola. ‘Libri di cucina a Venezia e nel Veneto’. In L’Antica cucina veneta dal medioevo al Liberty, edited by Antonio Barzaghi and Maria Rosaria Nevola, pp. 55-59. Treviso: Veneto Comunicazione, 2003.

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Moulton, Ian Frederick. ‘In Praise of Touch: Mario Equicola and the Nature of Love’. Senses and Society 5.1 (2010): 119-130. Moyer, Johanna B. ‘“The Food Police”: Sumptuary Prohibitions on Food in the Reformation’. In Food and Faith in Christian Culture, edited by Ken Albala and Trudy Eden, pp. 59-82. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Naso, Irma. ‘Frutta e gastronomia. Libri di cucina tra Italia e Francia nel tardo medioevo’. In Le parole della frutta. Storia, saperi, immagini tra medioevo ed età contemporanea, edited by Irma Naso, pp. 109-138. Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, -CESA, 2012. Nicoud, Marilyn. ‘I medici medievali e la frutta: un prodotto ambiguo’. In Le parole della frutta. Storia, saperi, immagini tra medioevo ed età contemporanea, edited by Irma Naso, pp. 91-108. Turin: Silvio Zamorani–CESA, 2012. Olsen, G. Thomas. ‘Poisoned Figs and Italian Salletts: Nation, Diet, and the Early Modern English Traveler’. Annali d’Italianistica, edited by Luigi Monga, 21 (2003): 233-254. Palma, Pina. Savoring Power, Consuming the Times: The Metaphors of Food in Medieval and Renaissance Italian Literature. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Parasecoli, Fabio. Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy. London: Reaktion Books, 2014. Perrone, Carlachiara. ‘Un sogno di Pietro Aretino’. In Pietro Aretino nel cinquecentenario della nascita. Atti del convegno Roma-Viterrbo-Arezzo (28 settembre-1 ottobre 1992), Toronto (23-24 ottobre 1992), Los Angeles (27-29 ottobre 1992), vol. 1, pp. 375-394. Rome: Salerno, 1995. Pertici, Petra. ‘Novelle senesi in cerca d’autore. L’attribuzione ad Antonio Petrucci delle novelle conosciute sotto il nome di Gentile Sermini’. Archivio Storico Italiano 169.4 (2011): 679-706. Pilcher, Jeffrey M. ‘Cultural Histories of Food’. In The Oxford Handbook of Food History, edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher, pp. 41-60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Rebora, Giovanni. Culture of the Fork: A Brief History of Food in Europe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Ribani, Filippo. ‘Tra satira e realtà: I furti agricoli nella Bologna trecentesca’. In V Ciclo di Studi medievali Atti del Convegno (3-4 giugno 2019, Florence), pp. 452-456. Lesmo (Bologna): EBS, 2019. Ribani, Filippo. ‘L’impronta contadina sull’alta cucina del basso Medioevo italiano’. In Laboratorio di Storia, vol. 15.1 (2019), pp. 1-23. [DOI: 10.12977/stor755] Riley, Gillian. The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Romei, Danilo. ‘Roma 1532-1537: accademia per burla e poesia “tolta in gioco”’. In Berni e berneschi nel Cinquecento, edited by Danilo Romei, pp. 49-135. Florence: ED. Centro 2 P, 1984.

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Romano, Angelo. ‘I biografi dell’Aretino, dallo pseudo Berni al Mazzucchelli’. In Pietro Aretino nel cinquecentenario della nascita. Atti del Convegno di RomaViterbo-Arezzo (28 settembre-1 ottobre 1992), Toronto (23-24 ottobre 1992), Los Angeles (27-29 ottobre 1992), vol. 2, pp. 1053-1071. Rome: Salerno, 1995. Sanger, Alice E., and Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker. ‘Introduction: Making Sense of the Senses’. In Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice, edited by Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker, pp. 1-16. Farnham, England, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Scrivano, Riccardo. Ritratto di Annibal Caro. Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 2007. Shapin, Steven. ‘Changing Tastes: How Things Tasted in the Early Modern Period and How They Taste Now’. The Hans Rausing Lecture presented at Uppsala University, Sweden, 2011. Smith, Alison A. ‘Family and Domesticity’. In A Cultural History of Food in the Renaissance, edited by Ken Albala, vol. 3, pp. 135-150. Oxford: Berg, 2011. Turner, Christopher. ‘Leftovers/Dinner with Kant’. Cabinet: Deception Issue 33 (Spring 2009). Last accessed date 16-9-2018, from: www.cabinetmagazine.org/ issues/33/turner Varriano, John. Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Vercelloni, Luca. Viaggio intorno al gusto. L’odissea della sensibilità occidentale dalla società di corte all’edonismo di massa. Milan: Mimesis, 2005. Vitullo, Juliann M. ‘Taste and Temptation in Early Modern Italy’. Senses and Society 5.1 (March 2010): 106-118. Zambon, Francesco, and Alessandro Grassato. Il mito della fenice in Oriente e in Occidente. Venice: Marsilio, 2004.

Web Resources IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive: www.idealetters.web.unc.edu/letters-platform [Last accessed date: 28-4-2021]

2.

Sixteenth-Century Food Wars Abstract A complex debate about diet, morals, and health occupied the Italian Renaissance literary imagination, ranging widely. Some writers advocated the appreciation of sensory pleasure and linked discernment even to peasants; others made furious attacks on foodstuffs like sausages and melons. Literary discussions over temptation and restraint; discipline and the pleasure of eating turned on a group of suspect foods in a cultural battle that involved medical prohibitions, religious associations of eating with lust, and popular lore. While a moral and disciplinary vision sought to control food discourse in medical and dietetic treatises, a counterargument advanced playfully by sixteenth-century literature put forward a new appreciation for taste and the legitimization of the idea of pleasure in eating. Keywords: health, morals, taste, pleasure in eating, temptation, discipline

Introduction The first chapter demonstrated that a powerful yet contested vision of social distinction implicit in food culture changed dramatically over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the role of personal taste and pleasure in eating – in literary and non-literary representations – began to balance out traditional links between food, status, and class. In particular, the pleasures of eating two traditionally luxury foods – fresh fruit and roasted fowl – appear in literature of this period as not only possible but desirable items to consume for the lower classes. This shift took place alongside a new emphasis on refined manners at the table and a growing importance of the sense of gusto. Chapter One also focused on how Italian cuisine and culture, from the sixteenth century on, upgraded the status of greens and vegetables from their initially low place on the alimentary hierarchy virtually to the heights of aristocratic delicacies. This new appreciation for

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greens and vegetables, which were championed by many genres of literary works, contributed to a change that was already underway in cookbooks and dietary tracts, as well as on menus, which together fomented a significant refashioning of contemporary food culture. But conceptions about food were not only influenced by status and class issues or by re-evaluations of traditional foodstuffs. Instead, they were also encouraged by the sixteenth-century revival of Galen and concomitant obsessions about a healthy diet and moderation in eating. These, to a certain degree, counter-balanced the newly positive consideration of gusto and discernment as an important aspect of food discourse and of the everyday practice of eating across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Indeed, this evolving way of thinking – which stressed moderation and concern about one’s health – was an approach that largely rejected issues of taste and pleasure in eating; it was promoted not only in numerous dietary tracts but also in religious texts and moralistic treatises, often printed in cheap and accessible editions. Dietary advice in fact became a successful literary genre in itself, contributing to a ‘culture of prevention’1 in which attention to the food eaten was very important as one of the six non-naturals that were thought to affect bodily health.2 The health and food guides written in early modern Italy were usually printed in multiple inexpensive editions (many of which survive today) and contributed greatly to the diffusion of the genre and to the dissemination of Galenic ideals.3 The most important Renaissance regimens that applied Galen’s conceptions include Baldassare Pisanelli’s Trattato della natura de’ cibi et del bere (1583 first edition), Castore Durante’s Il tesoro della sanità (1586), and Bartolomeo Boldo’s Libro della natura e virtù delle cose che nutriscono (1575). 4 By means of these and similar handbooks, this more medical vision of food and diet became part of popular contemporary culture. Not surprisingly – but certainly significantly – literary texts engaged with this advice in serious, comic, and critical modes. Authors of verse and prose were well aware of the many 1 Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, p. 7; see also pp. 13-47. 2 The so called ‘six non-naturals’ were things external to the body that influenced health and/or illness: food and drink, air, motion and rest, sleep and waking, repletion and evacuation, emotions or passions. Gentilcore, Food and Health, esp. pp. 14-15. 3 Galen’s complete works were translated into Latin by Venetian printer Aldo Manuzio in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Hygiene and the Alimentorum facultatibus, Galen’s most important writings, became the foundation for sixteenth-century ideas about food and health. See Gentilcore, Food and Health, p. 12. 4 Also influential was Ugo Benzi’s Regole della sanità et natura de’ cibi. Written in the fifteenth century by a Sienese physician who lived c. 1360-1439, the work was not printed until 1618. A standard annotated version by Lodovico Bertaldo was published in 1620 in Turin.

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Galenic ideals and health regimes whose presence permeated food culture across Italy in the sixteenth century, and even frequently quoted physicians’ recommendations and their advice on how to ‘correct’ imbalanced foods with different spices. Writers most often in this period did so not in support of these theories, however, but to criticize and reverse them, affirming the supremacy of personal gusto and pleasure over moderation and health concerns. In tracing the course of this sixteenth-century Italian literature, Jean-Louis Flandrin’s well-known notion of the ‘liberation of the gourmet’ – usually seen, as noted in the introduction – as a new ideal of mid-seventeenth-century France, takes on a significant sixteenth-century Italian dimension.5 Flandrin argued that the traditional ideal of Renaissance dietetics, wherein every type of food had to be ‘corrected’ using spices or eaten with other foods in order to make meals healthy for different bodies and humoral types, was for the first time overthrown in seventeenth-century France. His thesis contends that a new French style of cookery was introduced in this period and that it focused on the natural flavors of food, which was to be judged more by its flavor than by its medical properties. As is shown in what follows, however, Flandrin’s vision may be fruitfully revised and both moved earlier in time and across the Alps; indeed, one might make his same argument regarding the rapidly evolving food culture of sixteenth-century Italy, adding new dimensions to his study (which was based largely on cooks, cooking manuals, and traditional sources for food history) by including analysis of a much larger Italian literary corpus that contains satire, poetry, diaries, plays and prose commentaries on poems. This chapter, then, focuses on the circulation and reworking of dietary themes (medical and otherwise) in sixteenth-century Italian literary texts. My aim is not to survey the poetic and prose production that employed food metaphors, however. Instead, I undertake an analysis of how and why certain foods – and their accompanying health-related notions – came to be foregrounded in contemporary poetic irony, ribald humor, impudent parody, and even black legends. These are one instance of the food wars – the specif ic ‘cultural wars’, to use Edward Muir’s term, that are at the heart of this book – that saw supporters of a moralistic, medical view of food battling with supporters of a vision of food centered upon pleasure that had the effect of advancing a positive notion of the importance of taste.6 5 Flandrin, ‘From Dietetics to Gastronomy’. 6 Muir, The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance.

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Humoral physiology and a sense of taste: Pontormo’s Libro mio7 A helpful point of entry into understanding the impact that Galenic ideals regarding food and the body had upon early modern Italian society is an autograph manuscript revealing what an artist/artisan living and working in the period ate every day– one of very few such accounts. The Florentine painter Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1557) kept a simple form of diary called Il libro mio during the last three years of his life. In it he jotted down his meals as well as brief notes on shopping for food, the upkeep of his vegetable garden, the weather, the phases of the moon, and his desire to eat or avoid foods, according to the state of his stomach. Pontormo was neither rich nor poor; and although he ate mainly at home – often in the company of his pupil Bronzino – occasionally he recorded dinners with other acquaintances at a nearby osteria. He kept this diary while he was working on a fresco cycle commissioned by the Medici in the choir of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. And while its twenty-three pages include virtually no personal thoughts or emotions, it includes a practically complete daily list of what he ate plus a number of vivid observations on his physical state (including his frequent ailments), and small drawings in the margins that recollect what he had painted that day– often the leg, head, or arm of a figure. Pontormo’s desire to eat – and his own perceived fear of intemperance in eating – regularly appear as major concerns. He seems to have been obsessed by the state of his stomach and noted at the beginning of the Libro mio little reminders for healthier eating to protect it; for instance telling himself not to eat pork in the winter and in that season to live moderately so that his humors did not congeal or become concentrated in ‘pockets’ in his body and then thaw in the spring, causing what he feared would be terrible illness.8 From time to time, he would skip a meal when he felt his 7 The edition cited, Pontormo Diario. Con uno scritto di Emilio Cecchi, is based on the critical edition by Salvatore S. Nigro in L’orologio di Pontormo. Invenzione di un pittore manierista, con in appendice Il libro mio. 8 ‘Dipoi ti prepara da mezo setembre in là allo autunno che per essere e dì piccoli, el tempo cominciare humido e l’umidità del bere superfluo che hai fatto nella state, ti bisogna con digiuni e poco bere e lunghe vigilie e exercitio prepararti che e fredi del verno non ti nuochino non ti trovando bene disposto; e non frequentare tropo la carne e maxime del porcho; e da mezzo genaio in là non ne mangiare, perché è molto febricosa e cativa; e vivi d’ogni cosa temperato, perché le sachate degl’omori e delle scese si scuoprano al febraio, al marzo e allo aprile, perché nel verno el fredo gli congela’; Pontormo Diario, p. 11. The first three pages of the Diario (pp. 11-13) contain a few random observations on contemporary standard medical advice. At the beginning of the fall, Pontormo reminds himself to be moderate in exercise and eating – and avoid meat and especially pork in the coming winter. The fall, he writes, is a time for fasting, to prepare the

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body needed to fast9 or would lament that he liked nothing of what he ate because his stomach was ‘sdegnato’10 (refusing because upset). Interestingly, for all his carefully considered dietary practices – which seem well suited to a man who portrayed himself as often unwell and who would eat bread, eggs, and lettuce at the beginning of meal as Galenic medicine counselled – Pontormo did not refrain, when he was feeling well, from eating a variety of foods that he considered tasty and which he desired for their delicious flavor. Some favorites he listed were a half head of roasted kid, roast pork, a lamb’s heart, and small birds, as well as fava beans, grapes, and cheese, sometimes accompanied by wine.11 He also appreciated fish when he dined out with friends and, perhaps significantly, they shared the cost of the meal.12 Other enticing foods that he enjoyed eating with friends included hare, melon, pigeon, fried liver, and roasted eel;13 sometimes he describes eating fish and meat in the same meal.14 The social context of a meal, these passages suggest, seem to have had an impact on his appetite and liberated him somewhat from his fears of ill health. Scholarly discussions of Pontormo’s Libro mio have tended to focus on his restraint and on the meagerness of his simple meals, which were so body for winter and to avoid the concentration of humors. A panacea seems to be moderation, especially during phases of the moon that can bring illness. 9 ‘[…] la mattina desinai con Bronzino e la sera non cenai, che fu la ventura mia che havevo mangiato troppo’ ([…] in the morning I ate with Bronzino, and in the evening I did not eat; it was my fault because I had eaten too much); Pontormo Diario, p. 27. 10 ‘e pati’ freddo e non so perché mi si sdegnò lo stomaco; la sera cenai con Bronzino popone e uno pipione e la matina di poi mi sentivo male e parevami aver la febbre, Lunedì mattina havevo e febre e stomaco sdegnato; cenai che non mi piacque nulla’ (I got cold and I do not know why my stomach was upset; in the evening I ate with Bronzino melon and a roasted pigeon and in the morning I was feeling unwell and I thought I had a fever. On Monday morning I had a fever and an upset stomach; I had dinner and did not like anything); Pontormo Diario, p. 32. 11 Pontormo Diario: ‘Porco arrosto’ (roast pork), p. 19; ‘cenai […] una 1/2 testicciola, cacio e baccelli’ (dinner […] was a half head of roasted kid, cheese and fava bean pods), p. 26; ‘cuore d’agnello’ (heart of lamb), p. 27; ‘tordi lessi e arrosto’ (boiled and roasted thrushes), p. 40; ‘uno capretto di soldi 34 molto buono’ (an excellent kid that cost 34 soldi), p. 43; ‘uve e cacio’ (grapes and cheese), p. 21. 12 ‘Adì 26 in sabato sera andammo alla taverna Attaviano e Bronzino e io; cenamo pesci e huova e vino vecchio, e tochò soldi 17 per uno’ (today 26 of the month a Saturday evening, Attaviano, Bronzino and I went to the tavern; we had fish and eggs and old wine, and we divided the cost, 17 soldi each) Pontormo Diario, p. 49. 13 Pontormo Diario: ‘domenica mattina desinai con Bronzino e la sera con Daniello una lepre’ (On Sunday morning I ate with Bronzino and in the evening with Daniello we had a hare), p. 35; ‘cenai con Bronzino popone e uno pipione’, (for dinner with Bronzino I had melon and a roasted pigeon) p. 32; ‘fegato fritto’ (fried liver), p. 50; ‘anguilla arosto’ (roasted eel), p. 50. 14 ‘e la sera andai a cena con Daniello: cavretto arosto e pesce’ (and in the evening I went to dinner with Daniello: we had roasted kid and fish); Pontormo Diario, p. 27.

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often based on just a piece of bread and two figs or a frittata, choices such discussions usually attributed to his melancholic temperament. And indeed, his diary certainly attests to the circulation of notions of humoral physiology that were so successfully popularized by the dietary and health manuals of the day. At the same time, however, careful reading of the text reveals a greater gastronomic enjoyment of food than has been recognized to date – even a hint of Platina’s ‘honest pleasure’ in eating. Actually Pontormo valued his sense of taste and wrote on more than one occasion that a ‘lamb was as delicious as possible’; that, on Palm Sunday, he had ‘some wonderful savory crepes’; and that ‘at San Lorenzo I ate fairly well, a little boiled meat that was quite good’.15 Indeed, the last entry in the Libro mio records a tasty meal of roasted eel eaten with friends on a Friday night in October 1556, as the autumn weather began to turn cold.16 Il Libro mio has been at the center of discussion among art historians trying to make sense of the largely unappreciative response to Pontormo’s fresco cycle in San Lorenzo, which was notoriously destroyed in the eighteenth century.17 The substantially negative portrayal of the artist penned by Giorgio Vasari in his Vite and by other contemporary intellectuals, including Anton Francesco Doni, suggested that Pontormo’s melancholic temperament was the cause of his failure to finish the cycle despite eleven years of work on the project.18 This negative view of both the artist and his work extended into the twentieth century, with art historian Bernard Berenson describing the now whitewashed frescoes as ‘a riot of meaningless nudes, all caricatures of Michelangelo’.19 It is possible, then, that the dour tone of the Libro mio and Pontormo’s almost paranoid descriptions of his ailments – including his problematic bowel movements – contributed to the legend of a depressive solitary artist who regulated his diet in strict terms of learned humoral physiology and the observance of the phases of the moon. 15 Pontormo Diario: ‘cenai […] agnello el più belo che si possa’ (I had a lamb dinner […] the very best) p. 25; ‘Domenica sera, che fu l’ulivo, desinai in casa Bronzino certi crespelli mirabili’ (Sunday night, that was Palm Sunday, I ate at Bronzino’s place some wonderful savory crepes) p. 25; ‘e asai bene cenai in San Lorenzo un poco di lesso asai buono’, p. 31. 16 ‘Venerdì cominciò a essere fredo, e la sera cenamo alla t[averna] Daniello, Giulio, al Piovano: anguilla arosto che tocò soldi 15’ (Friday the weather turned cold and in the evening we had dinner at the tavern al Piovano with Daniello, and Giulio; we spent 15 soldi each); Pontormo Diario, p. 50. 17 See Sohm, The Artist Grows Old, pp. 105-129, where he reconstructs the debate. 18 Doni could not believe Pontormo would ever finish the fresco cycle. See Sohm, The Artist Grows Old, p. 193, n. 23. 19 Quoted in Sohm, The Artist Grows Old, p. 110. It is possible to see the preparatory drawings he made for the Basilica of San Lorenzo in the Gabinetto delle Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence.

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In fact, however, it might well be claimed that anachronistic conceptions of privacy and bodily functions may have unduly influenced modern judgments of Pontormo’s health and his food habits as causes for his ‘peculiar’ artistic production. Art historian Elisabeth Pilliod neatly summarizes the opinions of art critics on Pontormo’s last unfinished work, which art historians often judged based on the content of the Libro mio: The artist’s own words, written in his own hand, matched an early twentieth-century idea that psychological imbalance is a precondition of creativity and genius. Pontormo’s character was fixed, and he has, with few exceptions, been imagined a disturbed but gifted man ever since.20

Pilliod goes on to cogently suggest that we rethink the Libro mio, recognizing it for what it was –the written reflections of a person living in the sixteenth century who was anxious about his health and troubled by contemporary dietary and health prescriptive treatises and the ideals they promoted, which called into question his personal desires for food as well as actual contemporary food practice: in sum, she writes, the Libro simply indicates that he was ‘embedded in the popular culture of his time’.21 A crucial part of that culture, as noted earlier, was the theoretical system of humoral physiology developed by Galen that had gained considerable purchase in his day. Signif icantly, humoral medical prescriptions coincided quite closely with the medieval taxonomy of the Great Chain of Being, which reproduced the four Aristotelian elements in an ascendant fashion and classified different kinds of foods as being more or less closely aligned with each element. For Galenic humoral theory, a good diet that would keep in balance the different humors of the body was the result of eating foods that in turn balanced moist/water, dry/air, hot/fire, and cold/earth–in other words, again the four Aristotelian elements.22 In addition, a group of factors external to the body, the so-called six non-naturals – food and drink, air, motion and rest, sleep and waking, repletion and evacuation, emotions or passions – contributed further to the foundations of contemporary dietary theory.23 Within the framework of the six non-naturals, food contributed to the humoral composition of 20 Pilliod, ‘Ingestion/Pontormo’s Diary’. 21 Pilliod, ‘Ingestion/Pontormo’s Diary’. 22 Moreover, based on the predominance of one of the four humors, there were also personality types (the choleric, the phlegmatic, etc.). 23 Albala, Eating Right, pp. 115-162.

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the body and therefore corrected imbalances caused by factors such as age, gender, season, the place one lived, the air, and the amount of exercise and sexual activity one performed.24 As Ken Albala has suggested, conceptions of humoral physiology influenced cuisine and culinary practice to a degree, though to precisely what degree remains a matter of debate.25 Within early modern medical and dietary literature, emotional states depended on humors and the six non-naturals, but at the same time one’s state of mind could influence one’s humoral disposition, in part according to right or wrong dietary and non-dietary habits. Unrestrained gluttony and, consequently, badly digested foods were thought to corrupt the humors, which in turn could produce a disturbed mind. The Libro mio seems to suggest that Pontormo was well aware of these complex interactions. His example is significant because it shows – in personal and often poignant detail – how popularized humoral physiology, along with dietary and health prescriptions, influenced the food choices of one sixteenth-century man.

Morality, Health, Discipline, and the Pleasures of the Senses Pontormo’s Libro mio also offers us a glimpse into the tensions that arose over the desire to eat for pleasure, the fear of becoming ill eating unwisely, and the guilt induced by ignoring the ideals of fasting, sacrifice and abstinence.26 Concerns about appetite, then, not only turned on issues of physical health but were also stimulated by moralizing and disciplining discourses about the desire for good food and the pleasure taken in eating. Between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries a wide range of discourses on sobriety and excess that featured condemnations of the immorality of gluttony – along with a growing emphasis on manners and refinement – brought self-control and 24 Gentilcore, Food and Health, pp. 14-15. 25 Albala, Cooking in Europe, p. 5. 26 ‘Ricordo adì 5 di Novembre 1554, che mi pare che e’ bisogni, che io comunche io ho qualche impedimento o di stomaco o di capo o di doglie pe’ fianchi o alle gambe o braccia o di denti che siano continovi, e’ non bisogna che io faci come per l’adreto: ma che subito io vi rimedi col mangiare poco o con lo stare digiuno e ingegnarsi per le 4 Tempora osservare e digiuni comandati, perché io conosco che non lo facendo io me ne pento’ (I remember the fifth of November 1554, it must have been, that I had some problem with my stomach or head or pain in my sides or in my legs or arms or my teeth kept bothering me, and I wasn’t meant to go on as in the past but instead I should have immediately handled it by eating very little or by fasting and keeping myself in order to observe the Ember days and their required fasts, because I know that if I didn’t I’d regret it); Pontormo Diario, p. 12.

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discipline into the picture and led moralists to advocate moderation as a way to grow old and healthy while exhibiting correct behavior.27 Religious prescriptions about food in early modern Italy focused on the practice of periodic fasting as a way of disciplining the body and its appetites. ‘Lenten days’ (giorni di magro) and ‘fat days’ (giorni di grasso) alternated on the liturgical calendar and thus on the table.28 To match the seasonal calendar with the religious calendar was a complicated business that involved substitutions and adaptations but also contributed to the diffusion of certain foods and the evolution of Italian cuisine and taste: for example, it was largely in this context that olive oil (or butter) took the place of lard and fish was prepared instead of meat.29 In general, however, the best healthy diet for either medical or religious reasons was considered one of moderation and frugality. Significantly, attention to the sense of taste in choosing food had no positive place in this dietetic literature.30 In fact, the sensual pleasure of taste was to be shunned. Baldassare Pisanelli, in his dedicatory letter to Guglielmo Gonzaga in the Trattato della natura de’cibi et del bere (1st ed. 1583), warned against the allure of the senses: they do not distinguish between what is good for one’s health and what is not. He hoped that his book would help dispel ignorance about nutrition and that, with this important knowledge available to everyone, only ‘inordinate’ and ‘undisciplined’ appetite would be responsible for the onset of illnesses and death.31 Castor Durante’s Tesoro della sanità (1st ed. 1586), though lacking Pisanelli’s moralizing tone, insisted on moderation 27 A significant though extreme early Renaissance example of the condemnation of uncontrolled and disorderly appetite appeared in the demeaning portrait of a glutton penned by Leon Battista Alberti in his dialogue De iciarchia (1483), where the slovenly behavior portrayed is clearly intended to convey disgust and low status. See Alberti, ‘De iciarchia’, pp. 74-75. 28 Parts of this section are adapted from Giannetti, ‘Of Eels and Pears’. I thank the editors of the volume where it was published for permission to use it here. On the Lenten diet, butter, and oil, see Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, pp. 82-87 and pp. 120-125. 29 Famous cooks such as Maestro Martino de Rossi learned how to adapt dishes to a Lenten diet, inventing several ‘imitation’ foods using almonds, f ish, and f ish stock to prepare faux ricotta and eggs, for example. See Parzan, ‘Please Play with Your Food’, p. 29. Recipe books with suggestions for the two regimes (the vivande di grasso and vivande di magro) continued to be published well into the seventeenth century, when cookbook authors’ attitudes started to change: in the Scalco alla moderna by Antonio Latini, fish is presented as a refined food perfect for the most exigent palate. Only at the end of his work, in a sort of homage to a lengthy tradition, does Latini note an added benefit of fish, which is also healthy for the spirit. See Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, pp. 82-87. 30 Albala, Eating Right, p. 177. 31 ‘Al Serenissimo Signor Guglielmo Gonzaga Duca di Mantua e di Monferrato’, in Pisanelli, Trattato della natura de’ cibi et del bere, n. p.

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in eating: in particular, he recommended the self-discipline of approaching the table without an appetite and leaving the table with one.32 Sperone Speroni degli Alvarotti (1500-1588)33 – who wrote prolifically in various genres – displays a strong interest in moderation as well when writing about health, food, and well-being in his letters to his daughter Giulia. He was, however, often suspicious of doctors’ advice and wrote regularly to his daughter with all sorts of suggestions regarding what she should eat and drink to stay healthy or to recover from illness.34 Reading his letters, it is clear that he had solid knowledge of the dietary literature and lore of his time, though he did not cite or discuss his sources. An apprehensive father, he distrusted some types of fresh fruit, including pears, apples, and peaches,35 but other foods – particularly fatty meat – actually incurred his wrath.36 He recommended that Giulia, who was almost constantly pregnant, never eat fruit before a meal – for once almost exactly what doctors and dietaries advised. On the other hand, during summertime he encouraged her to eat figs and grapes, along with melons, malvasia wine, and a bit of cooked pear, all of which would have deeply troubled doctors.37 He also 32 Durante, ‘Avertimenti ne i cibi et nel bere’, fol. 50. 33 Speroni was a defender of the vernacular languages and the leading scholar of neo-Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy in the Veneto. 34 ‘Non ti metter mai sana in man di medici senza mia saputa’; Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 166 (letter 134 from 1562) (when you are healthy do not ever put yourself in the hands of doctors); ‘mi piace che tu sia chiara de’ medici per la prova fatta in te al contrario; ma dovresti anche esser chiara di me per molte prove fatte a tuo benefficio, né senza me metterti nelle lor mani’ (I like that you distrust doctors for the contrary proof you had; but you should also believe me because many times I advised you well; never put yourself in their hands without my knowledge); Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 169 (letter 140 from 1562). 35 ‘non mangiar mai peri (never eat pears)’; Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 140 (letter 98 from 1561). ‘Andando in villa guardati […] e da’ pomi, da’ peri e da perseghi’ (going in the countryside be very careful […] about eating apples, pears and peaches); Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 217 (letter 225 from 1564). 36 For instance: ‘guardati da ogni mangiar di pasta e di latticini e di ocche e di anatre’ (be very careful about eating pasta, dairy products, geese, and ducks); Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 139 (letter 98 from 1561); ‘nondimeno governati, procurando con conveniente esercizio le tue purgazioni e con lo stare allegra e con boni cibi, guardandoti per ora da carni grosse e grasse e da pesci e da ogni mangiar di pasta e latticini’ (and don’t be any less attentive, making sure to keep up appropriately with your purgations and being happy and eating well, while staying away from big, fatty meats and fish and from eating pasta and dairy products); Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 195 (letter 187 from 1563); ‘per adesso guardati da ogni vino negro e grande. Non mangiar pescie né carne alcuna che sia vecchia, né formaggio vecchio’ (for now stay away from any big red wine. Don’t eat fish or meat that’s old, nor aged cheese); Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 233 (letter 261 from 1568). 37 ‘Fighi e uova e qualche pero cotto mangia sicuramente, e meloni, se boni sono […] de’ cibi le sardelle, i cappari e per sé e per l’aceto son bone’ (Certainly eat figs and eggs and some cooked pears, and melons, if they’re good […] other foods like sardines and capers if they’re good either

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advised pere moscatelle, lemons, and citrons (cedri) in the form of jams38 and instructed her to eat only ‘small portions of melon and pumpkin provided that the stomach does not suffer’.39 Like Durante and Pisanelli, Speroni clearly had something of an obsession with moderation and self-discipline in eating and living. 40 While, as Elias might have put it, the ‘civilization’ of appetites and the lauding of moderation in eating might seem to be the dominant narrative in Italian and European society at the time, visual representations and a number of literary genres often move in the opposite direction, expressing an increasing fascination with the pleasure of good food, the exaltation of taste and potential reversals of traditional hierarchies of the senses. As explored in the first chapter, parasites and servants in sixteenth-century comedies reveal an appreciation for two luxury foods: fresh fruit and roasted fowl. Italian Renaissance theater, a genre that often overturned everyday principles and rules, 41 especially for plays performed during Carnival, 42 often featured a view of food that connected with notions of hunger, physical well-being, and the exaltation of pleasure in eating. A short conversation between two archetypical figures of Renaissance drama – the pedant and the parasite – in the comedy Fabritia by Lodovico Dolce (1549) sets the tone for such discussions in the sixteenth-century comic imagination. In this on their own or with vinegar); Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 218 (letter 227 from 1564). ‘il tuo cibo adesso fa’ che siano dei fichi e dell’uva, quando sarà bona e de’ meloni’ (Make sure that you’re now eating figs and grapes, when they’re good, and melons); Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 194 (letter 184 from 1563). 38 ‘ti mandarò in uno cesto quattro albarelli di diverse confezzioni cipriane […] credo che ti gioveriano cedri, limoni e peri moscatelli’ (I will send you in a basket four jars with various jams from Cyprus […] I believe citrons, lemons and moscatelle pears will be good for you); Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 232 (letter 259 from 1568). 39 ‘qualche poco di melone e zucche, pur che ‘l stomaco non patisca’; Speroni, Lettere familiari, p. 162 (letter 126 from 1562). 40 Ideas of moderation and self-discipline in eating may have had some connection to contemporary Christian reform, both Catholic and Protestant, but doctors and authors of food and health treatises did not usually refer to religion in their writings. See Giannetti, ‘Of Eels and Pears’, p. 294. 41 Reversals include: male characters dressing as women and female characters masquerading as boys; love triumphing over arranged marriages; old fools in love being punished; servants and parasites ruling their masters and being rewarded for it. 42 The major themes of Renaissance comedies – sex, gender, and play – elicited laughter but at the same time gave voice to debate on gender roles, sexuality, social hierarchies, and family structures. In sum, ‘the play of these comedies was at once fun and social work of the highest order’; Giannetti and Ruggiero, Introduction to Five Comedies, pp. ix-xlii, esp. xii. For an analysis of Renaissance comedies in which f iction and history, literary tradition and contemporary practices are mixed and debated, see Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss.

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scene, Pomponino – the old pedant who is helplessly in love and needs the help of Melino, a parasite – seeks, condescendingly, to show Melino that he is ignorant in matters of love. Pomponino asks Melino whether he knows what Ovid says in his On the Art of Love [De Arte amandi] about love; Melino promptly responds that what he really knows and values is what Platina says in his book On the Art of Chewing [De arte manducandi]. 43 With this joking answer, Melino suggests the superiority of knowledge about food, which is practical and provides straightforward pleasure, over knowledge about love which is difficult to win and enjoy; in sum, the high pleasures of food surpass the traditionally much more praised and exalted love. In another scene, Melino reprimands Pomponino for spending his career studying the ‘intrichi dell’ anima’ (intricacies of the soul) instead of seeking the ‘consolationi del corpo’ (consolations of the body). 44 This contrast between the physical consolations of the body and the abstract attributes of the soul is also stressed in the comedy La fantesca by Girolamo Parabosco (1556), where attention to food is a frequent topic of discussion. One scene depicts the parasite Mascellone and the servant Ghiribizzo engaged in a lively discussion on the superiority of food over drink, wherein food appears as superior even to honor – one of the key evaluative concepts of the Italian Renaissance world.45 While Mascellone affirms that he can provide Platonic commentary on every type of food preparation, 46 ever hungry Ghiribizzo 43 Dolce, Fabritia, fol. 46v (IV.10). 44 ‘Che dovevate essere dove si vendono le consolationi del corpo, e non dove s’insegnano gli intrichi dell’anima’ (You had to be where consolations of the body are sold, not where intricacies of the soul are taught). He proceeds to explain what he means by the expression ‘consolationi del corpo’: ‘che sono la vita, la contentezza, il ristoro, il bere e il paradiso del corpo: et ciò dico per mettere in ordine il banchetto delle nozze’ (and they are life, happiness, refreshment, drinking, and the paradise of the body: and I tell you this to prepare for your wedding banquet); Dolce, Fabritia, fol. 34r (III.14). 45 It is more praiseworthy to make an effort to produce a delicate and refined meal than to uphold one’s honor in the world. Mascellone: ‘Quante questioni, quanti homicidij si fanno al mondo per mantenere felice l’honore? E se questo si comporta e si loda, perché non si dee senza fine più pregiare colui che per mantenere il cibo delicato e signorile si sforza? Essendo solo il cibo quello che ci mantiene la vita, che più vale che cento milla honori’ (How many conflicts, how many murders have been committed in the world to uphold one’s honor? And if this is accepted and praised, why shouldn’t one praise highly a man who strives to have excellent and noble food? Given that it is only food that can keep us alive, which is a hundred thousand times more valuable than honor); Parabosco, La fantesca, fol. 29 (II). 46 ‘Molto più dottamente ti parlerei della cucina, che non è rosto, lesso, sapore, salsa, torta, tortelli, menestre, brodetti e potaggi ch’io non sapessi platonicamente commentare’ (I could much more competently speak to you about cooking as there isn’t any roasting, boiling, flavor, sauce, cake, stuffed pasta, soups, broths, and stews, that I couldn’t give a Platonic commentary about); Parabosco, La fantesca, fol. 29 (II).

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reveals sadly that he has forgotten how pheasants and partridges are dressed for cooking: the only thing that enters his body now, he laments, is a book: the De Consolatione philosophiae by Boethius.47 But instead of consolation, Lady Philosophy – protagonist of Boethius’s celebrated Latin work of 524 on the superiority of virtue over wealth, fame, and worldly goods – gives him only despair. The characters’ deprivation cannot be satisfied by bread alone, however. Instead, they can only be consoled with refined food: in fact, Mascellone affirms, no illness threatened by doctors could curb his gusto.48 With clever wordplay, Parabosco has Mascellone proclaim that fagiano (pheasant) signifies ‘fa sano’ (it makes one healthy), pernice (partridge) means ‘per nui se’ (it is for us), and cappone (capon) refers to ‘qua poni’ (put it here). 49 Only good food can remedy deprivation, offer consolation, and keep the body healthy. These humorous suggestions of the primacy of body over soul and supremacy of food over love could be dismissed as typical features of topsyturvy Renaissance comedy in which faithful servants and parasites are rewarded with a feast and banquet in a happy ending. However, references to the appreciation of fine food and individual gusto made by characters that are traditionally represented as starving, willing to eat anything at all that might fill their empty bellies, demonstrate that much more was at play in these plays. Instead, they can be fruitfully considered as a playful challenge to contemporary praise of – if not outright obsession with – moderation in eating by common characters who want to do more than just eat and fill their bellies. They want to eat with gusto.

Ruzante’ s orchard paradise50 The theme of earthly paradise as a place where all the senses are pleasurably engaged and one finds bodily consolation emerges in a number of works 47 ‘egli è uno anno ch’io non ho goduto un desinare o d’una cena a mio modo […] le torte poi? A pena so che si fano tonde, non intra nel mio corpo altro che Boetio de consolatione, che me fa disperare a fatto’ (it has been a year since I last enjoyed a meal or a dinner as I like it […] and cakes? I barely recall that they are made round [in shape], as no consolation but Boethius enters my body, which makes me completely give up hope); Parabosco, La fantesca, fols. 30-31 (II). 48 ‘per dio ch’io non mi so immaginare quale sorte d’infirmità mi potessi tuore il gusto’ (by God I can’t imagine what kind of illness could take away my taste for food); Parabosco, La fantesca, fol. 78 (IV). 49 ‘Il mio humore è il fagiano, che significa fa sano, la pernice, che significa per nui se, e il capone che vuol dire, qua poni’; Parabosco, La fantesca, fol. 79 (IV). 50 Parts of this section are adapted from Giannetti, ‘Of Eels and Pears’.

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by Venetian dramatist and actor Angelo Beolco, better known as Ruzante (1502-1542). In the Dialogo facetissimo et ridiculosissimo, a short comedy written in the Paduan dialect in the 1520s,51 Zaccarotto, the soul of one of Ruzante’s dead friends, returns to Earth and explains to the two hungry protagonists, the peasants Menego and Duozzo, how things work in the afterlife. Those who were pious and always said their prayers, who fasted and abstained from sensual pleasures, went to heaven, of course. Heaven, however, is not a merry place: most notably, one does not eat or drink there. Instead one spends one’s time in acts of penitence, and the only joy consists in contemplating God. Menego and Duozzo, who are both starving and thus quite concerned about the notion of a paradise without food, ask Zaccarotto to describe where he is. He responds with the extraordinary revelation that there exists a second heaven, much more attractive than the first. In this happy heaven are ‘good companions’ like himself and his other dead friends.52 Only cheerful and honest men who did not spend their time denying the senses with prayer and fasting may enter this other paradise, where days are passed in enjoyment of the senses: there is no requirement to work, food and drink are readily available, and time is spent hunting, joking with friends, listening to music, singing, and playing musical instruments. As Zaccarotto notes, the most important requisite for entering this heaven is to have been honest workers in life, neither stingy nor too liberal, and most of all ‘happy men, not melancholic’.53 In the Dialogo facetissimo, in other words, the pleasures of the senses not only refine life on Earth but open the way to what is clearly the better heaven. How, one wonders, did Ruzante conceive of this bizarre vision of a ‘nontheistic paradise’?54 Ruzante performed the Dialogo facetissimo at Fosson55 ‘during the year of the famine, 1528’, as the frontispiece of the 1554 edition printed in Venice states. This was a period of great hardship for the peasants of the Venetian 51 The Dialogo was written in Paduan dialect; I quote the Italian translation by Zorzi. There is no extant manuscript of the Dialogo, therefore we do not know whether Ruzante titled it or not, though we do know that it was written for performance and that it was published in 1554. The title Dialogo facetissimo was probably given by the press, as was common at the time. See Zorzi’s note in Beolco, ‘Dialogo facetissimo’, p. 1435. The work is both tragic and ridiculous as regards its frank description of and scatological humor concerning the effects of hunger and dearth on the body. 52 ‘Io vi dirò. Esistono due Paradisi, uno per i bravi compagni’; Beolco, ‘Dialogo facetissimo’, p. 716. 53 ‘e che soprattutto sono uomini allegri e non malinconici. A costoro il Paradiso è apparecchiato’; Beolco, ‘Dialogo facetissimo’, p. 718. 54 Carroll, ‘A Nontheistic Paradise’. 55 Fosson is a village near Loreo in the Polesine where Alvise Cornaro, Ruzante’s patron, hunted with friends.

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Republic, a situation well known to Ruzante, who worked as an administrator on the estates owned by the Venetian nobleman Alvise Cornaro. The Dialogo testifies to how recurrent famines terrorized the population: it centers on hunger and its devastating effects on the body and mind, as graphically illustrated in the conversation between Menego and Duozzo. Surprisingly, after beginning with the stark picture of starving peasants and their suffering,56 the Dialogo winds up with this measured vision of a heaven reserved to ‘good companions’ able to enjoy eternally the life of the senses – admittedly in moderation, but nonetheless enjoying that afterlife. One might expect that the Dialogo would have approached and resolved the theme of extreme dearth by tormenting its protagonists with the fantasies of Cuccagna so common to the literary and artistic imagination of the European Cinquecento. Instead, however, Ruzante starts a distinctly more measured cultural conversation. Ruzante expressed great concern about the Veneto peasants’ suffering on account of recurring famines and how usurers took advantage of the poor in moments of hardship in a monologue, the Prima oratione, written circa 1521 to honor the new bishop of Padua – the Venetian noble and cardinal Marco Cornaro, who had repossessed the bishopric after the war of Cambrai.57 The Prima oratione is a satirical petition to the cardinal to approve seven new laws, designed with total disregard for the dictates of the Church, to help the peasants live a better life. Ironically, Ruzante claims that by following these ‘pagan’ laws, Paduan peasants would be able to enjoy an earthly paradise similar to the one described in the Dialogo facetissimo. The new laws Ruzante facetiously proposes institute a utopian life for peasants where longstanding Christian restrictions – especially those regarding eating – are softened if not abrogated altogether. Among the most interesting is a law allowing peasants to skip fasting during religious festivals because their daily heavy physical labor requires them to be well nourished. Another law states that it should not be a sin to work in the fields on religious holidays during harvest time or to eat in the morning before Mass. These new laws not only do away with traditionally required periods of fasting but also convey an appreciation of the life of sensual pleasures – pleasures that were not normally seen by the Church as a desirable aspect of 56 The suffering of the body is central to the dialogue between Menego and Duozo. They want to eat bread, but the only thing they can count on is turnips, which give them dysentery. In the spring they hope to find weeds, herbs, and bran (crusca) to eat. Their bodies are described as devoid of any strength and they lament that they can no longer make love. Menego even fantasizes about dying through the act of eating himself. 57 On the Prima oratione see Carroll, Introduction to ‘New Law and Statutes’.

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the life of sixteenth-century peasants. Perhaps most importantly, the laws insisted that peasants be allowed to hunt – an activity widely forbidden to them– and eat not merely to satisfy their hunger but also to enjoy the pleasure of doing so. In fact, the sin of gluttony was to be entirely abolished: everyone should be able to eat things because they taste good, even when they are not hungry. Ruzante actually goes to great lengths to explain the benefits of eating for pleasure, referring to the experience of his elders, who say that pleasure and what tastes good, are also good for health. This, he holds, makes one live longer, do good deeds and go to paradise.58 It is worth noting that Ruzante was not asking the cardinal to provide much-needed food for hungry peasants in a time of famine; instead, he was calling for the liberation of food and eating from sin and guilt. As will become clear, Ruzante was also taking a position in the ongoing debate on diet and health, which involved his patron and friend Alvise Cornaro along with other humanists like Sperone Speroni. Clearly Ruzante’s vision does not line up well against the medical or prescriptive literature of the day discussed above; yet for Ruzante’s peasants these new laws design an earthly paradise of the senses that he clearly saw as much more attractive than the one reserved to the pious, who observed the laws of the Church and were destined to suffer a sort of contrappasso in a sad paradise without food, drink, or joy. This ‘human theology’ and 58 ‘Number five: that eating not be a sin of gluttony when you eat because it tastes good and even though you are not hungry. Because the doctors say that what tastes good is good for you and makes for good health, and staying healthy you live a long time, [living a long time] you become old, you do good deeds, doing good deeds, you go to paradise’; Beolco, La prima oratione, pp. 96-98. The original text has variations in the three manuscripts and published edition regarding a key term (in bold below): ‘La quinta. Che per magnare no sipia peccò de gola quando se magna pur che ’l sipia bon, se ben el no s’ha fame; perché i miègi dise che quel che sa bon fa bon pro, fazzando bon pro el fa sanitè, stagando sani se vive assè, vivando assè el se ven viegi, vegnendo viegi se fa del ben, fazzando del ben se va in paraiso’; Ruzante, Prima Oratione [ed. Alessi, 1551], Archivio Digitale Veneto, Università degli Studi di Padova. The Marciana It. XI 66 and Ms. Civica 36 manuscripts have ‘i miègi’ as above but ‘i vecchi’ appears in Ms. Vr. Civica 1636 and ‘i miè viechi’ in the printed Alessi edition of 1551. My translation from Paduan into Italian, which differs slightly from Carroll’s English version, reads: ‘che per il mangiare non sia peccato di gola quando si mangia purché sia buono, e sebbene uno non abbia fame; perché i miei antenati dicono che quello che sa di buono fa bene, facendo bene dà la salute, essendo sani si vive a lungo, vivendo a lungo si diventa vecchi, diventando vecchi si fa del bene, facendo del bene si va in paradiso’. In any case the idea, derived from the philosopher Avicenna, that what tastes good is also good for one’s health was common in a number of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century health and food treatises, for instance Aldobrandino da Siena’s (…-1287?) De regimine sanitatis and Maino de’ Maineri’s (c. 1290-1365/68). Liber Regiminis Sanitatis. See Albala, Eating Right, p. 172; Montanari, ‘The Taste of Knowledge’, p. 205.

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these images of a ‘nontheistic paradise’ make sense – according to Linda Carroll – in the context of the difficult economic times of the early sixteenth century; she holds that they were certainly influenced by the circulation in Northern Italy of works such as Thomas More’s Utopia and Desiderius Erasmus’s Encomium moriae, known by Ruzante, and by the early diffusion of the ideas of evangelical reformers.59 It is not surprising that later in the century, when his works were reprinted, that the heterodox image of the two paradises and the radical laws proposed to Cardinal Cornaro in the Prima oratione incurred the wrath of Counter-Reformation censors.60 As far as the influence of Thomas More’s Utopia is concerned, Carroll shows that while More argued that what is reasonable can give pleasure (‘and that therefore one can change people’s behaviour through laws appealing to reason’61), Ruzante reversed this position, claiming that attention to the body and sensual pleasures comes first, allowing one to live a healthy and long life, do good deeds, and thereby earn paradise; this is what actually happens to the souls of Zaccarotto and Ruzante’s other dead friends in the Dialogo facetissimo. Looking more closely at the ongoing debate on food and health, pleasure, and taste in the intellectual circles Ruzante frequented, provides a deeper understanding of his vision of the senses and of sensual pleasure in his day more generally. Ruzante’s patron Alvise Cornaro, a rich landowner in the Paduan countryside who was an agricultural innovator as well as an author, is most famous for his four books entitled Trattati della vita sobria (first edition, Padua 1558), which promised health and long life if readers ate with moderation and restricted their consumption to certain foods. Cornaro claimed to rely primarily on his own experience: when he was young he confessed that he had lived by the common belief that what was pleasing to his palate was also good for his health. He even listed his once favored foods such as melon, raw greens, pies (torte), cold wine, fish, and pork – all foods that, in sixteenth-century medical treatises, were labeled dangerous. But Cornaro reassured even his doubting readers by claiming that he had nonetheless reached the ripe old age of almost one hundred years and had regained his health once he eliminated from his diet all the foods that had greatly appealed to his youthful tastes. Concessions 59 These ideas had arrived in the Veneto during the first years of the sixteenth century via the trade routes that connected the Veneto with countries north of the Alps, such as Germany and Switzerland. For an analysis of the Prima oratione and the influence of More and Erasmus, see Carroll, ‘A Nontheistic Paradise’. On the diffusion of Thomas More’s Utopia in Italy, see Nelson, ‘Utopia through Italian Eyes’. 60 See Zorzi’ s note in Beolco, ‘Dialogo facetissimo’, p. 1447, n. 50. 61 Carroll, ‘A Nontheistic Paradise’, pp. 882-883.

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to the pleasures of taste and gluttony, he concluded, led to sickness and premature death.62 His Trattato was highly popular: published for the first time at mid-century it became the ‘only continuously published treatise in the genre’63 with repeated editions and translations continuing from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. In fact, Cornaro enhanced his reputation as an expert on healthy eating by including in his letters and other literary output well-conceived half-truths and imaginative fantasies about his own long life.64 Ruzante, in contrast, died at forty – not a short life by sixteenth-century standards, but a very young age in Cornaro’s opinion. In fact, he lamented the death of il nostro carissimo messer Ruzante in a number of letters and, as might be expected, attributed it to his excesses in eating and drinking. In a letter (published in 1563) written to the Patriarch of Aquileia, Daniele Barbaro, after Ruzante’s death, Cornaro declared that at ninety-one65 he had reached an earthly paradise thanks to his vita sobria, which was pleasing to God because it was ‘hostile to the senses and guided by reason’.66 The language and references used by Cornaro in this and other works advertised his theory and seek to gain supporters for it in part by showing that Ruzante was wrong about the senses both in his life and in his works. Even though he does not expressly mention Ruzante, the letter appears to 62 All page references to the Trattato are from Cornaro, Scritti sulla vita sobria. 63 Albala, Eating Right, p. 36. 64 The date of his birth is uncertain, but probably 1484; he died in 1566. In his two first wills he declared, respectively, to have been born in 1478 and in 1482. See Blason, ‘La vita di Alvise Cornaro’. If the date of 1484 is correct, he certainly lived a long life, eighty years, but not more than the ninety claimed in some of his writings. See Sambin, Per le biografie di Angelo Beolco, pp. 121-122. His work survives today, translated and adapted by followers of the ‘caloric restriction theory’, as a popular health fad. 65 In this text Cornaro declares that he is ninety-one years old, an example of his manipulation of his age. See also the aff irmation in his ‘Amorevole essortazione del Magnif ico M. Alvise Cornaro’: ‘Per il che io dico che, essendo (per la Iddio gratia) giunto a la età di 95 anni’ (For this reason I affirm that, thanks to God, I have reached the age of ninety-five); Cornaro, Scritti sulla vita sobria, p. 122. 66 ‘Et io, che so da quale cagione procede, sono astretto a dimostrarla et fare conoscere che si può possedere uno paradiso terrestre dopo la età delli ottanta anni, il quale possedo io; ma non si può possederlo se non con il mezo della santa Continenza et della virtuosa Vita Sobria, amate molto dal grande Idio, perché son nemiche dil [del] senso et amiche della ragione’ (And because I know the reason for this, I am obliged to demonstrate and to make known to everybody that it is possible to enjoy an earthly paradise after the age of eighty as I do; but one cannot have it without the help of Saint Continence and the Virtuous Sober Life, greatly loved by God because they are enemies of the senses and friends of reason); ‘Lettera scritta dal Magnifico M. Alvise Cornaro al Reverendissimo Barbaro, Patriarca eletto di Aquileia’ in Cornaro, Scritti sulla vita sobria, pp. 115-121 at 115.

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refer to him twice: first, in a reference to the earthly paradise that one can enjoy even after the age of eighty thanks to the cult of Saint Moderation (Santa Continenza), in contrast to (Ruzante’s) imagined paradise after death for those who indulged in the pleasures of food and the senses; second, in his affirmation that, when a man reaches the age of forty he has to change his way of life regarding eating and drinking if he wants to grow old.67 In another exchange of letters with his friend Speroni, who was involved in the ongoing debate for or against the vita sobria, Cornaro explicitly accuses the disorderly and intemperate eating habits of Ruzante as the cause of his premature death: I try to find a way to persuade my friends that the excesses of the body are the reason many men die young. I tell them this and they do not believe me; nonetheless they continue dying because of this and keep me in this unhappiness in which I find myself now that our dearest Messer Ruzante has died.68

Alvise Cornaro’s meditations on the vita sobria – and the difference between his longevity and his friend’s short life – in fact led him to rewrite one of Ruzante’s most famous works. A few years after the playwright’s death, Cornaro composed his own Oratione (c.1545-1550), a close imitation of the Prima oratione.69 In it, Ruzante’s laws that favor peasants are repeated with some significant changes and one major omission: the law that allows peasants to eat not merely to satisfy hunger but also to enjoy the pleasure of doing so is quietly dropped.70 Cornaro did not limit himself to this crucial deletion: he also dedicated a long paragraph to the advertisement of his strict 67 ‘ma l’huomo mentre che è giovine, perché è più sensuale, che ragionevole, seguita il senso; & essendo poi pervenuto alla età di XL ò L anni debbe pur sapere che all’hora è giunto alla metà della sua vita […] la onde è necessario di mutare vita nel suo mangiare, e bere, dalli quali dipende il vivere sano & lungamente’ (but when a man is young he follows the senses because he is more sensual than reasonable. But when he gets to the age of forty or fifty he must know that he has reached his middle age […] therefore it becomes necessary to change his lifestyle in eating and drinking, on which our long and healthy life depends); Cornaro, Scritti sulla vita sobria, p. 118. 68 ‘io gelo dico e essi non me lo credono e pur se non per desordeni se ne moreno e tengono me in questa infelicità, ne la quale son hora e più che mai fusse per la morte del nostro carissimo messer Ruzzante’. See the letter in Bellinati, ‘Alvise Cornaro’, pp. 146-148, and in Cornaro, Scritti sulla vita sobria, pp. 141-143. 69 Cornaro’ s Oratione per il Cardinale has been published and edited by Marisa Milani. 70 The Oratione is discussed in Lippi, Cornariana, pp. 93-152. Lippi juxtaposes the section on the pleasure of eating from Ruzante’s Prima oratione with the modified version written by Cornaro; see Lippi, Cornariana, pp. 140-142.

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diet, lifting concepts from his vita sobria to reaffirm his condemnation of any pleasure in eating and his unequivocal equation of eating with gluttony.71 For Cornaro, only by following the precepts of his vita sobria and continence could one live a long life. Ruzante, by his own words as well as by his actions, never agreed with Cornaro; the playwright’s last work, the Lettera all’Alvarotto (1536, more Veneto), provides his final word in the debate on food habits and the vita sobria. The Lettera, which critics have called his spiritual testament, is a complex apology for the senses and the materiality of life.72 Ruzante reaffirms his earlier conviction that an honest life respectful of bodily senses can lead humans to heaven. The frugal discipline of reason and religion – the guiding principles of Cornaro’s vita sobria – are here completely shunned. Ruzante addresses the Lettera to his friend Marco Alvarotto, who had been a companion in the playwright’s theatrical ventures in the Veneto. Ruzante explains his sudden desire to live forever on earth and his subsequent search among his books to find Lady Temperance in an attempt to follow Cornaro’s teachings and ask her to help him realize his desire. The search yields no results, however, and Ruzante finally falls asleep. In a dream he enters an orchard and meets his deceased friend, the actor Barba Polo, who guides him through a beautiful landscape.73 Lady Temperance is nowhere to be found, but Polo points out Lady Mirth, who rules this blissful place along with her brother Lord Smile, Lady Joy, Madam Feast, Lord Party, and many other smiling and happy inhabitants. Nearby, Lord Appetite and Lord Taste are setting the table for a dinner worthy of an abbot. Here in this earthly paradise are finally found, living happily and enjoying their senses, the ‘good companions’ of Ruzante to whom the Dialogo facetissimo had promised just such a paradise. If Ruzante and his companions had to seek out their earthly paradise in dreams, Aretino and his friends in Venice during those same years attempted to find their paradise of the senses, especially taste, in everyday life. In a letter written in 1537 to Gianfrancesco Pocopanno (discussed in Chapter One), Aretino thanks his friend for sending him the gift of a sonnet accompanied by a basket of the most prized fruit of the time – pears.74 Ironically, while Aretino greatly enjoyed this most fragile and precious gift, a few years later, when Cornaro received much the same gift from a friend, his reaction was decidedly different. He responds to the giver: 71 Lippi, Cornariana, pp. 141-145. 72 Beolco, ‘Littera de Ruzante’, pp. 1226-1243. 73 Barba Polo, also mentioned in the comedy Piovana, was a famous actor in the circle of Ruzante. 74 ‘Letter to Messer Gianfrancesco Pocopanno’, in Aretino, Lettere, I, p. 614 (letter 295).

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those pears were really beautiful and good, as my son-in-law, who enjoyed them, reassured me; as you know, I do not eat them because my Lady Continence forbade me long ago.75

Lady Temperance, whom Ruzante could not find anywhere in the orchard paradise of his dreams and who clearly did not trouble Aretino, accompanied Cornaro as Lady Continence throughout his long, abstemious life. This section has focused on a lively and often intense debate in Venetian literature of the sixteenth century about the sense of taste, temperance, sobriety, and the pleasure of eating. It reflects just one aspect of the many emerging discussions on food and taste more generally during the period. Significantly, the moralistic and disciplining vision of food that was so crucial for Cornaro was often tested and contested at the time in the context of two specific foods seen as both tasty and dangerous: melon and pork.

Melons, the Hybrid Fruit Melons were regarded with suspicion in widely circulated folktales that told stories that may sound strange to our modern ears about popes and emperors who died suddenly after feasting immoderately on often impressive numbers of melons.76 These stories appear and reappear, at times almost word for word, in food and health treatises throughout the Renaissance, as cautionary tales regarding the dangers of these most desired fruits of the cucurbits (or gourd) family.77 Why did the notion of the melon as a dangerous yet seductive food 75 ‘et erano molto belli, et buoni per quello, che a me disse mio genero, che li mangiò, che io non mangio peri, perché la mia S.ra Continenza già me li devedò’. Letter to ‘Magnifico M. Alvise’ in Cornaro, Scritti sulla vita sobria, pp. 148-153 at 148. The letter was sent from Padua in 1551. 76 According to Felici, during the second half of the sixteenth century melons (melone or popone) came in different varieties not so different from those we know today. They could have smooth or rough skin; they could be orange, white, or green; they could have a long or round shape (‘o sonno con la sua scorza raspolosa e piena di crespe o sonno lisci, o sonno montuosi e tuberosi o sonno divisi in solchi o sonno tutti equali, o sonno rossi dentro, o verde o bianchiccio’); Felici, Lettera sulle insalate, p. 95. On the history of the diffusion of melons in the Mediterranean area between the fifth and fifteenth centuries, their unremarkable quality in the Middle Ages, and their improved characteristics during the Renaissance, see Carnevale Schianca, La cucina medievale, p. 394. See also Paris, Zohar and Lev, ‘Medieval Emergence of Sweet Melons’. 77 Several treatises, from that of Platina to those of the physicians Savonarola (discussed below) and the much later Lodovico Bertaldi (d. 1625), repeat this same warning about melons. See for instance: ‘I meloni, quando sono maturi a suff icienza e che hanno tutte le qualità, che gli convengono, sono tanto dessiderati da molti Prencipi, e altri Signori grandi, che molti sono morti, per il superfluo uso d’essi, come riferisce il Durando [Castore Durante] ch’Albino

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last so long, especially when the fruit was so widely consumed in Italy at the time? What did popular lore contribute to ideas about the danger as well as about the attraction of melons? We might begin by explaining why melons were, at least from a prescriptive point of view, perceived as unhealthy.78 As discussed above, the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being has raw rustic vegetables grown in or on the earth at the bottom and fresh fruit up top; melons, therefore, occupy a hybrid position worthy of careful consideration. Melons do not, after all, grow on trees but on vines; the melon plant may strive for sunlight but melons themselves are firmly grounded, with fruitful vines that inevitably return to the soil, too weak to sustain their heavy weights. These characteristics meant, according to medieval, pre-Linnaean classification, that melons were neither a fruit nor a vegetable. Aldobrandino da Siena, a thirteenth-century physician working at the royal court of Provence, wrote a Régime du corps that considered melons, pumpkins, and cucumbers to be different types of fruit. For Corniolo della Cornia, a fourteenth-century author of an agricultural treatise, they were instead categorized as vegetables. This contradictory status was to a degree overcome in various manuscripts of the Tacuinum sanitatis from the end of the fourteenth century, in which melons appear as a specific kind of vegetable, similar to a fruit but without its privileged status. As Grieco explains, the ‘classificatory doubt’ of the period regarding animals and plants that were unable to be sorted into clear categories pointed to their potential impurity, thus making hybrid fruits and vegetables like squash, cucumber, and melon highly problematic.79 The melon’s proximity to soil also helped determine its description in health and dietary treatises as a cold and humid vegetable/fruit that absorbed all the harmful humors of the soil and transmitted them to the person who ate them. The damp quality of melons, moreover, was seen as interacting badly with the digestive heat of the stomach, resulting in a dangerous process imperatore tanto avido di mangiarne, come ancor delle persiche, che in una sera mangiò dieci meloni d’Ostia e cento persiche. Paulo Secondo Pontef ice, morì d’apoplesia, havendo nella cena mangiato due gran meloni. Dicono Federico terzo, Henrico settimo e Alberto secondo imperatori esser morti per l’uso d’essi’ (Melons, when they are appropriately ripe and have all the characteristics that they should have, are much desired by many princes and other great lords, and many of them have died from excessive consumption of them, as Durando [Castore Durante] tells us of the emperor Albinus, who coveted them, along with peaches, and in one evening he ate ten melons from Ostia and one hundred peaches. Pope Paul II died of apoplexy, having eaten two large melons during a meal. They say that Frederick III, Henry VII, and Emperor Albert II all died from eating them); Benzo, Regole della sanità et della natura, fols. 368-369. 78 On what follows I rely on Grieco, ‘The Social Politics’ (the section ‘Melons: a Lowly Fruit’ pp. 141-146). 79 Grieco, ‘The Social Politics’, pp. 142-143.

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of putrefaction that disrupted the body and its health. As Albala vividly relates, medical warnings –with their descriptions of juicy, ripe melons decaying and producing harmful vapors in the stomach – were successful in creating what we would today call a psychosomatic effect that helped produce the negative effects anticipated.80 Nevertheless, there were a few contemporary writers who recognized melons’ pleasant taste and attractive smell.81 In the two most important works on gastronomy and health written during the fifteenth century, the judgment on melons is mixed. Platina’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine (written between 1465 and 146682) and Michele Savonarola Libreto de tute le cosse che se manzano (c. 1450–1452), single melons out for their fine flavor, though health preoccupations about them remained.83 Savonarola, in his manual dedicated to Borso d’Este, admitted that among all gourds, melons were the most desirable fruit, only later repeating the usual Galenic concern with their coldness and humidity.84 Concerned equally with health and pleasure in eating, Platina recommended melons – with rind removed and seeds thrown away – as a good antipasto useful for digestion.85 However, he could not in the end refrain from warning readers that ‘The Emperor Albinus, however, was so delighted with this fruit that he ate 100 Campanian peaches and ten melons from Ostia at one meal’.86 In Platina’s account, the 80 Albala, Eating Right, p. 12. 81 Albala, Eating Right, pp. 9-13, pp. 205-206; Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe, pp. 54-55. 82 First Latin edition, c. 1470; second Latin edition, Venice, 1475. First Italian edition, 1487. 83 ‘Gratus est certe peponis usu. Vero difficillime ob eius frigiditatem commixtam humiditati coquitur’ (It is surely pleasant to eat a melon, but it is really very difficult to digest because of its combination of the cold with the humid); Platina, On Right Pleasure, p. 126- 127. Addressing cucumbers immediately thereafter, Platina adds: ‘Cucumeribus vis et natura prius fuerat explicanda, cum asserat Plinius cucumeres magnitudine excedentes pepones vocari’; Decepit, me ingenue erratum fateor, voluptas quae ex esu peponis capitur; hunc enim non cucumeribus solum sed cuivis edulio anteposuerim semper’ (First of all, the force and nature of cucumbers should be explained, since Pliny avers that cucumbers of excessive size are called melons. I openly confess my error, that the delight I get from eating a melon led me astray, for I not only place them above cucumbers but any other sort of fruit); Platina, On Right Pleasure, p. 126-127. 84 ‘Meloni, cucumaro e l’anguria: Di questi tri fructi diremo in uno capitulo per la grande convenientia hano insieme e prima del melone, el quale è fra i altri più desiderato’ (Melons, cucumber, and watermelon: of these fruits we will say elsewhere that in general the melon is considered the first, and the most desirable among the others); Savonarola, Libreto de tute, p. 75. ‘Cucumaro’ (cucumis sativus) is the old Venetian word for cucumber; ‘anguria’ is a watermelon. 85 ‘pepon tamen detracta cute et abiecto semine esui datus stomacho compescit ardores’ (but when melon is served with the rind removed and the seeds thrown away, it soothes the stomach); Platina, On Right Pleasure, pp. 126-127. 86 ‘Hoc fructu Albinus imperator adeo delectatus est ut centum persica campana et decem pepones Ostienses una cena comederit’; Platina, On Right Pleasure, pp. 126-127.

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emperor, perhaps surprisingly, avoids death to become, merely, very ill indeed. As far as melons were concerned, then, the typical advice was that if one could not resist the temptation of eating them, given their excellent flavor, it was necessary at least to wait until the stomach was empty or to accompany them with wine or something salty, like aged cheese.87 As we have already seen, for Alvise Cornaro, author of La vita sobria (first edition Padua, 1558), medical proscriptions about what to eat and what not to eat waged war with common wisdom about taste and pleasure in eating; this was especially true when it came to dangerously tasty melons. Cornaro narrates that, after having been very ill as a young man, he wanted to verify if the foods he liked most were good for his health. In other words, he wanted to test the fifteenth-century trope in both medical literature and common lore that suggested good flavor and a food being to one’s taste were the main criteria to follow in determining whether a particular food was healthy. His ‘experiments’ convinced him that the contemporary medical prohibitions against certain foods were correct, while the popular lore, fifteenth-century doctors, and authors of dietary treatises who privileged pleasure in eating were wrong; thus, he concluded, despite their pleasant taste, cold wine and melons were not at all good for his health – and, by implication, the health of others who would live long and sober lives by avoiding them.88 87 ‘Ẻ buon rimedio ancora il mangiare col melone il cascio vecchio, & le cose salate, & bevendoci appresso ottimo vino, ma non molto potente’ (It’s healthy to eat melon with aged cheese and salted things accompanied by excellent wine that’s not too strong); Durante, Il Tesoro della sanità, fols. 199-200. Interestingly, as Flandrin suggested, this medical advice could have been the origin of the popular modern Italian dish prosciutto e melone. Flandrin, ‘Condimenti’, p. 389. 88 ‘Però mi posi diligentissimamente à voler conoscere i cibi, che fossero a mio proposito, e prima deliberai di farne sperienza, se quelli che al gusto piacevano, mi giovassero, ò pur mi fossero di nocumento, per conoscere se quel proverbio, che io havea già tenuto per vero, e che verissimo universalmente si crede che sia, anzi è il fondamento di tutti i sensuali, che seguono i loro appetiti, era in fatto vero, che dice che quello che sa buono, notrisce e giova. Il che facendo ritrovai che era falso, perché a me il vin brusco e freddissimo sapea bono, e così I meloni e gl’ altri frutti, le insalate crude, i pesci, la carne di porco, le torte, le minestre di legumi, i mangiari di pasta et simili altre vivande, che mi dilettavano sommamente, et pur tutte mi nocevano’ (However I set myself most diligently to learning about the foods that were suited to my [health], and first I decided to experiment with them, to see if the ones that were pleasing to my taste were good for me, or if instead they were harmful, to understand if that proverb that I had always believed to be true and that is universally believed to be very true—indeed is the foundation of all the sensualists who follow their appetites—was in fact true, that says that whatever tastes good, nourishes and is good for one. In doing this I found that it was false, because to me very cold and harsh wine tasted good and so too melons and other fruits, raw salads, fish, pork, cakes, bean soups, and bites of pasta and other similar dishes that I enjoyed very much and yet they were harmful to me); Cornaro, Scritti sulla vita sobria, pp. 79-101 at p. 83.

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Famed poet Torquato Tasso reveals a certain uneasiness with the topic of melons in his literary dialogue Il padre di famiglia (first edition 1582). In this dialogue on running the family estate and educating children, a work similar to many other sixteenth-century treatises on household economics, the father and protagonist is a country gentleman; to honor a guest arriving from Naples he offers a generous number of the melons grown on his estate, but he himself refuses to taste any. Asked for an explanation, he affirms that melons are malsani (unhealthy) because they grow low on the ground, get no exposure to the sun, and therefore absorb the cold and harmful humors of the soil. Nonetheless, he invites his guest to enjoy them since they are ‘gratissimi al gusto’ (pleasant to the taste).89 This narrative sums up what seem to be the most common medical and dietary assumptions of the time, recognizing that a crucial disjunction existed between common preventive advice and real-life experience – along with the increasing relevance of the role of taste in hospitality and food choice. The contemporary nexus of dietary proscriptions, experience, and personal attitude appears revealingly in the ‘outsider’ accounts of a number of English travelers to Italy between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and in English dramas set in Italy, which offer telling perspectives. In Ben Jonson’s comedy Volpone (1606), Sir Politic Would Be, an English traveler to Venice, instructs his fellow citizen Peregrine on how to seem a true Italian: by religion, attitude, and correct political opinions – all three very important of course – but also by table manners, which were almost equally crucial:90 The handling of your silver fork, at meales; / the metal of your glasses: (these are the main matters / with your Italian) and how to know the hour, / when you must eat your melons, and your figges. (4.1.29-31)

The apparently extraneous mention of melons and the right time to eat them – which we know from contemporary sources is before the meal – indicate that even on a public stage in England the notion that melons were a dangerous fruit and therefore should be eaten before other foods to avoid 89 ‘Nascono, diss’egli, e, se vi piacciono, mangiatene à vostra voglia, né riguardate me, che, se poco n’ho gustati, non l’ho fatto perché ce ne sia carestia, ma perché io gli giudico assai malsani, come quelli, che, se ben sono oltre tutti gli altri di dolcissimo sapore, e gratissimi al gusto, nondimeno, non sollevandosi mai di terra, né ogni lor parte scoprendo al sole, contiene, che molto quasi beano del soverchio humor della terra’; Tasso, Il Padre di famiglia, pp. 25-26. On the melon discussion in Tasso’s Dialogue, see Biow, The Culture of Cleanliness, pp. 73-75. 90 Olsen, ‘Poisoned Figs’, pp. 234-235.

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putrefaction in the stomach was an accepted, shared belief. William Cecil received the following stern warning, before his imminent departure for Italy in 1562, from his son Thomas’s tutor: It is to be feared that Mr. Thomas shall not bear the great heats of that country, and being given also to eat much fruit, may soon fall into sickness, as he did in France by that occasion.91

Of course, we cannot know what actually happened to Mr. Thomas in Italy and whether he indeed succumbed to the sweetness of melons and other delectable and tempting Italian fruit. However, as we will see, assumptions about the dangers of traveling to Italy and partaking of Italian foodstuffs were not monolithic: other English and French travelers, after living in Italy, became passionate about eating fresh fruit and melons that less cosmopolitan Englishmen carefully avoided at home, considering them dangerously foreign to a normal diet. Alvise Cornaro, Torquato Tasso, Ben Jonson, Thomas Cecil’s tutor, and other writers were familiar with the medical proscriptions – or, at the very least, with the popular lore that accompanied the consumption of fruit in general and melons in particular. The contradictions within these prescriptive sources as well as between them and everyday life seem to have mattered enough that these authors’ writings play on the existence of an ongoing conflict between the importance of good taste, the everyday experience of eating delectables like melons (and not necessarily dying as a result), and the widely circulated medical and dietary notions that spoke against the consumption of specific foods. Once again, practice and theory diverge profoundly. The insistence on prohibition and the ongoing attempt to build a dietetic ideal that stressed restraint and morality was very significant and continued so for a long time, but, crucially, the contested position of melon – situated between fear and pleasure, and evoking the new disciplining vision – vis-à-vis experience and the sense of taste also points to the growing importance, in the sixteenth century, of everyday practice and the pleasures of taste over dietary and medical prescriptions.92 In fact, while doctors and dietaries warned against eating melons, this golden fruit gained in dissemination and popularity. Melons became the epitome of a beloved food, thought more delicious, perhaps, because they were potentially dangerous. To address this apparent paradox, it helps to 91 Olsen, ‘Poisoned Figs’, p. 236. 92 See the discussion in Chapter One on fresh fruit and roasted fowl.

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understand that dietaries and preventive medicine did not control dietetic practice, which was of course strongly influenced by contemporary culture (including literature) and everyday practice. Indeed, in this latter area archaeology once again aids our literary investigation. Archaeobotanical findings in fifteenth-century Ferrara provide much information on the diet and domestic life of the city’s middle- and upper-class inhabitants. An investigation of the so-called ‘Mirror Pit’ (fourteenth to fifteenth century), which was used for the disposal of floor sweepings and kitchen refuse from an urban palazzo, reveals that substantial quantities of fruits and vegetables were consumed via everyday alimentary habit. At that well-preserved site, 256,000 seeds and fruits belonging to 98 different species, including cultivated and wild plants, are present. Among them, figs, grapes, strawberries and melons are very common, perhaps cultivated right in the house’s garden.93 This finding supports similar research that finds melon seeds from earlier centuries in other archaeobotanical deposits around Ferrara.94 Agricultural and culinary practice, at least in Ferrara, did not pay all that much attention to the negative reputation melons had in dietary, botanical, and medical treatises from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.95 Literary texts offer rich and diverse insights into changing perceptions of the fruit across the period. Melons, in fact, became one of the favorite subjects of mid-sixteenth-century Bernesque poetry (and of still life paintings that display a burlesque sensibility), even as they gained the respect and esteem of philosophers and intellectuals who wrote spirited defenses of the mistreated fruit.96 In the end, the despised melon, along with salad greens, enjoyed a triumph and became a wonder, not to mention a food worthy of a king. 93 The authors mention that melons have been grown in Ferrara since the tenth century, as shown by the presence of melon seeds in archaeological digs in the area. Bandini Mazzanti et al., ‘Plant Use’, p. 448. 94 Bandini Mazzanti et al., ‘Plant Use’, pp. 448-449. See also the section on luxury foods in Chapter One. 95 Isabella d’Este, for one, considered melons a precious gift. She sent a batch of them – with wine to accompany it, according to doctors’ prescriptions – in summer 1495 to her husband Francesco, who was engaged in a military campaign outside of Mantua. Isabella even excused herself in her letter for the quality of the fruit, explaining that the melons, having suffered from too much rain, were not ‘in perfezione’ as she would have wished; ASM, AG, B. 2992, L. 5, fol. 61r, 25 July 1495 [IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive]. English translation in d’ Este, Selected Letters, p. 76. 96 See for instance Giachini, Lettera apologetica, and Angelita, I pomi d’oro, quoted in Heckmann Hanson, Visualizing Culinary Culture, pp. 223-224.

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The revenge of the melon As this chapter has outlined thus far, there was an important medical and dietary tradition that was reflected in sixteenth-century popular lore and commonplaces about the dangers of eating melons. In fact, the circulation of these ideas reached well beyond Italy. As noted above, some English travelers were suspicious about the enticing possibility of eating copious fresh fruit and melons while in southern Europe. And while skepticism continued, some such travelers changed their minds and their diets after living in Italy. William Thomas, one of the first English historians of Italy, admitted to his conversion from eating only meat and fish to eating fruit – which he had disdained before – after living in Italy for a time.97 The most famous example is perhaps Thomas Coryate, who dedicated an entire paragraph of his Crudities (1611) to the description of the opulent muskmelons that he saw on sale at the market in Venice. After affirming that the melon is one of the ‘most delectable dishes for a sommer [sic] fruit of all Christendom’, he too shared a bit of the traditional wisdom, advising his readers to be careful, as the muskmelon is ‘sweet in the palate, but sour in the stomach, if it be not soberly eaten’.98 Had Coryate read Michel de Montaigne’s observations on melons made a few years earlier in Les Essais (1st ed., 1580), the Englishman may well have worried less about the ills brought by melon consumption: for Montaigne they were excellent and in fact represented the quintessence of joie de vivre.99 As is well known, Montaigne paid close attention to the topic of health and well-being in his Essais. He suffered notoriously from kidney stones and his illness, along with the concern it brought, played a significant role in his writings. And thus he tended to discuss with considerable passion his relationship with food, his food preferences, his eating habits, his fasts, and his struggle not to overeat. He especially liked salty foods, sauces, meat, and fish; while he was not fond of vegetables or fruit – ‘except melons’.100 Indeed, 97 Parks, The History of Italy, pp. 9-10. Quoted in Olsen, ‘Poisoned Figs’, p. 240. 98 Interestingly, Coryate synthesized in a few words the ongoing conflict between the preeminence of taste and experience over acquired wisdom, although he suggested that moderation might be the resolution to the conflict. ‘For the sweetness of them is such as has allured many men to eat so immoderately of them, that they have therewith hastened their untimely death: the fruit being indeed γλυκύ πικρυ sweet sour. Sweet in the palate, but sour in the stomach, if it be not soberly eaten’; Palmer, Coryats Crudities, p. 117. 99 See Bamforth, ‘Melons and Wine’, pp. 99-128. 100 ‘je ne suis excessivement desireux ny de salades ny de fruits, sauf des melons’ (I am not too desirous of either salads or fruits, except melons); Montaigne, Les Essais, p. 1102.

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his taste for melons was such that he included them among the four essential pleasures of life, along with fresh air, wine, and one’s wife.101 This strange association is amusing and suggests just how delightful a melon could be. It has been suggested that Montaigne’s predilection for melons might have had a medical justification, as they were thought to be good for those suffering from kidney stones, but Montaigne never referred to them in that sense.102 Instead, he made a clever and ironic reference to doctors, who enjoyed the good life – of which melons constituted a significant part – while their poor patients had to adapt to gastronomically less exciting remedies: ‘And thus do our doctors, who eat melon and drink cold wine despite holding their patients to syrup and bread soup’.103 As this mockery suggests, Montaigne despised doctors in general. For him, the senses, natural appetite, and experience were all that counted in matters of health and illness. He dedicated an entire section of his third book to experience, affirming forcefully: ‘Experience is king of the hill [literally: properly on its own dunghill] as far as medicine is concerned, where reason gives it first place’.104 Certainly as far as melons were concerned, Montaigne followed his senses, his taste, and his previous experience. In fact, he had become acquainted with eating melons during a trip to Italy. After arriving in Tuscany in May of 1581 and anticipating with delight the ripening of melons soon to occur, in June he finally had the pleasure of a first taste. To celebrate the occasion, he wrote in Italian, ‘mangiai allora il primo pepone’ (I then ate the first melon).105 Although anti-melon voices still dominated the official narrative, it is precisely in the Italy Montaigne visited – of the mid-sixteenth century – that we find the most persuasive defenses of the defamed fruit, even among 101 Montaigne, Les Essais, p. 1093. 102 Bamforth cites Platina’s opinion from De honesta voluptate (‘Even if it is harmful to the nerves because of dampness, melon’s use nonetheless stimulates the urine and purges the kidneys and bladder if the seeds are left in it’; Platina, On Right Pleasure, p. 127) as well as Castelvetro’s Brieve racconto di tutte le radici (‘Rinfresca il melone i corpi umani fuor di modo, e per chi teme la pietra è ottimo’; p. 10). See Bamforth, ‘Melons and Wine’, p. 109. 103 ‘Ainsi font nos medecins, qui mangent le melon et boivent le vin fraiz ce pendant qu’ils tiennent leur patient oblige au sirop et à la panade’; Montaigne, Les Essais, p. 990. 104 ‘L’expérience est proprement sur son fumier au sujet de la médecine, où la raison lui quitte toute la place’; Montaigne, Les Essais, p. 1079. 105 Montaigne, Journal de Voyage, p. 274. Another snippet of evidence that a fashion for melons had reached France is Sommaire traitté des melons, contenant la nature et usage d ‘iceux, avec les commodities & incommodités qui en reviennent (1583) by a doctor from Lyon, Jacques Pons. The treatise, which was dedicated to the king, introduces the melon as the perfect fruit, exalting it for its beauty, utility, and taste. Pons argued that the melon, far from being dangerous, was instead remarkable for its therapeutic qualities. See Bamforth, ‘Melons and Wine’, pp. 112-115.

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learned doctors. These advocates emphasized their appreciation of experience and the senses over and above received wisdom. Worthy of note in this regard is Leonardo Giachini (1501-1547), a professor of medicine at the University of Pisa and a noted physician who was one of the founders of the Nuova Academia Medica Fiorentina, a group of doctors who sought to return to the teachings of Galen and purge any Arabic influence from the writings of Hippocrates and Galen. Giachini wrote a Lettera apologetica in difesa e lode del popone (Letter in Defense and Praise of the Melon, 1527) in a style closer to a pamphlet than to a medical treatise. The letter originated as a witty response to an unidentified guest who warned his companions, during a dinner party in Florence, that they should not eat the melons offered. The discussion that ensued did not prevent the other guests from continuing to enjoy the melons on the table, as Giachini points out. Still, he writes, when he received from the unnamed guest a booklet detailing all the well-known negative medical advice about melons, he felt he had to assume the role of the melon’s defender. After reading the tract, he burst out laughing and decided that he needed to write down the truth about them. In the Lettera, the melon is lauded as the king of all fruit because of its sweetness, surpassing even the highly prized peach, fig, and grape. Not only were melons not dangerous, Giachini claimed, they were beneficial – if one follows the teachings of nature and experience and if one trusts the senses of taste and smell. However, he warned his readers, one should enjoy them – and any other food for that matter – in moderation.106 Pietro Nati, a physician from Bologna, seconded Giachini in his equally learned defense of melons. Discussed pragmatically in his sixteenth-century treatise on life in times of plague, the melon, Nati suggests, is no longer poisonous – as it was in Galen’s time – and courtiers regularly consumed it at table. In light of his experience, he explained that the upper classes enjoyed melons every day, in large quantities, both at meals and between meals. His tactic here seems aimed at countering one of the worst accusations against melons – that it was a food of no substance, good only for gluttonous courtiers and by no means a safe part of a healthy and normal upper-class diet.107 An even later text conf irms how the perception of melons had 106 Giachini, Lettera apologetica. The letter – or pamphlet – was printed in Florence by Filippo Giunti in 1600 as an appendix to the Trattato della coltivazione delle viti by Giovan Vettorio Soderini. 107 ‘[…] le quali cose nel vero non si possono già dire de Poponi nostri, conciosia che per esperienza si vegga, mangiarsene nelle tavole de gentil’huomini in gran quantità e continuare le settimane e i mesi interi senza passare mai un giorno che e’ non ne mangino’ ( […] these things that cannot be said to be true of our melons, given that through experience one sees them being

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changed substantially by the end of the sixteenth century in Italy. Massimo Aquilani’s Origine, qualità e spezie de’ poponi e altro (1592) brought together new information on all the fruit of the cucurbits family, with the intent of distinguishing among melons (called poponi in Tuscany) watermelons (cocomeri/angurie), pumpkins (zucche) and cucumbers (cetrioli) which were so similar in nature that they had often been confused in the past.108 In dedicating his little volume to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Aquilani wished that he would at least enjoy the new information ‘if this year you are not able to enjoy greater bounty of that fruit’.109 Such defenses of melons by philosophers and doctors, while perhaps more learned, were nevertheless far less clever and appealing to a broad audience than were the contemporary defenses of melons penned by poets. Verses as well as entire poems undertook a reversal of the medical lore, insisting that the humble melon was a topic worthy of attention and praise. In fact, the melon became a favorite subject of the mid-century ‘paradoxical encomium’, in which the praise of a simple everyday object, food, or even illness – like syphilis – wittily played with and drew upon erotic metaphors, made fun of ancient Greco-Roman and medical culture, and commented on contemporary people and events.110 Poems dedicated to food, as we saw in Chapter One, were among the most common in this large corpus of Bernesque poetry; certainly, in this context, the extensive use of melon imagery in poems written by the followers of the Accademia dei Vignaiuoli founder, Francesco Berni, was no accident.111 These poets were well aware of the dietetic criticism that labeled the melon as dangerous but extremely eaten at the tables of noblemen in large quantities, and they continue to do so for weeks and entire months without ever letting a day pass when they don’t eat them); Nati, ‘Breve discorso’, p. 2. 108 As Aquilani explains at the very beginning of his text, various types of melons, pumpkins, and cucumbers are similar because they all grow in the soil and they have a paper like skin. Originally written in Latin, Aquilani’s book was later translated into Italian by Filippo Valori, the person to whom Giachini, a few years earlier, had dedicated his Lettera. 109 ‘questo mio studio in gratia sua tal qual è, dedico ora à Vostra Eccellenza Illustrissima degnisi ella accettarlo in picciol segno di mia gran divozione e se quest’anno manca gustarsi maggior bontà de tal frutto, gustisi almen di esso questa nuova maggior notizia’ (this study of mine for whatever it’s worth, I dedicate to Your Most Illustrious Excellency in the hope that you will deign to accept it as a small sign of my great devotion and if this year you are not able to enjoy greater bounty of that fruit, at least you will be able to enjoy this new information); Aquilani, Origine qualità e spezie, fols. 3-4. 110 On sixteenth-century Italian erotic poetry, see Marzo, Studi sulla poesia erotica, and Longhi, Lusus, pp. 57-94. 111 The Accademia dei Vignaiuoli originated in 1532 from a group of intellectuals and poets earlier gathered in the Accademia Romana, first founded by Pomponio Leto in the fifteenth century. On the Accademia and Francesco Berni, see Chapter Three.

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desirable, and engaged with such contradictions to the full in their literary play. The resulting poems – often clever and displaying the impressive knowledge of their authors – poked fun at the corpus of medical-dietetic literature that was heavily based on ancient auctoritates, especially Galen and Hippocrates, whose opinions, no matter how contrary to contemporary practice or to straightforward everyday understanding, were repeated tirelessly by one Renaissance writer after another. Giovan Francesco Grazzini (1503-1584) – a renowned herbalist and pharmacist in Florence who also happened to be a notable playwright, poet, and the editor of famous Canti Carnascialeschi – composed two long capitoli on melons. In the first ‘In lode de’ poponi’, he defies doctors’ opinions and dietaries’ commonplaces on the dangers of eating melons, praising them for their ability to heal every illness and, as Montaigne later would, denouncing the evil malice of doctors who sought to deny them to the sick. In fact, Grazzini suggests, malicious doctors knew full well the virtue of the melon The first thing it does is moistens the lungs / which never become weak in those who eat it / and provokes urine in people / With those who eat melon, the doctor earns little / because it is a medicine that empties, purges, cleanses, cleans and seals.112

In a second poem, Grazzini grants melons first place over pears, peaches, and plums (all usually deemed superior luxury foods), insisting on the healthy nature of the melon and, again, ironically, on the ‘maliciousness’ of doctors who, when treating a sick person immediately denied melons to the sufferer.113 Grazzini adds a social stricture to his ironic but telling praise, however: melons are so good, he states, that peasants should not have the right to eat them. Laborers, it seems, had to stick to their beans and grains.114 Another Bernesque poet, Antonio Negrisoli, wrote a ‘Capitolo 112 ‘La prima cosa, egli umetta il polmone, / che mai non imbolsisce chi ne mangia / e provoca ‘orina alle persone. / Con chi mangia il poppone, poco guadagna il medico’ / perch’esso è medicina, che vota, purga, netta, sana e stagna’ ‘In lode de’poponi’, in Grazzini, Rime, pp. 92-96, esp. p. 94. 113 ‘Non potea far natura il maggior dono, / ché di qual più rea sorte mal si sia, / atti e sufficienti a guarir sono; / ma la malizia de’ medici ria, / la prima cosa che fa all’ammalato, leva il popon che sanar lo potria’ (Nature could not give a greater gift / than of these which are prepared and sufficient / to cure any kind of ill that arises / but the maliciousness of doctors takes over / the first thing they do to a sick person is take away the melon that could heal them); ‘In lode de’ poponi’, vv. 43-48, in Grazzini, Le rime burlesche, pp. 534-538. 114 ‘E s’io fussi gran principe, o Signore / fra gli altri che ci son quasi divini / del mondo vorrei trarre un grave errore; / e ne’ lontani paesi e ne’ vicini / farei che, sotto pena della testa, non mangiassin poponi i contadini’ (And if I were a great prince, o Lord / among those who are

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delle laudi del poppone’ (Chapter on the Praises of Melon) that also reversed traditional medical opinions, affirming that melon grants every man great virtue / it nourishes and comforts the stomach, / refreshes the liver and frees the belly, although one must not forget to accompany it with a glass of good wine.115

The final mention suggesting accompanying melon with a glass of wine was an actual advice that was circulated in many medical sources at the time and that Negrisoli seems willing to acknowledge. Suggestively, Giovan Battista Croce, an agronomist who wrote a treatise on wines (Della eccellenza e diversità de i vini che nella montagna di Torino si fanno e del modo di farli Turin, 1606) proposed his own recipe for a wine called ‘vino melon’, to be enjoyed in the summer. This obviously was a time when melons were particularly popular, and he argued that the cold humors of the fruit needed to be tempered by a ‘hot’ wine like his that was made more powerful by a special procedure explained and carefully detailed in his book.116 Melons, like all cucurbits that mature fast and decay easily, had long been symbols of abundance and fertility, closely associated with the pagan traditions of Priapus, the god of orchards and harvest. As we will see in Chapter Three, melons, like peaches, were moreover often associated with human bottoms and thus, in turn, with sodomy because of their shape. This association offered many opportunities for Bernesque poets to play with the sexual innuendos of both fruits – an opportunity that still life artists also took full advantage of, even though their conceits are often overlooked by innocent modern observers. Needless to say, critics are seldom so naïve.117 Indeed, after describing a detail of a painting that presented a gourd fashioned as a phallus in the act of entering an open, over-ripe fig, nearly divine / in this world, I would like to resolve a grave ill / in places near and far / I would make it so that peasants could not eat melons on pain of death); ‘In lode de’ poponi’, vv. 103-108, in Grazzini, Le rime burlesche, pp. 534-538. 115 ‘Con gran virtù il Poppone ogn’ huomo afferra / lo stomaco nudrisse, e lo conforta, / e’l fegato rinfresca, e’l ventre sferra / Alternando il boccon sempre la scorta / d’un bicchier di buon vino ei se ne chiede’; ‘Capitolo delle laudi del Poppone al Signor Giuseppe Malatesta’. See ‘Le terze Rime di Antonio Mario Negrisoli ferrarese’, in Delle Rime Piacevoli del Borgogna, fols. 48r/50v. The poem was written before 1550. Negrisoli, a poet from Ferrara, died in 1553. 116 On this see Allen J. Grieco, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Wines’ in Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in Renaissance Italy, pp. 136-137. 117 According to Norrman and Haarberg, Nature and Language, all cucurbits are connected with sex: ‘Since cucurbits grow so fast and die so easily […] they are symbolic in that they stand for an acceleration of the life cycle’; Norrman and Haarberg, Nature and Language, p. 15. Quoted

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Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), complimented the painter Giovanni da Udine’s capriccio, saying it was expressed with so much grace that nothing more could be said.118 Vasari’s comment suggests that the erotic fruit metaphor was obvious to all and did not generate much scandal.119 Around 1545, Agnolo Bronzino designed, for Cosimo de’ Medici, a border for a series of tapestries representing the Meeting of Joseph and His Father, in which gourds and melons join together to create an inventive and sensual decoration. In fact, art historians have recognized in a number of recent studies how the sensual still life, which included depictions of fruits such as melons elicited not only the pleasures of eating but also those of the erotic.120 As we shall see in the next chapter, analogies in art and poetry between fruit and sex acts enjoyed great success throughout the sixteenth century, reaching their apotheosis in the work of Caravaggio at the beginning of the following century. In sum, by the end of the sixteenth century, melons had come a long way – even offering opportunities for clever allusions to pleasure and sexuality in works of art and literature: the medieval medical propaganda that railed against them perished rather peacefully, for the large part, in its battle with taste and the pleasures of the senses. Paul Freedman advances the hypothesis that the fear of eating melons might have flourished precisely because they were so delectable and sweet.121 As such a sought-after delicacy, after all, melons might have induced people to eat too many of them and become ill – not to mention fall into the sin of gluttony. Be that as it may, it seems clear that the fear of eating melons declined when everyday experience and the pleasure of eating them overcame the Renaissance fascination with received classical knowledge. In a way, we might say that the pleasures of the in Van Lates, ‘Caravaggio in the Garden of Priapus’, p. 71. See Van Lates’s article for an extensive discussion of cucurbits in Renaissance painting. 118 ‘Sopra la f igura d’un Mercurio che vola ha f into per Priapo una zucca, attraversata da vilucchi, che ha per testicoli due petronciani, e vicino al fiore di quella ha finto una ciocca di fichi brugiotti grossi dentro a uno de’ quali, aperto e troppo fatto, entra la punta della zucca col fiore; il quale capriccio è espresso con tanta grazia, che più non si può alcuno imaginare’ Vasari, ‘Giovanni da Udine’, p. 558; see also this volume, Chapter Three, p. 150, footnote 2. 119 According to the International Lexicon of Aesthetics, ‘capriccio’ (free fantasy, whim) is a polysemic word that became a significant term of art-theoretical vocabulary between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘It describes an artist’s (and poet’s) attitude to be free from moral and aesthetic rules’. The term is also used by Francesco Berni, Pietro Aretino, and Antonfrancesco Doni. See ‘Capriccio’ by Campione in International Lexicon of Aesthetics. 120 See Van Lates, ‘Caravaggio in the Garden of Priapus’; Varriano, Taste and Temptations; Kulbrandstad Walker, ‘Appetites’; Spike, Italian Still-Life Paintings. 121 ‘Melons and other raw fruit or large eels such as lampreys were regarded as dangerous in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, even if (or perhaps because) delectable’; Freedman, Introduction to Food, p. 12.

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senses and the lessons of taste were overcoming the apparent certainties of the ancients and of traditional taboos. The celebrated scalco (steward) and cook Panunto’s La singolare dottrina (1560) dedicates a chapter to melons and their properties, weaving together the two contentious topics that have framed our discussion, asserting forcefully that melons are the ‘most excellent food when it pertains to taste but also, in part, in terms of medicine’.122 After relating the usual medical criticism of melons, Panunto mischievously adds that ‘no one (of them, doctors) is following their own advice’.123 And so it was that slowly but surely melons earned a place on aristocratic and common tables, becoming a favorite subject of Bernesque poets and of artists, who contributed a great deal to the remaking of the melon’s reputation and to a shift in contemporary anxieties and expectations. Melons tested the disciplining proscription that considered food to be primarily a medicine or a danger for the body; and they eventually came to win the day, becoming increasingly visible, popular, and loved. As the century wore on, this maligned fruit drew more attention to itself in visual and written form, beginning with a laudatory illustration in Christoforo da Messisbugo’s Banchetti124 and then found glorified in many paintings in aristocratic villas and poems as well as treatises composed in defense and in honor of the sweet fruit. As Grazzini states, the popone was worth more than gold and was divine among fruits. Only the bitter reproving concerns of moralists and would-be disciplinarians fought a lonely rear-guard battle against the sweet pleasures of the melon, which, despite their victory, played a largely unrecognized role in the food wars of the day.

Pork, the lowly meat The Allegoria d’autunno (Allegory of Autumn) by Niccolò Frangipani,125 a follower of Titian, is a remarkable painting, now held by the Museo Civico in Udine, which displays a lascivious satyr who sticks one finger into a 122 ‘dico adunque del melone come del più eccellente cibo che si possa presentare quanto al Gusto, et anco in parte quanto alla Medecina’; Romoli, La singolare dottrina, fol. 318v (9.143). 123 ‘questo asseriscono I medici, ma niuno è che l’osservi’; Romoli, La singolare dottrina, fol. 318v (9.143). 124 ‘Cookbooks were adorned with courtiers offering melons for princely adulation’; Albala, Eating Right, p. 13, referring to Christoforo da Messisbugo, Banchetti (1549) frontispiece. Actually, the illustration is to be found at the end of the beginning section ‘Memoriale per un apparecchio generale’. 125 Image on the cover of this volume.

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split melon and, with his other hand, grasps a sausage on top of a table full of other autumn fruit. Next to him, a very feminine-looking young man is dreaming, presumably of the erotic pleasures the food evokes.126 Sausages – and particularly pork sausages – joined melons on the list of foods seen as appealing to taste but otherwise problematic – at least according to most numerous early modern doctors and dietaries – because they were heavy, moist, fatty, and unsuited to a delicate stomach. Humoral physiology once again dictated that the flesh of a hot and humid animal is beneficial only to a person with a cold temperament who needed those qualities to temper their complexion – meaning that people with predominantly moist and hot humors should avoid pork. By the Middle Ages, as we have seen, all quadrupeds occupied a questionable position on the Great Chain of Being. They were not of the air, like birds, nor of the earth; instead, they lay somewhere in between. Among the quadrupeds, pigs occupied one of the lowest positions.127 Like melons, then, pigs and their edible meat had a hybrid status: it was considered a lowly meat difficult to digest, good only for peasants and laborers. Nonetheless, in everyday life in Renaissance Italy, eating pork was very common especially because pigs bred easily, thrived in both urban and rural settings, and offered a good source of protein at a relatively affordable price. Thus it is generally agreed that pork had an important place in the meat consumption of the time, but significantly this was not the case for all social classes.128 The upper classes, avid consumers of several types of meat, did not have an economic motive to rely as heavily on pork as did the poor and tended to ignore it as common fare. As we see depicted in literary sources such as letters to and from Bianca Maria Visconti, in the mid- to late fifteenth century at the Milan court, deer and wild boar were occasionally eaten but partridges, peacocks, hare, quail, and guinea fowl were avidly consumed.129 Although pork and veal were consumed in Milan as well as at the courts of Ferrara and Mantua, it appears that there was ‘less interest in writing about veal or pork’ in sources such as letters from Bianca Visconti and Isabella d’ Este (with the exception of salami and mortadella); and thus it seems likely that veal and pork represented a staple, easily available, and not a culinary novelty.130 Salted pork, which could be preserved for longer periods, was in 126 See Varriano, Tastes and Temptations, pp. 120-121. 127 Grieco, ‘Food and Social Classes’, p. 311. 128 Montanari and Capatti in La cucina italiana maintain that pork was ‘la principale fonte di approvigionamento carneo, a tutti i livelli sociali’; p. 76. 129 McIver, Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy, pp. 81-82. 130 Regarding Isabella d’Este’s interest in gastronomical novelties, see Chapter Four.

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contrast the main source of meat for the lower classes. The demographic changes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – with periods of plague and famine alternating with times of population recovery, along with more efficient agricultural production and an increase in the size and number of urban centers – brought significant changes to this earlier consumption pattern. Fresh beef and veal, for wealthier inhabitants of cities, progressively became the most exclusive meats, while poorer urban inhabitants adopted fresh mutton as a rare but not too expensive alternative to salted pork – even as the latter remained a main staple for them and for rural peasants.131 The negative stigma of pork consumption thus garnered, over time, a social dimension that associated it with members of the lower classes, who were its primary and most visible consumers. Images of pigs in medieval bestiaries showed the animals wallowing in mud, sucking up filth, and voraciously eating anything and everything, food or otherwise. Unfortunately for the reputation of the pig, this was the type of behavior that literature most often echoed.132 Moreover, contemporary writers frequently associated pigs and their perceived negative characteristics with the human qualities of those who ate pork, which reinforced prejudices, especially against the poor and uncultured. ‘You are what you eat’ is not a new idea when it comes to pork. In the mock epic poem Baldus, written in macheronico (Macaronic Latin) by the Benedictine monk Teofilo Folengo and first published in 1517 (the same year as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso), the character of Guido equates human sinners to different types of beasts noted for their flaws: not surprisingly, pigs were his chosen image to represent sudiceria – filthiness.133 A second negative characteristic was the doubtful usefulness of pigs, at least when they were alive: Ariosto’s comedy Il negromante (The Necromancer, 1520) includes a monologue about men who could be exploited as if they were animals, pointing to the low esteem in which pigs and lower class people were held in contemporary society.134 Indeed, the Negromante lists several animals based on their utility or lack of thereof: the pig was first in line, not at all useful, in his opinion, except 131 Montanari, La fame e l’abbondanza, pp. 96-97. 132 Several novelle, from Boccaccio (e.g., ‘Calandrino e il porco’) to Sacchetti, related the importance of pork for sustenance, but also the negative perception of pigs as filthy and gross animals. For instance, see Sacchetti novelle LXX, CII, CXLVI, CCXIV. 133 ‘Nonne canes sumus invidia? Grassedine porci?’ (Aren’t we similar to dogs for envy, pigs for filthiness?); Folengo, Baldus, II, p. 738 (xviii.211). 134 ‘Sono alcuni animali, de i quali utile altro non puoi aver che di mangiarteli, come il porco’ (There are some animals that have no use other than to be eaten, like the pig); Ariosto, Il negromante, II. ii.

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in the form of pork – dead and prepared as a food for human consumption. This idea was not new: in a famous fifteenth-century facezia on the sermon of Don Lupo, Piovano Arlotto declared that there is an animal that ‘is good dead and not alive, and that is the pig’.135 The poet Francesco Berni jokingly took up this commonplace idea in his anti-humanist dialogue Dialogo contra i poeti (1526), adding a rather unusual comparison between poets and pigs: ‘Poets are like pigs; I may like them, but not unless they are dead’.136 In sum, pigs were linked to many negative characteristics; it is no surprise, then, to find that early modern doctors and dietaries despised pork not just for medical reasons, attributing to it all sorts of evils that could compromise a person’s health – unless, of course, they were a peasant working in the fields: filthy, lacking in grace, resembling a pig, and thus easily able to digest pork. Another well-known and abhorred attribute of pigs was their insatiable voracity. Dietary literature in general presented pigs as gluttonous and advised readers not to eat these animals’ fatty meat lest they develop sloppy manners and become gluttons themselves.137 It is once again worth noting the circularity here: the pig’s perceived characteristics reflected and, when eaten as pork, contributed to human characteristics. This vision not only has a moral dimension but also implies a belief in the direct transfer of qualitative characteristics from a food to the person who consumed it: if one eats the meat of a pig, one will become one. The belief in the doctrine of signatures, popularized by Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541) in the sixteenth century, likely played a role in such associations. According to this theory, all plants and animals had a purpose or a virtue/vice inscribed precisely in their shape, appearance, and humoral contents. These transferrable, ‘essential’ characteristics could make those who ate something become similar to what they consumed,138 so that eating pork could result in a pig-like appearance and in pig-like behavior on the part of the human eater. The physician and natural philosopher Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535? -1615), was thus saying little that was not already 135 ‘E’ sono, tra gli altri animali, quattro che hanno questa virtù e propietà, uno è buono vivo e non morto, e questo è l’asino; l’altro è buono morto e non vivo, e questo è il porco’; Arlotto, Motti e facezie, Facezia LXVI ‘Della Predica di Don Lupo’. 136 ‘Li poeti sono come li porci; se pur mi piaceno, non mi piaceno se non morti’; Berni, ‘Dialogo contra i poeti’, pp. 345-346. 137 Albala, Eating Right, p. 168. See Platina, On Right Pleasure, pp. 162-163. Nonetheless, we should not overlook the fact that he gives a few detailed recipes for sausages, all derived from his primary gastronomical source, Martino de Rossi. 138 ‘Nature endows everything, with the form which is also the essence, and thus the form reveals the essence’; Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, pp. 34-35.

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widely believed when he argued in his De humana Physiognomonia Libri III (1586) that a man with porcine features was often dirty, gluttonous, and stupid – in sum like a pig.139 As far as the pig itself was concerned, matters were even more complex. The Galenic revival of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in contrast to the more traditional medieval view of pork, actually promoted it as nutritious and easy to digest, while still reserving it primarily for lower-class workers involved in physical labor.140 In fact, for all its undesirable characteristics, pork began to be considered nourishing and healthful by followers of Galen, an idea that gained wide circulation in dietaries and medical treatises. There, instead of replacing the traditional unfavorable description of pigs, however, its lower-class associations came to be significantly reinforced, adding to the unsavory mix that strengthened its negative social associations. This troubling panoply of negative medical, social, and physiological stereotypes that surrounded pork reached into comic and burlesque literature, where it merged with carnivalesque passion for fatty meat and gastronomical excess. In literary and visual sources, which alternate between deprecatory and laudatory, the icon of the pig as the Carnival animal and as the incarnation of fat and gluttony flourished, along with the medical recognition that it could be a healthy meat for some.141 It is evident that the negative social connotation of pork remained a driving force behind doctors’ and dietaries’ continued support of it as a fare both nutritious and healthful for peasants while advising against it for higher classes. A good early example of this distinction appears in the writings of the father of neo-Platonic Renaissance philosophy, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). In his treatise De vita libri tres (1489), he recommends the eating 139 ‘Quei ch’hanno la bocca prominente, et han le labbra rotonde e grosse, rovesciate fuori, sono di opre e di costumi porcini […] la bocca uscita fuori, rotonda e rovesciata, con le labbra grosse, come se fusse l’estremità inchinata, dimostra sporco, goloso, stolto, e che quasi sia per divenir epilettico’ (Those who have a prominent mouth and have round and full lips that are protruding outward are in their work and habits porcine […] one who has a large, protruding mouth, with big lips as though the extremities were hanging loose, reveals he is dirty, gluttonous, stupid, and nearly epileptic); Della Porta, Della fisionomia dell’uomo, p. 199. 140 Albala, Eating Right, p. 252. The most important dietary book for the sixteenth century is Pisanelli, Trattato de la natura de’ cibi, which repeats traditional lore regarding pork, adding that it is nutritious because it is similar to human flesh (pp. 12-13). 141 Even thoughtful literary dialogues such as that of Moderata Fonte (1555-1592), Il merito delle donne (1600), half-jokingly extoll the acquisition of a pig as a much better deal for a woman than getting married, losing her dowry, and becoming a slave to her husband. As Leonora states very clearly in her conversation with the other women, it would have been better for them to buy a ‘nice pig’ for themselves every Carnival, ‘which would fatten them up and keep them in grease rather than keeping them in grief’; Fonte, The Worth of Women, translated by Cox, p. 114.

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of pork for laborers because they already had pig-like physical features.142 At the same time, Ficino admitted that there was a way to overcome the lowliness of pork by marinating it with salt, cloves, and coriander seeds before cooking it.143 Clearly, just as we saw occur with cabbage, seasoning pork with expensive and luxury spices could transform it into a valuable food that made it suitable for the upper classes – and, in this form, largely beyond the reach of the lower classes, almost as if dressing the pig expensively ‘made the man’, just as it did in the case of dressing actual men. Well dressed and elevated in status, pork in this era saw medical proscriptions losing ground, perhaps to cooking practices and to the emerging gastronomical culture of taste – and learning – leading even humble pig meat to find a place on aristocratic tables. In this vein, a recipe book by Christoforo da Messisbugo (late 1400s-1548), steward at the Este court in Ferrara, shows how ‘dressing up’ pork and sausages elevated these meats above their more negative common status as foods suitable only for rural or poor people. In his Banchetti, composizioni di vivande et apparecchio generale (1549) there appears a recipe for the famous salama da sugo that is still a renowned specialty of the city of Ferrara today. Messisbugo describes how less noble cuts of pork were mixed together with expensive spices such as cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon to create a dish that the Este family appreciated greatly. Apparently, the salama was a favorite at wedding banquets because of the reputed aphrodisiacal quality of its spicy sauce.144 One revealing testimonial regarding the diffusion of pork in everyday life and the conflicting advice of preventive medicine and dietaries appears in Pontormo’s Libro mio. As we have seen, his desire to eat tasty foods and his appetite for them remained a major concern throughout the work, despite attempts to control his dietary habits. In his quotidian entries, we see that pork was one of his most common meals: a dish of ‘roasted pork’ in spring 1554; ‘blood sausages and pork’, ‘roast pork loin’ [arista], and ‘pork boiled in wine’ in winter 1555 are just a few examples.145 Reading Pontormo’s entries, 142 See Kulbrandstad Walker, ‘Appetites’, p. 117. ‘Pork is best, therefore, for bodies which are pig-like, as are those of rustics and hardy men’; Ficino, Three Books on Life, vol. 2, p. 181. 143 Ficino, Three Books on Life, vol. 2, p. 181. 144 According to Laura Malinverni: ‘La definizione “da sugo” relativo alla salama si riferisce proprio al sugo, piccante e squisito, che l’insaccato libera durante la cottura e che poi viene servito a parte, a cui venivano attribuite virtù afrodisiache: per questo motivo, era uno dei piatti principali serviti nei banchetti nuziali’; See Malinverni, ‘i-salumi-alla-corte-estense-e-cristoforo-messisbugo’. 145 Pontormo Diario: ‘Domenica sera cenai porco arrosto’, p. 19; ‘migliaci e fegatelli e ‘l porco’, p. 21; ‘Lunedì sera cenai once 14 di pane, arista’, p. 21; ‘mangiai porco lesso nel vino’, p. 21.

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one wonders about this discrepancy between the medical advice with which he was familiar – he reminds himself at the beginning of his Libro not to eat pork – and his actual dietary practice. Was this simply because pork was nutritious and not too expensive? Perhaps, as well, food culture had changed and following one’s personal tastes could more readily trump concerns, even in someone so concerned – and educated – about his health. I would suggest that we have, in Pontormo’s albeit conflicted account, an early Italian example of Flandrin’s hypothesis that the link between medicine and cuisine at the end of the sixteenth century was becoming less important and replaced by more attention and credence given to taste, gastronomic pleasure and economic accessibility. Intriguingly, some authors – especially those trying to dignify pork – recycled Galen’s De alimentorum facultatibus, where he argued – troublingly – that pork was pleasurable because it was similar to human flesh. This claim is echoed in the sixteenth-century treatise La singolare dottrina by the steward Domenico Romoli: ‘In its taste as well as its odor, it seems that the meat of pork has a peculiar unity and likeness with the human body, as some reported, who tasted human flesh while not knowing it’.146 Not everyone agreed, but the similarity was commonly affirmed in medical treatises and some literary works. Anton Francesco Grazzini, in his playful prose commentary on his own poem on sausages, while explaining why the domesticated pig was the most delicious animal to eat, argued that pork was delicious because it was so close in taste to that of human flesh – which, he pointed out, was the best meat that existed. Fleshing out his ghoulish humor with a series of gruesome stories about cannibalism, that were definitely not new, he first recounts the tale of a Jewish woman who was dying of hunger. When she finally decides to kill and roast her young son, Grazzini writes, she ends up attracting all of her neighbors with the delicious smell of his roasting flesh, which the house’s doors and windows could not contain. A second tale involves an innkeeper near Rome who regularly murdered a few of his guests to make excellent meatballs and sausages with their shoulders and limbs.147 Supporting his arguments with the less 146 ‘cosi nel gusto come nello odore par che habbiano una peculiar unione e fratellanza col corpo umano si come da alcuni si è inteso che per non sapere hanno gustato la carne dell’huomo’; see Chapter Two (Delle carne de gli animali che si mangiano) of Groppetio, Un breve e notabile trattato, fols. 362-363. This little thirty-two-page booklet is appended at the end of La singolare dottrina. For a very similar affirmation, see Sacchetto, Galeno Della natura e vertù di cibi, fol. 68 147 ‘e che sia el vero ne fa fede quella femmina ebrea, la quale, arrabbiando per la fame, arrostiva un suo picciolo figliuolo, del quale venne tanto e sì buono odore che, ben che l’havesse serrato gli usci e le finestre e nel mezzo fussi della casa, si sentì per la contrada, onde le genti,

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macabre authority of physicians and anatomists, Grazzini pointed out the similarity of internal organs between pigs and humans as the main proof of the closeness of their taste.148 Accusations that Jews cannibalized their victims, especially in rituals involving Christian children, and secretly ate pork, were quite common in contemporary European literature; it is thus unsurprising to see Grazzini make use of such demeaning popular lore. Michele Savonarola, the Este family’s physician, notes in his fifteenth century Libreto – in a somewhat less disparaging vein – that a Jew who had converted to Christianity tasted prosciutto for the f irst time and found it to be excellent.149 By the late sixteenth century, reflections on this transgressive idea associated with the consumption of pork appeared in different genres, including comic theater. In a sixteenth-century Florentine convent play, the Jewish cook and innkeeper Farfuglia had the specific task of preparing enticing dishes of pork with which to torture an old Jew named Eleazzaro.150 Farfuglia explains to Eleazzaro’s servant that he already offers pork in all its versions in his osteria because that is what the many Jews he serves demand. He then explains that if his master were to eat as much pork as the other Jews whom Farfuglia serves, when Eleazzaro dies ‘there will not be any man left who is not porkified’ (‘non ci rimarrà più homo che non si imporchetta’).151 meravigliandosi, là trassero a naso come i bracchi e, non meno affamate di lei, gliele aiutorno fornire. Questa verità manifesta ancora quell’oste vicino a Roma che haveva fama di far sì delicate polpette, cotal che non si diceva altro per tutta la cristianità, e questo veniva perch’egli assassinava et ammazzava spesso qualchuno col quale pensasse far buono bottino, e delle spalle poi e delle coscie ne faceva le saporite et ottime polpette’; Grazzini, ‘Comento di Maestro’, p. 248. 148 ‘Hora adunque, sendo di tutti gli animali il porco piu simile all’huomo, perciò che, come dicono i notomisti et i cerusici, i porci dentro stanno a punto a punto come gli huomini et in un medesimo modo hanno lo stomaco, il fegato, la milza’ (Now then, the pig being the most similar to man of all the animals, it is for this reason, as anatomists and physicians say, that pigs are point by point just like men and in the same way have a stomach, a liver, a spleen); Grazzini, ‘Comento di Maestro’, p. 248. Accordingly, he recommended that the pig be domesticated. 149 ‘E qui non voglio passare la resposta del zudio facto Christiano in Candia che cuossì gustando de quelli presuti ne le sue prime nuoze disse, se havesse creduto la carne del porco esser cuossì buona, seria batizato zà diese anni avanti’ (And here I don’t want to forget the story of the Jew who became a Christian in Crete and who, tasting those hams at his wedding, said that if he had known that pork meat was so good he would have been baptized ten years earlier); Savonarola, Libreto de tute, pp. 110-111. 150 The comedy was first uncovered by Elissa Weaver in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. See Weaver, Convent Theater, p. 134. La tragedia di Eleazzaro ebreo, a prose play in five acts, belonged to Suor Maria Grazia Centelli (1518/9-1602), a nun at the Dominican convent of San Vincenzo in Prato. According to Weaver, Centelli may have written it, perhaps when she was a novice. 151 Centelli, Tragedia di Eleazzaro ebreo, fol. 20r (III.ii); ‘[…] se egli ne mangia per essere quella persona di autorità e di credito che è in questa terra, immaginatevi che non ci rimarra piu homo

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In addition to its marking of class, therefore, pork marked religious identity and played a significant role in the efforts of the Counter-Reformation Church to separate Christians from Jews. Whatever this foodstuff’s more specific connotations, one continuous unifying element runs through many early modern texts on pigs and pork: the animal and its meat are both intertwined with conceptions of and prejudices concerning human nature, religious beliefs, and what it means to be human.152 Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, the humble pig was at the center of some of the most important controversies and debates of the day. Certainly culture, more than anything else, shaped the Renaissance perception of the pig as an animal and as meat. This complex interweaving of ideas regarding pigs, diet, medicine, philosophy, social roles, and religious and cultural identities – as well as human identity itself – functioned quite creatively across different literary genres, and especially in Bernesque poetry.153

The triumph of the sausage154 Perhaps in part because of its negative reputation, the humble but rich and flavorful pork sausage became a favorite icon of fifteenth and sixteenthcentury carnivalesque representations, from poetry to paintings, cheap prints, and engravings – where it came to symbolize abundance and sexual license along with lower class taste, behavior and immorality.155 Turning to prose, in sixteenth-century comedies pork in general was the preferred food of lower-class characters, especially famished servants, and was often greedily sought by them in the form of an enticing juicy sausage. The fat dripping from sausages promised to satisfy the perennial hunger of these archetypical characters. However, as the meat par excellence of Carnival, the world of Cuccagna, and paradisiacal abundance, pork was also one of che non si imporchetta io intendo’ (my emphasis). ‘The implication is that all Jews but Eleazzaro are like pigs’; Weaver, Convent Theater, p. 139, footnote 34. 152 The classic study is the book by Claudine Fabre-Vassas, La bête singulière. 153 Almost a century later, in 1627, Benedetto Buonmattei wrote a cicalata (a playful poem) for his entrance into the Crusca Academy; intriguingly, the title was Cicalata sopra la somiglianza tra il popone e il porco (The poem playfully considered the similarity between melon and pork). 154 This is a slightly revised version of a section from Giannetti, ‘The Sausage Wars’, pp. 166-172. 155 Albala, Eating Right, pp. 180-181. On print representations of sausages and salami as part of ‘early Renaissance erotic humor’, see Matthews-Grieco, ‘Satyrs and Sausages’.

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the preferred staple themes of sixteenth-century Bernesque poetry, where ‘low’ topics (like pork sausages) came to be assigned a higher status, in this sense serving a wider swath of social groups, though of course the genre was learned – written by erudite men for a well-read audience. Certainly, metaphorical uses of the term salsiccia (sausage) were not new. Many tales in Giovanni Sercambi’s popular Novelliere, fifteenth-century carnival songs, and humorous and popular print allegories of Carnival associated the consumption of meat and sausages in particular with the pleasures of the senses, especially sexual pleasures. In one novella a libidinous widow living with her brother – who had not arranged to marry her after the death of her husband – realized one day that there was a similarity between the sausages her brother was bringing home for dinner and the instrument with which her late husband had made her happy. This led her to satisfy ‘the desire she had for a man’,156 using those same sausages to sate her own pleasure and consuming them little by little until she was discovered by her brother. In Sercambi’s humorous novella there is no satirical attack against the widow – who is described as young and naturally deprived of sexual pleasure. A similar sexual innuendo is found in a popular sixteenth-century print, where an elderly lower-class woman is selling a sausage during Carnival, just before the time of Lent when both meat and sexual intercourse will have to be momentarily abstained from. Not all references to the phallic pleasures of pork were merely laughing, in the satirical prints and grotesque portraits studied by Matthews-Grieco, old peasant women desirous of sausages are more typically the object of (often cruel) satire. Sausage sex, in sum, could elicit a mere smile or withering misogynistic disdain in the guise of clever humor, as well as everything in between. Even with their negative medical and social reputation, however, sausages had had their partisans in the gastronomical world for at least two centuries.157 The contradiction is evident: Platina provided a general, and expected, warning against pork at the beginning of Book VI (‘you will find pork not healthful whatever way you cook it’) but then offered three recipes for sausages, all derived from Maestro Martino: pork liver sausages, blood

156 The widow Orsarella tells her brother: ‘O Matteosso, pensi tu che io non abbia desiderio dell’uomo come la donna tua?’ Sercambi, Il Novelliere, vol. 2, pp. 57-60 (‘De vidua libidinosa’), esp. p. 60. 157 For instance, in the second half of the sixteenth century, Pisanelli advised eating sausages and salumi in moderation, recognizing in them a number of positive characteristics, such as the reawakening of appetite and the making of drinking more pleasurable. Pisanelli, Trattato della natura de’ cibi, fol. 13.

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sausages, and the range of sausages known as Lucanica.158 Platina was more interested in informing his readers about how to cook and smoke pork than in discussing its social suitability (or lack of same), although he was clearly aware of arguments based on such concerns. For example, his book includes an elaborate recipe for roast piglet stuffed with a mixture of herbs, garlic, cheese, ground pepper, and beaten eggs, cooked slowly over a grill. At the end of the tempting recipe, however, he added the expected medical advice: the roast piglet ‘is of poor and little nourishment, digests slowly and harms the stomach, head, eyes, and liver’.159 For readers of Platina, then, it might appear that roast piglet is not really a fare suitable for anyone, especially the higher classes, and yet his detailed recipe and the luxurious ingredients used suggested that the social and medical concerns regarding pork were already losing ground to the cooking practices of courts and an emerging gastronomical culture.160 Taste and pleasure were clearly winning battles for the once humble sausage, which now was adored even at the tables of noble weddings, hobnobbing with birds, wild game, and the elites of Italy. The salsiccia, fresh and cured, also took center stage a little before midcentury among a group of bawdy poems on fruit, vegetables, and other humble foods, authored by three of the most representative poets writing in the Bernesque style: Anton Francesco Grazzini, Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1543), and Mattio Franzesi (c. 1500-c. 1555). Firenzuola composed a canzone, and Grazzini and Franzesi capitoli to praise the pork sausage for its alimentary and sexual properties as well as to demonstrate its social primacy in comparison to supposedly superior foods such as pheasants and capons. As if they were exchanged as part of a philosophical debate, these poems regularly elicited long, scholarly and often obscene prose commentaries, in which the erotic allusions of their verses were clearly associated with the consumption of meat during Carnival, suggesting the literal consumption of both carne as meat and carne as flesh of a more sexual variety.161 It is noteworthy to observe how literature and its imaginary built upon the 158 ‘Suillam carnem quoquo modo coxeris insalubrem invenies’. Platina, On Right Pleasure, pp. 264-265. ‘Esicium ex lecore’ (Liver Sausage); ‘Farcimina’ (Blood sausages); ‘Lucanicae’ (Lucanian sausage); Platina, On Right Pleasure, pp. 280-283. 159 ‘Male hoc et parum alit, tarde concoquitur, stomacho capiti oculis atque hepati nocet, oppilationes facit, calculum creat, pituitam auget’; Platina, On Right Pleasure, pp. 276-277. 160 For instance, Aretino, in his comedy Il Filosofo, summarizes this new ambivalence about pork with his character Radicchio’s resolute affirmation that ‘non aguzzan l’appetito i bianchi mangiari, né le quaglie col zuccaro e acqua rosa, ma le bragiole e le salsiccie sì’ (neither blancmange nor quails with sugar and rose water sharpen the appetite, but pork chops and sausages, yes); Aretino, Il Filosofo, p. 509 (III, xv). 161 See the section ‘Sausages and Salami’ in Matthews-Grieco, ‘Satyrs and Sausages’, pp. 38-41.

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contradictory models of medical and gastronomical culture to produce a more complex vision that allowed considerable room for ambivalence. The ‘Canzone del Firenzuola in lode della salsiccia’, written between 1534 and 1538 by the Florentine poet and dramatist,162 boasts that its author was the first to write in praise of the sausage while playing on the double erotic sense of its phallic shape: ‘Since no fanciful poet / has dared yet / to fill his throat [sate his gluttony] / with sausage’.163 Firenzuola concludes with an invocation: Poem, go to those poets in Florence / and reveal the secrets / of sausage, and tell them that in all the land / this food is more perfect than any other.164

Probably written in Rome while Firenzuola was a member of the academy known as the Virtuosi, the poem was followed by an ironic prose commentary signed by a mysterious Grappa.165 The canzone recognizes its affiliation with the Bernesque poets but humorously affirms that they deserve only a herb crown (rather than the laurel reserved for the best poets) because they praised the oven, figs, and chestnuts but failed to praise the sausage, ‘the most perfect food’.166 The pork sausage produced in Bologna was presented by Firenzuola as a food worthy of poets and also for rich priests and lords, learned men and beautiful women. He argued, in fact, that sausage had a better reputation than the highest priced meat of the time – veal. Not only did his poem praise this culinary specialty, it cleverly blended sexual innuendo with a gastronomical discussion on how to make the sausage. In the Bernesque 162 See Agnolo Firenzuola, ‘Canzone’, pp. 313-315. All references to this poem are to verses from the modern edition cited in bibliography. 163 ‘poi ch’alcun capriccioso / anchor non è stato oso / de la salsiccia empirsi mai la gola’; Firenzuola, ‘Canzone’, vv. 12-14. 164 ‘Canzon, vanne in Fiorenza a que’ poeti / et palesa i secreti / de la salsiccia, et dì lor ch’al distretto / questo cibo d’ogni altro è più perfetto’ Firenzuola, ‘Canzone’, vv. 76-79. 165 Grappa is now identified as Francesco Beccuti. See Comento del Grappa. On Beccuti, see Fiorini Galassi, ‘Cicalamenti del Grappa’. On the Virtuosi academy, a continuation of the Vignaiuoli, see Chapter Three. 166 ‘questo cibo d’ogni altro è più perfetto’; Firenzuola, ‘Canzone’, v. 79. The allusion here (‘Se per sciagura le nove sirocchie / havesser letto le capitolesse, / o, per me’ dir, quelle maccheronee / di voi altri poeti da conocchie, i quali il forno et le castagne lesse / lodaste, et fiche muccide et plebee’; vv. 1-6) is to the poems ‘Sopra il forno’ by Giovanni della Casa, ‘Capitolo de’ f ichi’ by Francesco Maria Molza, and ‘In lode delle castagne’ by Andrea Lori. All three are poems dedicated to the female genitals.

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tradition, it also mocked doctors’ recommendations about when to eat certain foods and reassured readers that the sausage ‘is good roasted and boiled, for lunch or for dinner, before or after the meal’, employing prepositions that suggest different parts of the body and different types of sexual intercourse (e.g., et dietro, literally ‘and afterwards’ but also suggesting ‘from behind’).167 This passage closes with ‘a nice secret’ – an admonition to never have sausage during the hot months of summer, but to wait until August has passed. According to Aristotelian physiology, men, who are by nature hot and dry, are less vigorous and potent in the summer when its excessive heat weakens their sexual powers. Nonetheless, he argues, even old men who have lost their heat can be young again thanks to the mighty sausage.168 Firenzuola, who was reputed to have eclectic sexual tastes, concluded that one could make sausages with ‘every type of meat’, alluding to all possible sexual practices.169 The sausage’s phallus-like morphology permits playfulness with its attributes, which could be seen both as gastronomic and sexual: Sausages were ordered from above / to amuse those who were born into the world / with that grease that often drips from them; and when they are cooked and swelled / you can serve them in the round dish, although few today want them in the split bread.170 167 ‘Mangiasi la salsiccia innanzi et drieto / a pranso, a cena, o vuo’ a lesso o vuo’ arrosto / arrosto et dietro è più da grandi assai; / innanzi et lessa, a dirti un bel segreto / non l’usar mai fin che non passa Agosto’ (Eat sausage before and after / for lunch or for dinner, either boiled or roasted, / roasted and after is much more noble, / before and boiled will tell you a nice secret: / to not eat them until August has passed); Firenzuola, ‘Canzone’, vv. 30-35. 168 ‘Perchè in estate gli uomini sono meno capaci di fare l’amore, le donne invece lo sono di più […]? Perché gli uomini sono più inclini a fare l’amore d’inverno, le donne in estate? Forse perché gli uomini sono di natura più caldi e secchi?’ (Why is it that in the summer men are less able to make love, while women are instead more capable […]? Why is it that men are more drawn to making love in the winter, women in the summer? Perhaps because men are by nature warmer and drier?); ‘O vecchi benedetti! / questo è quel cibo che vi fa tornare giovani e lieti, et spesso ancho al zinnare’ (Oh blessed old men! / this is that food that will make you young and happy again, and bring you back to the breast); Firenzuola, ‘Canzone’, vv. 58-60. See Aristotle’s Problems, as quoted in ‘Appendice I, Ludi esegetici II, p. 200. 169 ‘Fassi buona salsiccia d’ogni carne: / dicon l’istorie che d’un bel torello / Dedalo salsicciaio già fece farla / e a mona Pasife diè a mangiarne; / molti oggidí la fan con l’asinello’ (Good sausage can be made with every meat: / historians say that Daedalus, sausage maker, ordered it made with a young nice bullock and gave it to lady Pasiphae to eat; today many make it with ass); Firenzuola, ‘Canzone’, vv. 46-50. 170 ‘Fur le salsiccia ab aeterno ordinate / per trastullar chi ne veniva al mondo / con quell’unto che cola da lor spesso; et quando elle son cotte e rigonfiate, le si mettono in tavola nel tondo. / Altri son, che le vogliono nel pan fesso’; Firenzuola, ‘Canzone’, vv. 61-65.

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When a sausage is cooked and ready to serve, Firenzuola advises, it is best displayed ‘nel tondo’ (in a round dish or, metaphorically, a person’s bottom) although others prefer it served with ‘pan fesso’ (split bread or, metaphorically, the female genitals), though there are few who prefer the latter today, Firenzuola adds. As a Florentine, he writes, the preference goes to the local sausage: I, for my part, would like it our way, / made with my hands, / and large and firm and red and natural, and encased in clean intestine.171

The adjectives tondo and fesso (round and split, the latter also meaning ‘foolish’), clearly refer to homo- and heterosexual intercourse even as they allude to different gastronomical appetites.172 The poem concludes with ecumenical and procreative language, affirming that the creation of sausages was an endeavor intended to give pleasure and utility to everyone and that good sausages are the reason why people are born into this world.173 While claiming that sausages are well suited to all people and tastes, gustatory and sexual, Firenzuola specifies that, when served dietro and roasted, they are good only for members of the upper classes. Like other Bernesque poets, in other words, he seems eager to invest a common, inexpensive food with a higher social status – as we have seen, roasted fowl and roasted meat were theoretically reserved for the upper classes. At the same time, the use of dietro, which clearly suggests sodomy, links that forbidden sexual practice with upper-class practice. Elevating this lower-class food to a higher status was the perfect metaphor for speaking subtly in favor of sodomy and elevating its status at a time when it was officially a crime as well as a damning sin. The long ‘Canzone in lode della salsiccia’ by Anton Francesco Grazzini, which was followed by an erudite and playful prose commentary by the 171 ‘Io per me la vorrei de la nostrale, / fatta con le mie mani, / et grossa et soda et rossa et naturale, / et in budei bennetti’; Firenzuola, ‘Canzone’, vv. 54-57. It is interesting to speculate that this encasing of ground pork with intestines to make a sausage suggests a simple mode of birth control and leads one to wonder if these poems are also playfully alluding to such practices. 172 The adjectives ‘tondo’ and ‘fesso’ clearly refer in the erotic lexicon of the time to male (passive) sodomy and female genitals. According to Dall’Orto, every object that is round indicates the anus, while oval or square objects denote the vagina: ‘E se l’ano è “tondo” (e quindi la vagina è “quadrata” o “ovale”) qualsiasi oggetto sia tondo, per esempio un tagliere (che in antico era rotondo e usato come piatto) sarà l’ano, e da qui deriva che “tagliare” significherà “sodomizzare”. Quindi, “tagliare un arrosto” vorrà dire […]’ See Dall’Orto, Tutta un’altra storia, p. 256. 173 ‘Basta che i salsiccioli / cotti nei bigonciuoli, / donne, dove voi fate i sanguinacci, / son cagion che degli uomini si facci’ (So much that sausages / cooked in the big pot, / women, where you make the blood pudding, / are the reason that men are made); Firenzuola, ‘Canzone’, vv. 72-75.

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same author, extols the sausage from a gastronomical point of view, humorously contrasting its attractions with moralizing medical lore, and once again interweaving this encomium with sexual innuendos.174 Presenting himself as a knowledgeable gastronome, Grazzini praises the primacy of the Florentine sausage as superior to capons, partridges, and all bird meat, as well as that of highly prized f ish such as lampreys and eels.175 After defining it as a meal worthy of poets and emperors, and begging Greece and Rome to recognize the superiority of Florentine sausages, the poem praises its color and appearance, and lists its ingredients in cookbook-like mode: well-ground lean meat and pork fat, salt and pepper, cloves, cinnamon, oranges, and fennel, all stuffed into intestine casing.176 Grazzini clarifies, however, that his intent is not to explain how to make sausage but to laud its beauty, taste and goodness. When discussing the process of sausage stuffing (‘imbudellar la carne’), he takes the opportunity to shift the poem from the culinary to the sexual, saluting women who always want to have their bodies full of sausages because they are good and healthy—another battle won in the sausage wars.177 The accompanying prose Comento di maestro Nicchodemo dalla Pietra al Migliaio sopra il capitolo della salsiccia makes clear that ‘buona carne’ (good meat) well done and well cut makes a good show when displayed in a round dish – the tagliere – a reference to sodomy and again a pretext for praising the male bottom.178 In fact, the tagliere is even more pointed than that of the tondo and is compared favorably with other famous poetic icons such as the eyes, hair, breasts, or feet of Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura.179 174 See Grazzini, ‘Canzone in lode della salsiccia’, pp. 227-230 (all references to this poem are to verses from the modern edition cited in bibliography.) and Grazzini, ‘Comento di Maestro’. There is no firm date for the latter’s composition, but it was likely written around 1539-1540. See the introduction by Pignatti in Romei et al., Ludi esegetici, p. 163. 175 Grazzini, ‘Canzone in lode della salsiccia’, vv. 22-33. 176 Grazzini, ‘Canzone in lode della salsiccia’, vv. 79-81. 177 ‘[…] aiutatemi, donne, a dirne il vero. / Di questa certo come si ragiona / voi ne volete sempre il corpo pieno, / tanto vi piace e tanto vi par buona’; Grazzini, ‘Canzone in lode della salsiccia’, vv. 106-111. 178 I am using the edition of the Comento di maestro published in Ludi esegetici, Romei, Plaisance, and Pignatti eds., pp. 231-308. The tagliere is a wooden dish used by the trinciante to slice the meat and is a common metaphor for the male bottom. See Toscan, Le Carnaval du langage, vol. 1, pp. 1392-1393. 179 ‘La bellezza del tagliere non è come forse molti credono, e non consiste in l’esser bianco, non di buon legno, non tondo, non ben fatto, ma si bene nell’essere pieno di buona carne ben cotta e ben trinciata; […] tolghinsi pur costoro i capelli di fin oro, la fronte più del ciel serena, le stellanti ciglia […] come dire le Laure, le Beatrici, le Cintie e le Flore!’ (The beauty of the cutting board is not what perhaps many believe it to be, it does not consist in its whiteness, nor the quality

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A long section of the Comento on the gastronomical virtues of the sausage in fact begins with a verse by Petrarch, ‘O d’ ogni riverentia et d’honor degna’ (from sonnet ‘Quando io movo I sospir a chiamar voi’) dedicated to Madonna Laura;180 it is this line that Grazzini uses to shift abruptly – and humorously – from these renowned and reverent words to the mundane and salacious culinary and sexual wonders of the sausage – the only meal, he again claims, worthy of poets and emperors. Even the untouchable Petrarch’s Laura thus comes under attack in the sausage wars. Grazzini not only satirizes Petrarchan poetry but also, and more directly and deeply, the medical lore of his time regarding sausages and pork. His playful observations on the ability of the sausage to heal every illness simultaneously maintains sexual overtones while reading like a learned medical prescription that lists herbs and substances used by apothecaries at the time in preparation of their confetti, pills and tonic drinks.181 Grazzini also makes the straightforward culinary point that Florentine pork and lard, key ingredients in the local sausage, were exceptionally good for roasting and frying. They were also the essential ingredient for a popular bread with lard called pan unto (greased or fat bread). The attraction to lard, white pork fat, was echoed in a poem by the prolific author and translator Lodovico Dolce (1508-1568), ‘Salva la verità, fra i Deci nove’, which is dedicated to a gift of a wild boar that the author had received from a friend. Dolce calls this wild of wood, not its roundness or if it is well made, but rather in the fact that it is full of good meat cooked properly and carved correctly; […] taking away even from those with fine golden hair, brows more serene than the sky, sparkling eyelashes […] that is to say the Lauras, the Beatrices, the Cynthias and the Floras); Grazzini, Comento di Maestro, pp. 240-241. 180 ‘Venendo hora a raccontare le virtù e le lodi del porco, si comincia con una sclamatione orrevole et ammirativa, come il Petrarca di Madonna Laura: O d’ogni riverentia e d’honor degna’; Grazzini, Comento di maestro, p. 250. The sonnet is number 5 (v. 11) in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. 181 The term confetti (and confetioni) indicates a nut-shaped concoction with medicinal, often aphrodisiacal, properties. Sweets made with fruit, spices and cane sugar were also called confetti. See Giannetti, ‘The Satyr in the Kitchen Pantry’, p. 105. ‘perciò che quei traditori de’ medici la prima cosa levono il porco e non vogliono a patto nessuno che n’habbia l’ammalato per mantenergli bene il male addosso, sendo il porco, e maggiormente la salsiccia, habile e possente a guarir d’ogni malattia e più sana che la sena, più necessaria che la cassia, più cordiale che il zucchero rosato, più ristorativa che il manicristo, et insomma ha più virtù che la bettonica’ (For this reason the first thing those traitorous doctors take away is pork and they don’t want the sick person to have it in order to make sure he remains ill, because pork and even more so sausage is capable and powerful enough to heal any illness and it is healthier than senna, more necessary than cassia, more pleasant that rose sugar, more restorative than maniscristo and finally it has more virtue than betony); Grazzini, Comento di Maestro, p. 280. The terzina commented upon is at vv. 103-105: ‘Io crederria d’ogni gran mal guarire / quando haver ne potessi un rocchio intero, / ancor ch’io fussi bello e per morire’.

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pork ‘porco cinghiale’ (boar meat) a ‘magnificent and regal gift whose rich flavor will make Abstinence die of gluttony and Carnival lick his fingers’.182 The author’s enthusiasm for lard in the poem is depicted in a dream sequence wherein Dolce witnesses himself, in Ovidian fashion, metamorphosed into a succulent sausage, rich with fat dripping from his extremities.183 As we saw with Renaissance medical transference theory but here with a slightly different and more positive spin, eating pork actually transforms the poet not into the animal itself but into its gastronomical essence and pleasure. His poem thus exploits the commonplace notion of the fratellanza between pigs and humans in a way that once again privileges the sausage. Yet another poem on sausages was written by Mattio Franzesi, who dedicated it to a certain ‘Caino spenditore’ – a friend presumably in charge of food acquisition and spending in Florence. Franzesi learnedly employs the language of gastronomy in an amusing pairing with quotidian language that again references sodomy. The sausage is called ‘buon boccon’ (excellent morsel) and ‘boccon sì ghiotto and divino’(gluttonous and divine morsel) when it is eaten with the beloved specialty pan unto, a dish the poet declares superior to two famously upper-class foods, impepato and marzipan.184 Franzesi, in agreement with Dolce, describes pan unto (here slices of bread with sausage inside) as a divine and gluttonous morsel, far superior even to the luxury food par excellence – beccafico, a fat and fresh songbird.185 Moreover, the poet enthuses, salsiccia costs little and can be used in many different ways as the basis of a good meal: for instance, it can substitute for 182 ‘dono invero magnifico e reale, / da far morir di gola l’astinenza / e leccarsi le dita a Carnevale’; Dolce, ‘Salva la verità, fra i Deci nove’, vv. 10-12 in Capitoli del Signor Pietro Aretino, fols. 16r-18r. All references to this poem are to verses from this edition. 183 ‘E chi m’avesse allora allora punto / aria veduto uscir liquor divino / del corpo, ch’era pien di grasso e d’unto’ (and who might have seen me punctured then slowly that moment / dripping divine liquid / from my body that was full of fat and oil); Dolce, ‘Salva la verità, fra i Deci nove’, vv. 43-45. 184 ‘Qui non è osso da buttare al cane, / e’l suo santo panunto è altra cosa / che lo impepato overo il marzapane’ (This is not a bone to throw to the dog / the holy panunto is even better / than impepato or marzipan); Franzesi, ‘Capitolo sopra la salsiccia’, pp. 316-318, vv. 25-27. Impepato is a type of bread mixed with honey, pepper, confit oranges and sugared almonds, in other words a costly bread. References to verses from the edition in bibliography. 185 ‘Dicon che la midolla del panunto, / incartocciata come un cialdoncino, / tal che di sopra e di sotto appaia l’unto, / è un boccon sì ghiotto e sì divino, / che se lo provi ti parrà migliore / ch’un beccafico fresco e grassellino’ (They say that the marrow of the panunto / wrapped in paper like a little pastry / so that above and below the grease comes out / is a morsel so gluttonous and so divine / that if you try it, it will seem better to you / than a fresh and fat beccafico); Franzesi, ‘Capitolo sopra la salsiccia’, vv. 38-42. It should be noted that even the luxury food the beccafico had strong sexual overtones.

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a salad (i.e., a woman)186 and priests in particular often eat it because they do not need to cook it since they can just warm it up between their hands.187 The poem’s language, interestingly, refers with technical precision to the culinary aspects of sausage even when it is metaphorically discussing sexual acts. Sausage is better than prosciutto when boiled (used with women) and is as good when accompanied with sauces (guazzetti).188 Furthermore, all the birds in the world would be just like truffles without pepper and confetti without sugar, were they not accompanied by sausages. A sausage meal is a meal for the sake of taste and pleasure, not nourishment. Franzesi then proceeds, not unlike Grazzini, to describe the sausage’s shape as well as how to make a good-tasting, good-smelling sausage using spices, herbs, and that unique ingredient in Florentine sausages – fennel. The poem ends with a list of Florentine gastronomical specialties, such as ravigiuolo cheese with grapes, cheese with pears, old wine with stale bread, and several other dishes, to which sausage in pan unto stands up as fully equal. Praising a humble subject fit well with the agenda of Bernesque poetry, which extolled simple foodstuffs and everyday objects as we have noted. Privileging sausages over songbirds was clearly not just a rhetorical ploy but also implied a comparison between simple food for poorer people and luxury food for the upper classes that favored the humble over the wealthy. And at its most basic level Franzesi’s poem, like the writings of Grazzini before him, sought to elevate the social status of the pork sausage, presenting it no longer as a food da tinello – for poor courtiers used to eating the leftovers of their lord – or for peasants, but as a meal worthy of rich citizens and important prelates.189 186 ‘Lasciamo star che molto ella non costa / et che l’è necessaria per le ville / più che il bicchier di state et che la rosta; / serve per insalata’; Franzesi, ‘Capitolo sopra la salsiccia’, vv. 49-52. The reference here is to a famous poem by Francesco Maria Molza dedicated to salad as a euphemism for female genitals. See Chapter Three. 187 ‘[…] la si cuoce senza fiamma o fuoco, / et un prelato l’usa assai sovente; / […] Così si trova la salsiccia cotta, / le man si scalda et leva, et poi con essa / sguazza e trionfa, ch’è una cosa ghiotta’; Franzesi, ‘Capitolo sopra la salsiccia’, vv. 55-66. 188 ‘Questa scusa prosciutto, essendo lessa, / dà condiment a intingoli et guazzetti, / et è tutta servente di se stessa’; Franzesi, ‘Capitolo sopra la salsiccia’, vv. 67-69. In Bernesque vocabulary, ‘rosto’ and ‘arrosto’ (roasted) usually refers to sodomy between men; ‘lesso’ (boiled) to sexual acts with women. Dall’Orto explains the euphemisms going back to Burchiello’s poetry as follows: ‘per via delle mestruazioni la vagina è “piovosa”, e per contrasto, quanto è “asciutto” indica l’ano. Una cottura asciutta della carne, “l’arrosto”, indicherà quindi il coito anale, mentre la cottura umida, il “lesso”, indica il rapporto vaginale’. See Dall’Orto, Tutta un’altra storia, p. 256. 189 ‘Questo non è già pasto da tinello / ma da ricchi signori e gran prelati / che volentieri si pascon del budello’ (This is not a meal for the servant’s quarters / but rather for rich lords and important prelates / who happily eat this offal); Franzesi, ‘Capitolo sopra la salsiccia’, vv. 79-81.

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These sausage poems, moreover, permitted discussions of virility, sexual potency, masculinity and sodomy under the guise of gastronomical discourses and simultaneously addressed the constant preoccupation of medical and dietary literature of the time with how to ensure sexual potency. They further endorsed a decisively masculine view in which women are depicted as lusty and desirous of raw carne (meat), in short, the phallus, which is able to heal every illness and satisfy every need. Thus the sausage poems reconfirm a hierarchical vision of sexuality dominated by the mighty phallus even as they endorse a concept of diverse gastronomical taste – lesso and arrosto, nel tondo or nel fesso – offering a variety of views on sexual activities that responded to every taste. These sausage poems were written within the cultural circles of the Vignaiuoli and Virtuosi academies well known in the period for their substantial corpus of poetry dedicated to the comparison of fruit and vegetables to sexual organs and sexual acts, as the next chapter shows in more detail. The not-so-covert sexual allusions of most of these vegetable poems exalted sodomy in their extolling of peaches and carrots as well as more accepted sexual acts with women in poems on salads and figs. Poems on the glorious sausage covered all the bases of sexuality, although with a preference, often openly stated, for male-male sexuality. Intriguingly, linguistic play on sausage-as-carne allowed for lengthy descriptions of what was, after all, an Italian and Florentine gastronomic specialty of the time, totally ignoring the negative vision of pigs as gluttonous, dirty animals that was presented by contemporary dietary literature. Since gluttony was the quintessential behavior represented by pigs, what better way to reclaim pork in the sausage wars than to use it to symbolize gastronomical richness and the pleasures of sexual variety? If sins of the flesh were often symbolized as sins of carne in medieval times, now, in a perfect reversal, pleasures of the flesh were symbolized by pleasures of eating meat in all of its variety. At the same time that a moralizing and disciplining vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century, a counter argument was advanced, playfully presented in prose literature and Bernesque poetry, written in favor of pork sausages as a metaphor for the pleasures of the senses. The next chapter, ‘Attending Poetic Banquets: The Erotics of Food Poems and the Discovery of Taste’, follows in the footsteps of melon literature and sausage poems to examine the rich literary production that used images of vegetables and fruits to discuss the pleasures of the senses and, once again, sexuality and gender.

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Attending Poetic Banquets The Erotics of Food Poems and the Discovery of Taste Abstract The rich literary production, both high and low, that makes use of humorous and at times outrageous sexualized images of vegetables and fruit is studied here in relation to medical-dietetic literature that stigmatized such foods as well as to contemporary conceptions of sexuality. Using primarily little-studied ‘Bernesque’ literature as an example of ‘embodied imagination’, this chapter describes and analyzes how a number of Renaissance Italian poets imagined a carrot or a peach in ways that meld its shape, nutritional characteristics, metaphorical implications, and material qualities. The embodied experience of eating and tasting such fruits and vegetables, both literally and metaphorically, became a vehicle for expressing new and potentially revolutionary ideas about gusto a century earlier than has been recognized to date. Keywords: Bernesque literature, embodied imagination, sexuality, eroticism, fruit and vegetables

[…] degli amatori della Poesia. La quale, si Come tutte le altre cose che ci nascono, ancora ella ha I suoi frutti e i suoi fiori: & se quei giovano al gusto, Questi dilettano all’odorato, & l’uno senza l’altro ordinariamente non viene in luce1

Introduction As we have seen in the last chapter, the phallic splendors of the triumphant sausage provided much fodder for literary texts; following in its footsteps, 1 ‘[…] of lovers of Poetry. Which, like all other things that are born, has both its fruits and its flowers, and if the first please the taste, the second delight the sense of smell, and one cannot shine without the other’; Giunti, ‘Al nobilissimo Messer Alessandro’, n.p.

Giannetti, L., Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy: The Renaissance of Taste. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728034_ch03

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this chapter considers a broader sampling of bawdy poems in praise of fruit and vegetables. The works discussed herein were written between the 1520s and 1540s and were printed, reprinted, commented upon, and imitated widely in the two centuries that followed. Contemporary with the writing of these poems on the sexual virtues and vices of humble and rustic vegetables or elegant and luxurious fruit was a cultural climate that saw abundant artistic representations of gardens and their produce, many depicting sexual and sensual pleasures. In the visual arts, this theme was most famously represented in the border decorations of the Loggia di Psyche in the Villa Farnesina in Rome, where Giovanni da Udine depicted garlands of fruit and vegetables with sexually evocative shapes.2 On a humbler level, domestic objects as well played on the erotic connotations of fruit and vegetables. Among the most interesting examples are a Venetian majolica plate (c. 1540-1550) with a leering image of a satyr surrounded by fruit and vegetables with sexual overtones (cucumbers, gourds, melons, peaches, and pomegranates) and a Deruta dish (1530s) depicting a woman seated on the ground and selling penises from a basket with the inscription ‘ai boni fruti’ [Come get your good fruit, women]. The theme appeared also in princesses’ bedrooms of private palazzi where tapestries and bed hangings adorned with images of sensual fruit and flowers may have symbolized fertility and an incitement to sensuality.3 Is it possible that the numerous examples of the sensual and sexual representation of fruit and vegetables – which appeared in distinct cultural domains from poetry to the visual arts – had some connection to the long debate on the social, cultural, and culinary role of vegetables and fruit that we have seen ongoing in Italy over almost two centuries of discussion about food.4 Is this why vegetables and fruits became protagonists of poetry at this time? While many of these foodstuffs continued to be viewed with suspicion by Renaissance physicians and their dietary tracts, agricultural treatises, cooking manuals, and literary works – not to mention consumption practices – revealed a 2 The border was painted around 1511-1513; see Wolk-Simon, ‘Rapture’, in Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, p. 44. Vasari commented on the lascivious image of the gourd entering the fig with amusement and admiration: ‘il quale capriccio è espresso con tanta grazia, che più non si può alcuno immaginare’; see Vasari, ‘Giovanni da Udine’, p. 558. For one of the first studies on ‘erotic’ vegetables in art, see Morel, ‘Priape à la Renaissance’, pp. 16-17. 3 For a description of the plate with a satyr [in the Louvre museum] see Bayer, Art and Love, p. 219. Ajmar-Wollheim in ‘The Spirit is Ready, but the Flesh is Tired’ discusses the Deruta dish among other objects featuring carnal sexuality in the domestic context. Regarding bed hangings and draperies see Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Letter to Sallustio Tarugi. 4 See Chapter One, sections on vegetables and fruit.

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different picture, one that considered them a good choice for both the elite and the humble table.5 The corpus of Bernesque poems (so named for the founder of the genre, Francesco Berni, 1498-1535, as noted earlier) includes a significant number of verses dedicated to humble everyday objects, illnesses, and contemporary idea(l)s – for example: honor, card games, insects, and clothes – as well as to a wide range of foodstuffs – vegetables, fruits, and different types of meat. Although these poems appear to be lauding their chosen subjects with the sole aim of entertainment, they are more than initially meets the eye: they are written in a mix of everyday and elegant language; they refer in a learned manner to both contemporary events and classical history; they play with an impressive variety of erotic metaphors; they reverse with humor the most scholarly medical advice; and they delight in religious satire and in the mockery of Petrarchan poetic conceits. What are humble fruits and vegetables doing playing and being played with on such an august stage? One thing is clear: the traditional division between elite and popular culture does not function well as a framework for understanding these unusual compositions, which could be better described as sharing a multiplicity of cultural layers, attitudes, systems of meaning, attributes, and values – both popular and elite. While studying the characteristics of their genre may help us grasp some of their features, a literary analysis detached from the poems’ historical and cultural context would fall far short of elucidating their rich humor, playfulness, and erudition. We need instead to consider the contemporary materiality of the various fruit and vegetables that are these poems’ subjects as well as the cultural abstractions of the poetic imaginations that gave various foodstuffs deeper resonances in their day. My analysis of these poems therefore employs generally the critical concept of ‘embodied imagination’ formulated by food historian Jeffrey Pilcher as a new way of studying the idea of taste and the role of food ‘as a nexus between human sensory experience of the environment and the cultural meanings assigned to it’.6 The ‘embedded imaginary’ inscribed in a certain 5 Chapter One analyzes how, in the sixteenth-century literary imaginary, the idea of a ‘cultural field’ relating to the consumption of fresh fruit and raw green vegetables changed significantly. While green vegetables experienced a kind of upward socio-culinary mobility, moving from the lower to the upper classes, fresh fruit saw instead a descent – from a food reserved for the upper classes to a food frequently found in the common kitchen. 6 See Pilcher, ‘The Embodied Imagination’, p. 886. The ‘embodied imagination’ offers a useful means for conceptualizing the connections between sensory perceptions of food such as flavor, warmth, and satiety; the material work of preparing and consuming food; and cultural and social

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food is detailed in a culturally specific language that includes references to the multifaceted world of material culture, and cultural abstractions. This coupling appears to be particularly significant in the Bernesque poems on fruit and vegetables, whose themes meld together the materiality of the items discussed with their metaphorical attributions, including sense of taste, sexuality, and social and hierarchical concerns. Although Pilcher’s study does not refer specifically to fruit and vegetables in the sixteenth century Italian environment, the concept of the ‘embodied imagination’ makes it possible to analyze more deeply the Bernesque poems beyond the traditional categorizations of genre or imitation of poetic forms. In the Bernesque poems, the imagination embodied in a carrot or a peach gives way to a cultural fantasy that melded their shapes, their nutritional characteristics, their metaphorical implications, their related history, and the physical sensations they elicited in order to express, discuss, and often contest contemporary ideas and values. Eventually, the embodied experience of eating and tasting those fruit and vegetables – both literally and metaphorically – became a vehicle for promoting novel ideas of ‘taste’. In fact, the sixteenth-century construction of a positive notion of taste found an often overlooked yet significant ally in the sexual representation of fruits and vegetables in the Italian poetry of the day. Recent scholarship on taste and gluttony in early modern Europe that focuses on France has affirmed that, for a long period, descriptions of the pleasures of good food were confined to narratives of the world of Cockaigne and to the registers of eroticism, satire, and comic inversion.7 This scholarship doubts the possibility of finding early modern texts that discuss ‘seriously’ the pleasures of food and affirms that such narratives from the period are ‘hardly comparable to a theoretical discourse’. It also maintains that a new discourse on taste only ‘appeared’ in the early eighteenth century when taste was finally endowed with the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions that ‘rehabilitated’ abstractions. The term was coined by the Jungian psychotherapist Robert Bosnak to emphasize that people experience dreams not simply in the mind but with the entire body, and that affect and emotion as well as cognition shape the content of dreams’. Ibidem, p. 862. See also Norton, ‘Tasting Empire’, which includes important observations and criticisms of both essentialist and functionalist models of taste in the context of Europeans incorporating new foods, such as chocolate. 7 Von Hoffmann, From Gluttony, p. 30. The book is an intellectual history of taste in France between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on philosophical, religious, medical, and culinary learned sources. Von Hoffmann traces the transformation of the official discourse on taste from an animal sense to a higher form of judgment, crediting France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for ‘the invention and construction of taste as a sense modality, constituted for the first time as a dual entity, uniting body and soul’; Von Hoffmann, From Gluttony, p. 177.

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it from its earlier confinement to the basest dimensions of physicality.8 One shortcoming of this scholarly position is the assumption that taste is more tied to discourse and ideology than it is to material practice, sensory perceptions, and imagination. Another limitation is the laser focus on one country – France – at one specific time – the seventeenth century – the location in and moment at which taste, in the modern sense, was supposedly born. I argue, instead, that sixteenth-century Italian Bernesque poetry offers an alternative way of understanding how notions concerning taste were formed and how the linguistic registers of satire and eroticism may actually reveal a great deal about the idea of taste as a complex ‘force’9 that melded cultural abstractions and imagination with ideology, everyday language, and the culture of food, as well as ideas about sexuality, social identity, and sensory perception.

Bernesque poetry We begin in the summer of 1529 with a missive Francesco Berni wrote in response to an ‘amenissima lettera’ (a very pleasant letter) he had received from his friend and fellow poet Giovanfrancesco Bini (1480-1556) in Rome. At the time, Berni was living in Verona in the service of the bishop and curial official Giovan Matteo Giberti. The poet was there in a minor order and felt he was leading a dull and dissatisfying life. Bini’s letter made Berni remember the happier times of a year before, when he had been in Rome with a group of friends and fellow poets who were all part of the short-lived Accademia dei Vignaiuoli. He concluded his letter by calling on his friend to continue that ludic life: We must live until we die, despite those who don’t like it, but the important thing is to live happily, as I invite you to do, by attending those banquets which are taking place in Rome, and by writing as little as you can; because this is the victory, which conquers the world.10 8 Von Hoffmann, From Gluttony, p. 30, cites Quellier: ‘But is it possible to write seriously on the pleasures of good food? Trivial, food remains widely absent from noble genres’; Von Hoffmann, From Gluttony, p. 176. 9 I use the word ‘force’ in the sense attributed to it by Norton, ‘Tasting Empire’, where taste is an ‘autonomous force’ not dependent on ideology or ethos but that affected, rather than reflected, discourse. 10 Translation in Frantz, Festum voluptatis, p. 26, of the letter originally published in De le lettere facete, fols. 36-37: ‘A vivere havemo fino alla morte a dispetto di chi non vuole: e ‘l vantaggio è

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The Accademia dei Vignaiuoli was founded in Rome by a Mantuan nobleman named Uberto Strozzi (who was in fact the nephew of Baldassare Castiglione); it was one of the first sixteenth-century Italian academies – informal gatherings of intellectuals that met for dinner, witty conversations, music, and poetry starting in the early 1530s.11 According to the surviving sources, about 1535 or slightly later, the Vignaiuoli renamed themselves the Accademia or Reame della Virtù and continued their activities for roughly five more years.12 Meetings, often held at Carnival time, featured improvised speeches and the recitation of poems, frequently accompanied by music.13 Literary academies like the Vignaiuoli and the many others that flourished in the first half of the sixteenth century, held Italian as their ideal language of communication and were very different from the previous century’s intellectuals’ groups, which gathered to read, discuss, and translate primarily classical (Latin) works. One of the first academies in Italy to privilege the vernacular, the Vignaiuoli vivere allegramente, come conforto a far voi: attendendo a frequentar quelli banchetti, che si fanno per Roma, e scrivendo sopra tutto manco che potete. Quia haec est victoria, quae vincit mundum’. 11 Romei evaluates the extant documents related to the existence of the academy, warning scholars that the Academy’s name, Vignaiuoli, is a convenient label but is not necessarily correct: ‘se vorremmo conservare all’Accademia il nome dei ‘Vignaiuoli’ d’uso ormai consolidato, dovremo essere consapevoli che si tratta di un’etichetta di comodo, convenzionale e inesatta’; Romei, Berni e berneschi, p. 55. A letter by Giovanni Mauro to Gandolfo Porrino of December 16, 1531, discusses the existence of a ‘vigna letteraria’ in Roma in those years: ‘La sera di Santa Lucia il signor Muscettola fece cena alli Poeti, dove anch’io per poeta fui convitato et altro vino non fu bevuto, che di quello della vigna del Pontano, fatto venir da Napoli a posta. Il quale ebbe in sè tanto del vigor poetico, che tutti ci riscaldò’ (On the night of Saint Lucy Mr. Muscettola prepared a dinner for the Poets, to which I, being a poet, was also invited. No wine besides that of the Pontano vineyards, which had been brought there specially from Naples, was drunk, and it had such poetic vigor in it that it warmed all of us); see De le lettere facete, fols. 319-323 at 320. 12 On the Virtuosi, see Chambers, ‘The Earlier “Academies”’; see also Frantz, Festum voluptatis, pp. 24-42. On the Vignaiuoli and the Virtuosi, see Romei, Da Leone X a Clemente VII. On the Accademia della Virtù, see Moroncini, ‘The Accademia della Virtù’, and Cosentino, ‘L’Accademia della virtù’. 13 See Sabino’s dedication to Strozzi in Institutioni di Mario Equicola: ‘Percioché non prima da Napoli a Roma foste venuto, che la vostra casa fu consagrata alle Muse, e diventò il diporto di tutti i più famosi Academici che fossero in Corte. I quali quasi ogni giorno faccendo ivi il suo Concistoro, il Berni delle sue argute facezie, il Mauro delle sue attrattive piacevolezze, Mons. Della Casa, all’hora in minoribus, de suoi ingegnosi concetti, M. Lelio Capilupo, l’Abate Fiorenzuola, M. Giovan Francesco Bini, e l’ameno Giovio da Lucca con molti altri’ (Thus you had only just come to Rome from Naples when your house was consecrated to the Muses and became the playground of all the most famous academicians that there were at court. Nearly every day they were there, holding their consistory. Berni making his witty remarks, Mauro with his pleasing quips, Mr. Della Casa – at that time the youngest – forming his genius ideas, Mr. Lelio Capilupo, the abbot Fiorenzuola, Mr. Giovanni Francesco Bini, and the amusing Giovio da Lucca, among many others).

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became most famous for their poetic production of so-called ‘learned erotica’14 and for their anti-Petrarchan, anti-classicist poetic stance.15 Among them, the most noted were Giovanfrancesco Bini (c. 1484-1556), Annibal Caro (15071566), Giovanni Della Casa (1503-1556), Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1543), Mattio Franzesi (c. 1500-1555), Anton Francesco Grazzini (1503-1584), Francesco Maria Molza (1489-1544), and Giovanni Mauro D’Arcano (c.1490-1536). With a few exceptions, they all were learned in Latin and the classics, as well as Dante and Petrarch; they all translated classical works; and they all wrote classical and Bernesque poems, playful commentaries, treatises, comedies, elegant letters, and novelle in imitation of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Berni, an accomplished intellectual like the other members of the academy, had written a group of playful poems in the 1520s in this vein, and his leadership was recognized by his fellow poets Molza and Grazzini,16 as well as by Filippo Giunti, editor of the most important collections of Opere burlesche (Humorous Works) published in Florence between the 1540s and 1550s.17 The formal poetic innovation of Berni and his followers consisted in putting together two traditional forms, the capitolo and the terza rima (third rhyme) to create what became the famous form capitolo di lode in terza rima. Among their favorite subjects to praise in this new form were the plague, 14 That is, poetry and other arts that recovered pre-Christian classicism and the themes of erotic love, as coined by Frantz, Festum voluptatis. 15 They all used Petrarch’s own language to challenge his poetry and its dominant role in the period. For instance, Grazzini, in his edition of Il primo libro dell’ opere burlesche, used the first verse of the Petrarchan canzoniere to begin his own sonetto in honor of Berni: ‘Voi, ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono / Di quei capricci, che il Berni divino / Scrisse cantando in volgar fiorentino’ (You, who hear the sound, in scattered rhymes / of those poetic whims, that the divine Berni / wrote singing in the Florentine language). Berni’s poetry is placed here on a par with Petrarch’s; see Grazzini, ‘Il Lasca a chi legge’, vv. 1-4. 16 See the following verses dedicated to Berni by Molza in his ‘Capitolo de’ fichi’: ‘Però, se di seguir brami il sentiero, / che ‘l Bernia corse col cantar suo pria, / drizzar quivi lo ‘ingegno or fia mestiero’ (my emphasis) (However, if you wish to follow the path / that Berni ran with his early poetry / It is your craft now and then to stiffen your wit); Molza, Capitoli erotici, pp. 43-58. Grazzini’s poem ‘Il Lasca in lode di messer Francesco Berni’ at the beginning of his edition of Il primo libro dell’opere burlesche, calls Berni the ‘master and father’ of the new style. 17 Filippo Giunti in his dedication ‘Al nobilissimo Messer Alessandro’, affirms Berni’s status: ‘Et fra i primi, e forse il primo, che in tal maniera di Scrivere in burla lodevolmente poetasse, fu il nostro Messer Francesco Berni’ (And among the first, perhaps the first, was our Messer Francesco Berni who in that jesting style commendably wrote poetry). The Giunti press had been well established in Florence since the last decades of the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century, while the ducal printer Torrentino issued works produced in the Florentine Academy that were approved by the Censors, who reviewed books for publication, the Giunti family released many texts that were not sanctioned, including the Opere burlesche and many of the works written by Grazzini; see Zanrè, Cultural Non-Conformity, pp. 25-27.

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syphilis, paintbrushes, urinals, candles, glasses, honor, gelatin, hardboiled eggs, fennels, apples, peaches, and of course sausages. Glorifying common objects as well as unsavory illnesses such as syphilis in poetic form certainly turned the known world upside down, and appropriately so in a period that saw drastic and dramatic changes in the political, economic, and social climate after the invasion of Charles VIII in 1494. Choosing to employ the form of love poetry with a dash of Petrarchan language in order to commend everyday objects or foodstuffs rather than a beloved, offered a deliberate and clever mockery of the traditional theme of refined and spiritual love. And their output was made more piquant by its frequent exaltation of sodomy, performed among a well-defined group of male poets who continuously referred to each other’s works in their poems, letters, and commentaries on their intellectual and social world. When the Vignaiuoli morphed into the Accademia della Virtù, they added to their literary production a number of soon-to-be-famous prose commentaries on their fellow academicians’ works that were erudite, parodic, and licentious.18 Moreover, to better play the part, they identified themselves with phallic and sexual pseudonyms taken from the vegetable world: Il Carota (Sir Carrot), Il Radice (Sir Radish), Il Fico (Sir Fig), Ser Agresto (Sir Vinegar), il Cotogno (Sir Quince), and il Cardo (Sir Cardoon), to name a few. What connected much of the disparate and highly original work by the Academicians was its underlying sexual double entendre and inventive metaphors, often found in clever word play on the similarity between body parts and the shape and/or function of various foods and objects. Of course, associations among foodstuffs, eating, and sex in poetry and literature were nothing new. Vernacular models included Boccaccio’s Decameron; fifteenth-century novelle by Giovanni Sercambi, Masuccio Salernitano, and Sabadino degli Arienti; poetry by Burchiello and Antonio Cammelli; Pulci’s Morgante; and obviously Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Canzoni carnascialesche. Classical Latin literature, with its established tradition of erotic writings dedicated to foodstuffs, was also well-known and imitated in the Renaissance. Literature of the early sixteenth century – especially novelle, mock-epic poems (Folengo’s Baldus), and the highly successful genre of comedy – delighted in using food metaphors to explore the theme of desire.19 18 See the letter by Caro to Benedetto Varchi (Rome, March 1538) in Caro, Lettere familiari, vol. I, pp. 68-70 (letter 40). On the activity of the Accademia della Virtù and on its decline, see pp. 81-83 (letter 47). 19 Even in Celestina, a long play written by a Spanish monk – Francisco Delicado, who lived in Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century – the abundance and precision of descriptions of food assumed that the audience would understand the double meanings related to sex and

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Yet though the vast array of ‘lascivious’ – to use a contemporary word – food poems and commentaries written in the circle of the Vignaiuoli/Virtuosi had several literary antecedents, their poetic production constitutes an original discourse unique at the time in its inventiveness, intensity, and circulation. This output, furthermore, went well beyond a simple divertissement aimed at provoking laughter, though its humor was very important. The satiric and comic function of these texts had a long tradition: laughing about sexual topics – Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber facetiarum is among the most interesting instances of this – and making salacious jokes was a common pastime in both popular and more elite cultures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But the advent of the printing press and the expanding print market for ‘erotica’ in the sixteenth century gave much wider visibility and diffusion to bawdy verses dedicated to objects and foods.20 The prevailing critical interpretations of Italian scholars regarding these poems and prose commentaries consider them, variously, to be Renaissance imitations of the ancient paradoxical encomium, examples of transgressive literature, parodies of ‘serious’ lyric poetry.21 Indeed, most of that analysis has been conducted within a strictly ‘literary genres’ framework, as if the Bernesque poetry of the sixteenth century had nothing to do with the contemporary world, culture, and society in which it flourished. More troubling yet, traditional critical interpretations has paid no attention to the fact that many of the themes, metaphors, and vocabulary of these texts come from the world of food and medical thought. The poetry and prose production of the Vignaiuoli and Virtuosi was not simply a classical literary exercise in writing humor. Their works were deeply embedded in a shared ‘culture of the illicit’ that fed off contemporary cultures of food and Galenic medicine and participated in debates on the senses and the body through would enjoy the connection between certain foods and common practices of eating them and sexual behavior. 20 On the expanding print market for ‘erotica’ see Matthews-Grieco, ‘Satyrs and Sausages’. 21 Corsaro, author and editor of several studies on the unconventional writing of the sixteenth century, sees the burlesque poetry as a continuation of the ancient paradoxical encomium. See Corsaro, La regola e la licenza, pp. 94-104. Some Italian scholars still employ binaries in relation to this corpus: ‘burlesque’ versus ‘serious’, for example, or poetry dedicated to a ‘serious hero’ versus to ‘low’ and ‘vile’ themes. See for instance Bartali, Prìncipi, gemme, vermi e orologi, p. 96. Among the most positive interpretations are Frantz, Festum voluptatis; Romei, in various studies on the berneschi; Longhi, Lusus, il capitolo burlesco, with reservation regarding the sexual meanings; and obviously Jean Toscan’s monumental Le Carnaval du langage. One new interpretation situates some strands of Bernesque poetry – in particular Caro, Comento di Ser Agresto – in the spiritual climate of Evangelism and the Reformation; see Moroncini, ‘The Accademia della Virtù’. For a new study on Berni, see Savoretti, L’orto delle muse.

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metaphors and clever word-play.22 This corpus provides insights into a way of thinking, categorizing, and connecting ideas that can be difficult to understand today unless we consider it in the context of a larger culture of coded conventions that (obviously) does not merely refer to previous literary works. As has been said, in this environment, ‘everyone, from the humblest peasant to the most refined humanist or patron of art knew, understood and could appreciate that a bird was not simply a bird’ either in life or in poetry.23 Vignaiuoli poetry and prose brought the classical authorities down to the most prosaic level of everyday life, mixing them with the popular, the cultured, and the mundane in what we would today call a circular exchange of ideas and values. The end product was certainly humorous and at times intentionally bizarre. We can hypothesize that it played upon a clever critique of moralistic and pedagogic literature that centered its message on moderation and frugality, as well as of a contemporary medical culture that repeated the same old concepts of the virtues and dangers of foodstuffs. Equally important is this corpus’s exaltation of the ‘lower’ senses and of the fulfilment of pleasure that began to dismantle long-lived negative connections between gluttony and lust. In the literary works of the fifteenth century discussed earlier, it was often meat that conveyed ideas of lasciviousness and lust. Traditionally, animals such as boar, pig, wolf, and ape in late medieval and early Renaissance visual and prescriptive sources, represented luxuria and gluttony as inextricably bonded.24 Sins of the flesh were often symbolized as sins of carne, in the sense of meat.25 In a reversal of this vision, chastity was associated with 22 I use the expression ‘culture of the illicit’ as formulated by Guido Ruggiero. See, for example, Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros, and Ruggiero, ‘Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality’. 23 Ruggiero, ‘Hunting for Birds’, pp. 2-3. 24 For medieval theologians, gluttony and lust were united because immoderate eating excited the senses and therefore could lead to sins of the flesh. In medieval bestiaries and other iconographic sources, especially north of the Alps, gluttony is often represented as a fat man holding a piece of meat and a glass in his hands, and riding a swine or a wolf. See Quellier, Gola, pp. 15-23. For medieval bestiaries, see Cohen, Animals as Disguised Symbols, pp. 3-22. In Italy, church frescoes represented gluttons in Hell suffering the punishment of ever-starving Tantalus. In Ripa’s Iconologia (without images), Gluttony (Gola) is described as a ‘donna a sedere sopra un porco perché i porchi sono golosi’ (woman sitting on a pig because pigs are gluttonous), fol. 193; Gourmandize (Crapula) is identified with a ‘donna brutta grassa’ (ugly fat woman), fol. 98. 25 Grieco, ‘From Roosters’. According to the taxonomy of the Chain of Being, birds belonged to the element of air and were hot and humid; when eaten they would transfer their properties to the body that had consumed them, and this would stimulate a carnal appetite in the eater. This helps explain, for instance, why the famed preacher San Bernardino of Siena, in his Lenten sermons in fifteenth-century Florence, condemned the desire of Florentine young men for capons

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vegetarianism, with hermits living in the desert and surviving on grasses, with Lenten practices, and in general with a temperate way of living. The Vignaiuoli’s poetic production, therefore, takes up in an unusual way the praise of fruit, traditionally reserved to the social elite, and of once-despised vegetables, such as root vegetables and beans: when singing their praises, rather than doing so to laud vegetarianism or frugality – or to exalt chastity – this corpus exalts the flesh and its often quite illicit pleasures. These fruit and vegetable poems of the early sixteenth century metaphorically and literally flourished in palace and villa gardens in Rome and in the countryside, where poets and intellectuals often met for banquets, dinners, and music.26 The beautiful settings of Roman and Florentine gardens may have inspired the poetic figure of the orchard or orto (vegetable garden), a lesser version of the garden of Parnassus, which spoke verses in the first person; the fashion was initiated by Giovanfrancesco Bini in 1535 with his poem ‘Capitolo dell’orto’. Naturally, the symbolism of the orchard or garden and its products included the revival of the Roman god Priapus, protector of vineyards and gardens, fertility, and fecundity.27 Aldus Manutius’s edition of the Latin collection Carmina Priapea, published in 1517, contributed to the diffusion of vegetable metaphors to indicate male and female genitals and sexual acts: Priapus’s garden was ripe with figs, leeks, and eggplants.28 In the ancient world, however, a Priapus statue was also a boundary marker – a phallic scarecrow used to demarcate and protect property from intruders and the evil eye. It is in this function that the god appears in another letter written by Berni to Bini in 1534.29 This letter – which mocks classical dedicatory letters and is replete with open sexual allusions – could be read as the poetic manifesto of the Bernesque poets. It includes a salutation to and partridges, claiming they opened the doors to a life of sensual foods and sensual pleasure. In particular, he linked gluttony to lust and sodomy. See Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari, vol.2, pp. 45-46. Quoted in Vitullo, ‘Taste and Temptation’, p. 106. 26 In 1501, Agostino Vespucci wrote from Rome to Niccolò Machiavelli in Florence with a series of amusing and ironic comments regarding the habits of poets who spent all their time with women in gardens drinking, playing instruments, dancing, and just having fun. See Bentz, ‘Ancient Idoles’, p. 439. 27 The ‘capitolo dell’orto’ by Bini is the first of a series of capitoli. On the literary and artistic representations of Priapus in the Renaissance, see Waddington, Aretino’ s Satyr, esp. pp. 11-20. The Accademia degli Ortolani in Piacenza was dedicated to Priapus. On the Renaissance phallus, its potential for humor, and artistic culture around it, see Simons, ‘The Phallus’. 28 Sella, Carmina Priapea. 29 Years later, Niccolò Franco, a great enemy of Aretino, wrote Priapea in imitation of the anonymous Carmina Priapea, where Priapus speaks in the f irst person. See Frantz, Festum voluptatis, p.105. In Franco’s Priapea, there are also sonnets in the Bernesque style on peaches, beans, and figs.

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all his friends and wishes that they enjoy their flourishing orchard and a good harvest, protected by the god Priapus: and above all the others to the very good natured Mr. Molza, to Mr. Giovanni Della Casa, and to all the Divine Academy. May God grant you his blessing in giving you a large Priapus for your garden, with a pitchfork as long as a beam between your legs and a big scythe in your hand and that you will be bothered neither by frost, fog, worms or foul winds, and that you might have beans and peas in their pods and peaches and carrots all year round, as I desire for my own small and failing garden here which I take care of and keep up as much as I can.30

In the following years, the poetic harvest, at least, was indeed as splendid as Berni could have wished: the Vignaiuoli sired a large number of poems that were collected in several editions and continued to be published with great success to the eighteenth century, engendering numerous imitations in seventeenth-century literature.31 Annibal Caro, the famous translator of Virgil’s Aeneid, added to the pagan overtone of Berni’s letter with a playful story of the mythical origins of the Vignaiuoli’s alimentary predilections in a prose commentary, his Comento di Ser Agresto, on a poem on figs that had been written by fellow academician Francesco Maria Molza. According to Ser Agresto da Ficaruolo (Ser Vinegar from Figland, a nickname Caro gave himself), ‘bad boy’ Berni had been thrown out of the Garden of the Parnassus as a punishment for his lack of reverence for the Muses of Poetry. With the help of the Muses’ servants – known as the Berte, figures of mockery personified – he was able, however, to return in secret to steal the key of the gatekeeper, Mother Poetry. Having done so, rather than enjoying her garden of high poetry the Vignaiuoli used 30 ‘e sopra gli altri al da benissimo Signor Molza, a M. Giovanni della Casa, e a tutta quella divina Academia. Così vi dia Dio grazia di avere un priapone grande per il vostro orto, con una fuscina trabale fra gambe e una falciazza in mano: e che non vi s’accosti mai ne brinata, ne nebbia, ne bruchi, ne vento pestilente: e habbiate fave e bacelli, e pesche e carote tutto l’anno: si come desidero d’ havere io nel mio horticciuolo fallito qua giu, che attendo pure a raffazzonarlo quanto posso’; De le lettere facete, fols. 36-37, esp. fol. 37. (I have slightly modified the translation by Frantz, Festum voluptatis, p. 26.) 31 The first editions, including the rare 1548 Giunti edition, had an illustrious editor – who was also a great admirer and friend of Berni – in Anton Francesco Grazzini (1501-1584), who published a series of the most significant works under the title of Opere burlesche. See Marzo, Studi sulla poesia erotica, for a list of the editions of Opere burlesche published in the sixteenth century; see Longhi, ‘Francesco Berni’, for an extensive review of Berni’s works, the Giunti editions, their reprints in the eighteenth century, the original manuscripts, and the modern editions.

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the key to gain access to an adjacent, humbler garden. There, Berni and his friends, cavorting through the garden, took it over and, each according to his whims, picked peaches, beans, cucumbers, apples, carrots, artichokes, and other fruit and vegetables. The image of Berni stealing Mother Poetry’s key, and ignoring her Parnassian garden to enter a vegetable patch is a clever and powerful boast by these poets, stressing their claim that they considered themselves outliers and, literally, transgressors in the contemporary revival of the idea of a Parnassus of poetry that celebrated the canonical masterpieces of the Italian and Latin literary tradition, assigning poets like the Vignaiuoli a peripheral position.32 Despite their ostensible marginality, their metaphor of the garden – where vegetables of phallic shape; round fruits, with their echoes of beautiful bottoms and forbidden flavors; and salads and figs, with their sexual references to women are gathered year-round – had enormous success in literary circles and beyond. The notion that certain foodstuffs could have an influence on sexual desire, acts, and potency was rooted in medical discourses that could be traced back to antiquity and appeared in many Renaissance food treatises, philosophical tracts, and literature – the latter often with a comic bent. Among doctors and authors of food treatises there was a general consensus that meat, oysters, wine, bread, and eggs were nourishing foods that aided sexual functioning. Other ‘hot foods’ were also good for firing sexual appetite and lust; these included capers, chickpeas, pine nuts, artichokes, asparagus, turnips, truffles, arugula, and parsley. Foods imbued with a ‘windy’ (i.e., inflating) quality – such as leeks, carrots, parsnips, and tubers – were also seen as aiding sexual performance.33 Significantly, in the framework of Galenic humoral theories, the potential transfer of qualitative characteristics from certain foods to 32 In the sixteenth century, Mount Parnassus appears in a famous painting by Raphael, with Apollo and the Muses surrounded by classical and Christian poets (‘Apollo e le Muse sul Monte Parnaso’, 1508, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Palace); in a poem by Filippo Oriolo da Bassano (‘Il Monte Parnaso’, 1531); and in the famous letter by Aretino discussed in Chapter One. In 1582, the poet Cesare Caporali published two works in Berni’s style, Avvisi di Parnaso and Viaggio in Parnaso, giving birth to a new literary genre in which an imaginary world provides the backdrop for talking about literature and art in the space of an idealized Renaissance palazzo. During the first years of the seventeenth century, Traiano Boccalini and Miguel de Cervantes followed this same model, publishing the renowned and more politically oriented Ragguagli di Parnaso and Viaje del Parnaso, respectively. See Benigno, ‘Dialoghi dell’al di là’. 33 See Albala, Eating Right, pp. 143-154, esp. 144: ‘In Renaissance physiology, sexual appetite is directly linked to nutrition. Production of sperm is merely the last step of the entire digestive process, and it is generated directly from an excess of nutritive material remaining after the body has been nourished’.

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the body of the consumer meant that things were much more complicated than they appeared according to the relatively simplistic taxonomy of the Chain of Being discussed earlier. Asparagus, turnips, truffles, and chickpeas, despite being close to the soil and thus, theoretically, cold plants devoid of nutritional quality, were also – and contradictorily – considered hot foods that could incite lust, as could the lowly carrots and legumes that provided a ‘windy’ quality believed to be helpful for achieving an erection.34 What is lacking among these foods traditionally considered aphrodisiacal is fruit.35 The contemporary belief in the ancient doctrine of signatures may help to explain how fruit became part of the erotic imaginary. This doctrine argued that all plants and animals had a specific virtue (virtù) or ability that was inherent in their shape, or appearance.36 Clearly defined by Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, this notion was widely diffused and was part of common wisdom and knowledge, appearing in books of secrets and other popular literature.37 In this specific context, a food’s alleged aphrodisiac quality originated in its similarity to the shapes of human genitalia. Long root vegetables, such as carrots or leeks, had an obvious phallic shape, while the curving shape of the delicate fig, with its mysterious, fecund interior, recalled the intimate parts of a woman. The connection between apples or peaches and body parts may seem less immediate, but interestingly it was a poem on peaches by Berni that initiated the poetic tradition of sexualizing fruit and vegetables.

The peach and the apple, companions to the melon The ‘Capitolo in lode delle pèsche’, composed by Berni in 1522, is the first poem dedicated to one particular fruit and was widely recognized as the antecedent for all licentious poetry on fruit and other foodstuffs in the 34 The most successful food treatise of the fifteenth century, De honesta voluptate et valetudine by Platina (1421-1481), lists an impressive number of foods and recipes with aphrodisiacal properties. See Platina, On Right Pleasure for: partridges (book 5, pp. 255-257), truffles (b. 9, p. 411), oysters (b. 10, p. 437), onion and tubers (b. 3, p. 187), rocket or arugula (b. 3, p. 199), pine nuts (b. 3, p. 177), turnips (b. 7, p. 319), marzipan (b. 8, p. 379), and pies in broth (b. 8, p. 377). In the sixteenth century, the highly successful La singolare dottrina di M. Domenico Romoli sopranominato Panunto dell’ufficio dello scalco, which includes many of Platina’s recipes, considered foods such as onions, carrots, chickpeas, artichokes, arugula, marjoram, pine nuts, and leeks as aphrodisiacs. 35 On fruit, see Chapter One; on melons in particular, see Chapter Two. 36 ‘Nature endows everything with the form which is also the essence, and thus the form reveals the essence’. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life, pp. 34-35. 37 See Giannetti, ‘The Satyr in the Kitchen Pantry’, esp. pp. 106-107.

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sixteenth century.38 The poem turned on the perceived similarity of the shape and appearance of a peach to the bottom of a young man and the metaphors and euphemisms that could be built upon that visual similarity. In other poems that later followed Berni’s example, the rounded shape of melons, apples, and other similarly shaped fruits, was employed to similar effect. The peaches celebrated in this capitolo were healthy to eat and, by inference, to enjoy – in stark contrast with contemporary medical opinion that saw them as a cold, damp food, dangerous for one’s health. Notwithstanding this negative medical prescription, literature and culture had held a different vision of peaches as early as the fifteenth century: they were flavorsome and avidly desired, made for pleasurable eating, and denoted refined taste in the eater.39 Indeed, the cultivation and consumption of peaches and similar fruits had been growing steadily since the Middle Ages in all social groups and across geographical areas of Italy. 40 Practice and theory appear to diverge profoundly, then, in this period, as we have already seen with melons, which were denigrated by a long-lasting mythology of danger and unhealthfulness, despite being avidly consumed as we have seen. 41 Reading Berni’s poem on peaches makes it clear that mocking contemporary medical and dietetic literature on peaches was a deliberate choice that gave Berni the opportunity to criticize the classicizing culture of his day in its most pedantic aspects, inaugurating a fashion that was to become important for all Bernesque literature. Moreover since, according to Berni, the virtue of the peach was inscribed in its shape and in its resemblance to a youth’s bottom, the poem adds an ulterior meaning to the discussion of moralistic and/or religious prohibitions, suggesting counter to common knowledge that sodomy was not only a more delectable but 38 See Berni, ‘Capitolo in lode delle pèsche’. This section on Berni’s poem relies partially on Giannetti Ruggiero, ‘Forbidden Fruit’. 39 See section ‘The allure of fresh fruit’ in Chapter One. 40 According to local statuti, lower classes could not cultivate fruit trees (see Gullino, ‘Alberi da frutta negli statuti comunali piemontesi’) but progressively during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries fruit trees were planted in open spaces close to urban centers. See Naso, ‘Frutta e gastronomia’ p. 108. See also the recent study by Goodson, Cultivating the City in Early Medieval Italy: ‘In medieval Italy, people did indeed grow apples, as well as pears, figs, hazelnuts, chestnuts, citrons, cherries, and peaches as food crops’; p. 22. 41 See discussion on melons in Chapter Two. ‘It has been hypothesized that the stronger the prohibition of these foods was at the time – as strange food, as food fit only for courtiers, as dangerous food – the stronger became the desire to break the taboo. Peaches and melons came originally from Persia and from the Middle Eastern regions, lands of fabled beauty, abundance and corrupt customs, lands often associated with sodomy in popular beliefs; thus they could be seen as a sort of suspicious food right from their origins’; Giannetti Ruggiero, ‘The Forbidden Fruit’ at p. 40.

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also a healthier form of sexual activity. 42 A defense of sodomy had already been openly formulated in one of his first poems, ‘Capitolo a suo compare. A Messer Antonio da Bibbiena’, which was dedicated to his patron Antonio Dovizi da Bibbiena in 1518; there, Berni mocked his dedicatee for chasing after prostitutes, risking his money and health when instead he could use his paggi (servant boys) to satisfy his sexual needs. 43 The poem ‘Capitolo in lode delle pèsche’ affirms from its opening lines that all of the fruits forcefully rejected by medical literature – apples, berries, pears, plums, cherries, and melons – are instead tasty whether they are fresh or dried. It is peaches, however, that deserve first place. While learned medical literature recommended eating most types of fruit only before the meal, 44 Berni humorously and cleverly remarks, it is instead recommended that one enjoy peaches all the time, but especially after dinner: Oh fruit most blessed / good before, in the middle, and after dinner / but especially good in front and perfect from the rear!45 42 The term ‘sodomy’, as I employ it herein, refers to a sexual practice (anal intercourse) between men that early modern society, law, and religious authority (with local differences, e.g., between Venice and Florence) considered a crime and a sin against nature. Sodomy practiced between men and women was labeled in legal language an ‘unnatural act’. See Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, p. 114. 43 Poem quoted in Martines, Strong Words, p. 3. For the misogynistic poem ‘Capitolo a suo compare. A Messer Antonio da Bibbiena’, see Poeti del Cinquecento, vol. 1, pp. 669-672. An Italian scholar, commenting recently on this poem, reveals the diff iculty of detaching the work of critique from ‘moral’ judgments: ‘Per suo conto il poeta sa di non correre rischi, perdurando in una convinta e morbosa omosessualità, dichiarata esplicitamente nel capitolo d’un ragazzo’ (my emphasis); see Brestolini, ‘La poesia misogina’, p. 236. 44 See for instance Savonarola, Libreto de tute le cosse, p. 75, for advice regarding melons: ‘Voleno esser manzati in anti pasto, il perchè manzati dopo pasto fano il cibo del stomaco lubricare. Generano vento e cuossì fanno venire la colica’ (They want to be eaten before the meal, because after the meal they corrupt the food in the stomach, create wind and cause indigestion/colic). Savonarola’s opinion that melons and other cold/damp fruit should be eaten before the meal is repeated regularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; see for instance Bertaldo, Regole della sanità. But the advice was reversed for grapes and fresh figs, usually eaten at the end of dinner. 45 ‘O frutto sopra gli altri benedetto, / buono inanzi, nel mezzo e dietro pasto; / ma inanzi buon e di dietro perfetto!’, Berni, ‘Capitolo in lode delle pèsche’, vv. 10-12. The anonymous fifteenthcentury ‘Canzona delle pesche’, vv. 15-20, recognizes that most people prefer to eat peaches after the meal but concludes with a general exhortation to enjoy them anytime. Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘Canzona degli innestatori’, v. 46 – a poem dedicated to the act of grafting plants – includes peaches in its playful and lengthy descriptions of male–male and male–female sexual contact: ‘puossi ogni pianta, e pèsche anche innestare’ (every plant can be grafted, peaches included). Regarding ‘de nanzi’ and ‘de dietro,’ which clearly indicate different sexual practices in Berni’s poem, we might note that Maestro Martino de Rossi (also called Martino da Como) makes extensive use of the same expressions in his recipe book’s first chapter on the best preparations of meat. When discussing ‘carne di capretto’ (kid meat), he affirms that ‘la parte de dietro è

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The parodic obscenity of the frutto benedetto, which imaginatively and blasphemously evokes the solemn and holy praise of the Ave Maria’s benedictus fructus – revolves around playful grammar and the interchanging meaning of ‘before’/ ‘after’ and ‘in front’/ ‘from behind’. The reference to the sexual practice of sodomy is both clever and pointed. After this religious parody, the poem continues in the style of a medical recipe, reassuring readers that not only did peaches not corrupt the stomach but also they were ‘appetizing and cordial’ both before and after the meal with sodomitical implications, as well as ‘tasty, refined, restorative’.46 Like medicaments prepared by pharmacists, peaches help the sick regain their health. If Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder, and Theophrastus had nothing positive to say about them – Berni adds, almost as an afterthought – it was just because they did not consume peaches (and thereby, he suggests, did not practice sodomy). Unlike these ancient authorities, Berni continues, ‘today’ everyone likes a ‘good morsel’.47 By celebrating peaches and calling them a food that ‘everybody’ craved, Berni made two quite distinct interventions in contemporary discourse and practice. First, he joined earlier authors who contested the culinary ideology that linked fruit to class, considering peaches a luxury fruit reserved for only an elite few. Second, he assumed a male audience that favored sodomy – that is, by implication, the literary circles of the Vignaiuoli and Virtuosi. As such an audience would have recognized as a very specific reference, the poem goes on to reveal that the therapeutic virtue of peaches is hidden: They keep under themselves a mystery hidden (misterio ascosto) / the same as beccafichi and ortolani do / as well as other songbirds that begin (to get fat) in August. 48 meglio arrosto’ (the rear is better roasted); he further notes: ‘de la carne del cervo la parte de nanzi è bona in brodo lardieri’ (the front part of the deer is good in larded broth) and ‘carne de lepore è tutta bona arrosta, ma la parte de dietro è migliore’ (hare meat is all good roasted, but the rear part is best); Martino da Como, Libro de arte coquinaria, pp. 1-2. It is worth considering how this language came to be transferred from a recipe book into poems and novelle of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 46 ‘Son le pèsche apritive e cordiali, / saporite, gentil, restorative, / come le cose c’ hanno gli speziali’ (Peaches are appetizing and cordial [drinks that aide the stomach in eating and digesting] / tasty, delicate and restorative / just like the things apothecaries sell); Berni, Capitolo in lode delle pèsche’, vv. 43-45; 47 ‘Le pèsche eran già cibo da prelati, / ma, perché ad ognun piace i buon bocconi, / vogliono oggi le pèsche insino i frati, / che fanno l’astinenzie e l’orazioni’(Peaches used to be a priest’s food / but because everybody likes a good mouthful/even friars / who practice abstinence and pray / want peaches today); Berni, ‘Capitolo in lode delle pèsche’, vv. 28-31. 48 ‘Hanno sotto di sé misterio ascosto / com’hanno I beccafichi e gli ortolani, / e gli altri uccei che comincian d’agosto’; Berni, ‘Capitolo in lode delle pèsche’, vv. 52-54.

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The reference to beccafichi (warblers) and ortolani (ortolans) might well have been recognized by his readership as bird metaphors for the erect male sexual organ. 49 The ‘misterio ascosto’ in the peach, however, remains ambivalent: Is the sexual practice alluded to sodomitical or heterosexual? After all, the beccafico could also perhaps allude to male–female intercourse – uniting, as it does, the fig and the bird in one word.50 Though even less evident, it may be that ortolano also alludes to male–female sex, all of this confusion and obfuscation making a definitive sexual reading virtually impossible.51 Nevertheless, it seems that at the most straightforward level – in a poem that is anything but straightforward and, I would suggest, intentionally so – the hidden mystery Berni refers to is once again that his peach is a male bottom and the sex he is lauding in a cleverly ambiguous manner is male–male sex; his little birds’ sexual appetites have been redirected by the peach to, from his perspective, a tastier dish. The mystery can thus be experienced only through the senses, and only the worthy deserve to understand it – namely readers, like his peers, who understand both the poem and the pleasures of the ‘peach’. Berni concludes the poem mischievously: ‘The most fortunate is he / who can give or take peaches’.52 At a deeper level in his irreverence, Berni 49 According to Dall’Orto, Tutta un’altra storia, pp. 258-261, Berni (and Bernesque poetry) inherited from Burchiello the idea of coitus as essentially a male–male sodomitical/anal act, although male–female vaginal coitus is present in the poetry as well. 50 Grazzini (1503-1584) wrote a celebrated ‘Capitolo in lode de’ beccafichi’. Dall’ Orto, Tutta un’altra storia, p. 260, lists ‘beccafico’ as one of the words used to indicate a passive sodomite. 51 Silvia Longhi referenced a few verses that may have inspired Berni from the mock epic poem Morgante, which involve male–female intercourse: ‘Piovano Arlotto ch’avea più volte in su questo pensato / perché e’ sapeva e v’e misterio sotto, / e finalmente or l’avria ritrovato: / cioè che Cristo a Maddalena apparve / in ortolan, che buon sozio gli parve’; Pulci, Morgante, p. 1106 (xxv, 217, vv. 4-8). In Canto XXV, Pulci assigned to Piovano Arlotto – a notorious jester of the fifteenth century – responsibility for explaining the mystery of the goodness of little birds. According to Arlotto’s irreverent and blasphemous explanation, Christ after the resurrection (the ‘resurrection of the flesh’, to use Boccaccio’s euphemism for an erection) appeared to Mary Magdalene in the orchard as an ortolano, a word that indicates the bird as well as a garden caretaker. If Berni took from Pulci the reference to a blasphemous ‘misterio’, the suggestion is that Christ appeared to Mary an ortolano with an erection; see Longhi, ‘Francesco Berni. Rime’, p. 694, notes 52-54. The oldest reference of this type can be traced back to Decameron III. 1, where the supposedly mute Masetto di Lamporecchio becomes an ortolano (gardener) in a nunnery. See also Bandello, Novelle, p. 126 (novella 5): ‘Egli dubitò che ella altrove non si provedesse d’ortolani che il di lei giardino coltivassero’. My emphasis. 52 ‘Io ho sempre avuto fantasia, / per quanto possi un indovino apporre, / che sopra gli altri avventurato sia / colui che può le pèsche dare e tôrre’ (I always had this fantasy/ as far as a seer can predict / he is the most fortunate / who can offer or take peaches); Berni, ‘Capitolo in lode delle pèsche’, vv. 73-76. Romei, an Italian scholar of Berni’s poetry, applies modern categories

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may have overturned as well the classical and contemporary stereotypical vision of sex and sodomy as based on an active/passive dynamic.53 ‘Is this merely a playful reversal or a suggestive indication that the active/passive age hierarchy that was the ideal for Renaissance male–male sexual relations was more flexible than it appeared, and that some males both desired peaches and offered them, perhaps Berni himself’.54 Whether suggesting such a radical notion or not, Berni’s peaches play with the conflict between contemporary dietary advice and medical theory, on the one hand, and everyday practice, both alimentary and sexual, on the other. In turn, as a very well-known poem on the sexual side of a beloved fruit, the ‘Capitolo in lode delle pèsche’ aptly embodies the rich complexity of Renaissance imagination regarding food and sex. ~~~ Apples shared with peaches their shape and sexual function, as can be seen in a capitolo by Andrea Lori entitled ‘In lode delle mele, a Luca Valoriani’55 that was published for the f irst time in Florence in the Secondo Libro dell’opere burlesche (1555).56 Probably written at least ten years prior, Lori’s poem followed Berni’s example closely; its initial disclaimer that the author was talking about actual apples, not ‘those of love’,57 shows how the poetic of sexual preference to the poet, writing with a judgmental tone. See Romei, Introduction to Francesco Berni, Rime, p. 6: ‘Di queste prime prove il carattere di spicco è l’impudente e aggressiva omosessualità, la scanzonata misoginia. […] Anche più tardi, finché il Berni vivrà nella ‘famiglia’ del Bibbiena, a conferma della tolleranza che lo circondava, il motivo omosessuale sarà replicato senza pudori’ (my emphasis). Berni, in Dialogo contra i poeti (1525), explored, among other topics, connections between poets and sodomitical sexuality. 53 Roles in sexual interactions between men were determined by age. The passive partner in sodomitical relationships was usually the younger, between the age of twelve and eighteen. The active partner was an adult male, older than eighteen/twenty years old. In Venice, the formal legal distinction between passive and active sodomy in court records dates from the mid-1440s (Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, p. 121) although the distinction is found regularly in earlier criminal cases reflected in the minor penalties for passive partners; laws in Florence also distinguished between active and passive roles in sodomitical acts (Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, p. 88). 54 See Giannetti Ruggiero, ‘Forbidden Fruit’, p. 47. 55 The poet and translator Andrea Lori (1520s-1579) was a friend of Grazzini and of Ludovico Domenichi. For his biography, see ‘Nota su Andrea Lori’. 56 Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, fols. 125r-127v. According to Longhi, there is no proof that Grazzini collaborated on this edition. Giunti published a reprint of this edition in the same year. 57 ‘Le mele / io non dico di quelle degli amori’. Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, v. 4.

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equivalence between a round fruit and a youth’s bottom, as established by Berni’s poem, was already becoming a topos: If you want that I light the candles And that I hold you and thus adore you, Remember me, Luca, at the Apples. I am not talking about those of love Lest you would understand it in an unfortunate sense, But about those others, which you gather outdoors. Alas, I am not thinking about those inside But about yours from the farm, which you said You would send me; every one of my senses is full of them.58

Lori clarified, tongue firmly in cheek, that the poem would speak only talking of garden apples, not those ‘inside’, reminding his dedicatee that he had promised to bring them and that if he did not deliver, the author would die. The poem is replete with suggestions of sodomy: references to priests who ask young boys to bring them apples; the commonality of apples in school; the preference for oval and round shapes; and use of the word guasto (damaged) to indicate someone who was in love with someone else.59 Even women who initially defended the fig (the fruit representative of the vagina and vaginal sex) were now offering apples (their buttocks, for sodomy) to their friends to keep their gardens tended.60 58 ‘Se tu vuoi, che io t’accenda le candele / e ch’io ti tenga, e per questo t’adori, / ricordati di me, Luca, a le Mele. / Io non dico di quelle de gli amori / Che tu non intendessi a tristo senso, / ma di quell’altre, che ricoi di fuori. / Quelle di dentro, affe, ch’io non ci penso, / ma le tue dal poder, che tu dicesti / già di mandarmi, io n’ho pieno ogni senso’; Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, vv. 1-9. My emphasis. 59 ‘Ben se ne sono accorti certi Abati, / che se ne fan portar sempre dinanzi / da certi giovanetti lor creati’ (Certain abbots noticed that it is good / and always ask some young boys, their creatures, to bring them [apples]); Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, vv. 25-27. ‘Quivi è l’ovato, il quadro, il lungo e il tondo / quantunque a me la forma circolare, / c’abbia il suo largo il lungo e ‘l suo profondo / mi par a me che si possa trovare’ (Here is the oval, the square, the line and the circle / although it seems to me that a round shape / which is large, straight and deep / can be found); Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, vv. 37-39. ‘Or tornando a quel frutto almo, e divino, / io ne son guasto’ (Now returning to that noble and divine fruit / I am madly in love with); Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, vv. 43-44. Guasto also had a more general and legal meaning, implying someone who was perceived to have a sexual injury or dysfunction. 60 ‘Le donne al primo steron sul crudele, / dicendo lor pastocchie sopra il f ico, / poi ancor esse han calato le vele / E si sono risolute a qualche amico, / de le mele, ch’elle han dietro al lor frutto, che è si buon frutto, / dar, per non fare il lor giardin mendico’ (Women at first being so cruel / telling their lies about the fig / now even they have lifted the veils / and have offered to

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Lori, like Berni before him, affirmed with this poem that sodomy was widely diffused as a trope and could be practiced not only among men but also between men and women.61 Moreover, the poem continues, banquets and wedding feasts would not exist without apples; along with fennel and wine they are a perfect remedy for an upset (guasto) stomach.62 Like peaches, they are good before, during, and at the end of the meal, but Lori’s preference, he declares, is for apples ‘before’ (dinanzi) – the implication being that he preferred the active role in sodomy.63 In turn the classical doctrines of Galen and Hippocrates, who strongly advised against eating apples in their medical works, he rejected laughingly noting that ‘today’ everybody uses the apple tree, from young boys to pedants.64 The poem concludes with a series of erotically suggestive recommendations on how to grow apples and store them, and especially how to use them, and with a plea to Luca Valoriani to finally bring him the apples he so desired.65 a friend / some apples, that they have behind their fruit, which is such good fruit / to give, so that their gardens don’t remain wanting); Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, vv. 79-84. 61 Lori’s poem offers an interesting view on early modern female sexuality and the practice of sodomy between women and men. Although we cannot take at face value the affirmation that even women prefer to practice sodomy with men, Lori’s poem opens up a perspective on female sexual pleasure. 62 ‘Ma dimmi, ove si fece mai convito, / banchetto, o nozze, o pur solo un cenino, / che di cibo cotal non sia fornito? / Fra due mele il finocchio, e un centellino / di vin, t’acconcia lo stomaco guasto, / e ti fa ‘l fiato, e’l celabro divino’ (But tell me, when have you ever had a dinner-party / banquet, wedding, or even only a supper / that was not well provided with that food? / between two apples the fennel and a sip of wine / fixes your damaged stomach / and makes your breath and your brain divine); Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, vv. 103-108. 63 ‘Son buone innanzi, in mezzo, e dopo pasto, / ma sopra tutto dinanzi io le voglio’ (They are good before, in the middle and after the meal / but mostly I want them in front); Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, vv. 109-110. 64 ‘Onde si scorge oggi il melo per tutto / usarsi, e fino a’ putti, ed a pedanti, / che vanno spesso in zoccoli per l’asciutto / Leggi in Galieno, in Ipocrate, e in tanti / altri, che fur dottor di medicina, / perché di questo io non vò dir più innanti’ (Today everybody uses the apple tree [referring to the fruit] / from young boys to pedants who often go in clogs for dry land [a common reference to anal intercourse] / read Galen, Hippocrates and many others that were medical doctors / as I do not want to talk about this anymore); Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, vv. 87-93. The Italian term for apple tree (il melo) is synonymous with ‘buttocks’ and can be substituted in Italian for apples themselves. See examples in Toscan, Le Carnaval du langage, vol. 3, p. 1441. The poor woman brings to her dowry three ‘poderi’ (land properties): ‘ficheto’, ‘meleto’, and ‘poppeto’ (a Tuscan motto, cited in Boggione and Casalegno, Dizionario, p. 558). 65 ‘Sarecci a dir, / com’ella si ripone, / acciò non si guasti, e si mantenga; e quai fra le miglior sien le più buone. / E qual terra a piantarle è la più degna: / benché la basti giovin, bianca, e soda, / a voler ch’altri sue dolcezze goda: / come tener si dee pulito, e asciutto / il magazzin, dove le stanno ascose’ (It is also worth explaining / how to store the apple / so it won’t spoil; and [know] which ones are the best / what is the best soil to plant them in / although it is enough

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Apples and their appeal returned mid-century in a capitolo written by the editor of the first collection of Bernesque poems, Anton Francesco Grazzini (1503-1584), who was an accomplished poet and dramatist himself.66 After defending his use of his mother tongue instead of the Petrarchan ‘rime leggiadre’,67 Grazzini embarked upon an encomium to apples that cleverly melded together its agricultural and sexual merits. The poem names several contemporary varieties of apples, concluding that mele rose (pink apples) are the best.68 In the following verses, the poem plays with a comparison between the fruit itself and a youth’s bottom, stating that pink apples are honored ‘today’ by religious and lay people alike – who, to no one’s surprise, prefer them over figs. Grazzini, too, employed the typical lexicon of sodomy (dreto, dietro, guasto) as well as that of recipe books (mele saporite, mele buone e dolci; tasty apples, good and sweet apples).69 There is no mention, however, of doctors’ warnings about the negative impact on health that can be caused by eating such fruit, as can be seen not only in their tracts but also in other poems. The last part of the capitolo weighs in on the different taste – gastronomical and sexual – of apples eaten raw or cooked, concluding that the best flavor resides in fresh apples. Interestingly, Grazzini uses the noun sapore (flavor/taste) and the verb gustarle (to taste them) in the same line in order to compare fresh or raw apples with ones that are cooked, roasted, or boiled. So that no one here will reproach me saying: / he who cannot eat them raw / shall eat them cooked, roasted or boiled: / in tasting them they have if the apple is young, white and firm / if you want others to enjoy its sweetness / [and] how to keep clean and dry / the storage, where you hide them); Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, vv. 133-144. 66 Besides editing the Primo libro dell’opere burlesche, Grazzini – who had the nickname of Il Lasca in the Accademia degli Umidi which he helped found in 1540 – published I sonetti by Burchiello and the famous 1559 collection of Trionfi and canti carnascialeschi. He was also a prolific author of comedies. 67 ‘Rime leggiadre’ refer to the fashionable Petrarchan mode of writing poetry. Grazzini, ‘In lode delle mele’, vv. 16-21. 68 ‘vie più dell’altre belle e saporose / son da tutte le genti giudicate / cordiali e miglior, le mele rose’ (Pink apples are judged by all the people / cordial and better, / more beautiful and tasty than all others); Grazzini, ‘In Lode delle mele’, vv. 31-36. Mele rose were a prized varietal (see Virgili and Neri, ‘Mela rosa’) in Tuscany and central Italy that were painted by the Medicean artist Bartolommeo Bimbi. Bimbi painted several canvases for Cosimo de’ Medici that included more than 100 varieties of apples. See the entry for ‘apple’ in Riley, The Oxford Companion to Italian Food, pp. 18-20. 69 ‘Son queste in tutto il mondo oggi onorate / da secolari, e da religiosi / tenute più ch’i fichi care e grate’ (Those are today honored all over the world / by religious and lay people alike / held dear and appreciated more than figs); Grazzini, ‘In Lode delle mele’, vv. 37-39.

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not the same taste as the raw / therefore it would be best to eat them raw, and give vent to the desire to touch them.70

The distinction between raw and cooked, with apologies to Lévi Strauss, turns on the distinction between male–male sodomy and the ideal of vaginal sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, confirming once again Grazzini’s claims for the superiority of the former. In fact, although he is playing with the contemporary sexual lexicon of ‘roasted’ as reference to male–male sodomy, and ‘boiled’ as reference to (vaginal) intercourse with a woman, here he is clearly declaring his preference for young boys, ‘fresh raw fruit’, and active sodomy.71 It is moreover interesting to note, in this context, that since fresh fruit in a more literal sense was the epitome of luxury food, it was the perfect metaphor for male–male sodomy as Grazzini portrayed it: a sexual activity that was not for every taste – only the most discerning. Suggestively, Grazzini here displays a preference for active sodomy, although he also presents passive sodomy in a positive light.72 In sixteenth-century Italy, male–male sodomy was held to be a mortal sin and a crime against nature, God, and society; legally, it was regularly deemed worthy of capital punishment, although usually only for the active partner. Nonetheless, it was widely practiced and (at least ideally) organized in a patriarchal and hierarchical fashion that mirrored the rest of society and thus made it somewhat less troubling. In theory as well as in practice, young males in their late teens and twenties were to take the dominant active role, sexually and socially – seeking out peaches, apples, and melons – while younger youths in their early teens took the passive role – offering apples, peaches, and melons. The poems analyzed in this chapter – with their positive visions of young, fruit-like bottoms and of sexual intercourse with youths – reflect a 70 ‘ma perch’alcun qua non mi riprendesse, dicendo: chi non puote crude usarle, / le mangi cotte, voglia arrosto o lesse: / sì ma ‘l sapor non hanno nel gustarle, come le fresche, ond’è me’ cento volte / averne crude, e sfogarsi a toccarle’; Grazzini, ‘In Lode delle mele’, vv. 91-96. 71 Dall’Orto, Tutta un’altra storia, 260, explains the expressions commonly used to distinguish male–male sodomy and vaginal coitus: arrosto/lesso, asciutto/umido, tondo/quadro, crudo/cotto, etc. 72 Passive sodomy, when exercised by a young boy, was punished less harshly; but when the culprit was an older man, the punishment was more severe. Passive sodomy was associated with female sex and immature youth and was not acceptable in mature males, who had to conform to ‘virile’ behavior: ‘The restriction of the “womanly” role to adolescents actually permitted all mature men to engage in sex with boys without jeopardizing their “male” gender identity’; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, p. 13. In Venice the passive partner usually suffered a lighter penalty, while the active was often executed; Ruggiero, Boundaries of Eros, p. 121. In sixteenth-century Florence, penalties became lighter for both partners over time; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, pp. 51-53 and 60-64.

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contemporary notion of passive sodomy that rejected religious condemnation as well as secular standards of behavior while portraying in verse a more general everyday vision of such practices. As we have seen, peaches, apples, and melons – as simply peaches, apples, and melons – were perceived as dangerous foods and were usually forbidden by the classical dietetic and medical texts that were so faithfully reiterated by Renaissance authors. What better way, then, for the Bernesque poets to playfully extoll sodomy – the forbidden sin of the Renaissance – than to praise the forbidden fruits of the Renaissance?73

Figs and salads Returning briefly to Andrea Lori’s poem on apples, we might note that it rehearses, at the end, the well-known and popular contemporary debate on the merits of figs and apples, arguing that apples are more worthy of honor than figs. The reason for this – the poet humorously claims – is the fact that one remains upright and ‘behind’ in order to ‘possess’ an apple, while figs ‘catch’ one naked and in a lower position, not standing up: The fact that apples are more honored, believe me / the reason is, figs catch you naked and in a low position / although not standing. / But I tell you / you need to stand, always, / behind the bad shield, or you will not possess the kind apples.74

Once again, active sodomy is cleverly presented here as a more honorable practice than intercourse with a woman, whose fig ‘captures’ her partner, forcing him off his feet and into a low and demeaning position. These lines are noteworthy for going against the grain of contemporary assumptions about sexuality and gender, which often tended to limit women to the role of passive recipient. Here, instead, the vagina is granted enough power to ‘capture’ males and force them to humble themselves. It is remarkable that, whereas in contemporary society female sexuality was seen as passive and thus could be equated to passive sodomy,75 in Lori’s poem it is presented as 73 Giannetti Ruggiero, ‘Forbidden Fruit’, p. 43. 74 ‘Ma ch’abbin più di onor le mele credi, / La cagion è, ch’i fichi basso, e nudo / Ancor ti piglian, benché non sia in piedi. / Ma le mele gentili, al malo scudo, / Ritto bisogna stare. Sempre, e dietro, / ch’altrimenti non s’hanno, io ti conchiudo’; Lori, ‘Capitolo in lode delle Mele’, vv. 120-126. 75 In early modern Florence passive sodomites were often represented as women, as we know from fifteenth-century protocols in sodomy trials and from popular sexual imagery. See Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, pp. 107-109; see also Ruggiero, ‘Marriage, Love, Sex’.

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active and aggressive. While much of this disparagement of the fig was in part a playful response to the celebrated poem on figs by Molza, the banter enabled Lori to portray women and their figs as active rather than passive. Francesco Maria Molza, who was a prolific poet in Latin and Italian,76 dedicated two long capitoli in terza rima to figs and salad that were published in the first and second volumes of the Opere burlesche but written years earlier. The poem on figs earned him the nickname Il Fico in the academy and Padre Siceo77 in the prose commentary by his friend Annibal Caro. In the ‘Capitolo in lode de fichi’ (Capitolo in praise of figs), the poet takes up the defense of the fig in response to an invitation by the god Apollo to dedicate more attention to a fruit that had been overlooked by Molza’s fellow academicians: I thought I’d praise the melon, / when Febus smiled and said: / ‘Don’t allow the fig to be neglected’ / However, if you wish to follow the path / that Berni ran with his early poetry / It is your craft now and then to stiffen your wit.78

Since it was Apollo who suggested the fig as a topic (and the need for a kind of intellectual erection – a stiffening of the poet’s wit), Molza asked for the god’s forgiveness: to make the case for the fig,79 the poet writes, he would have to declare its superiority to Apollo’s laurel. Thus, after declaring that he was following Berni’s mode of writing on fruit, Molza embarked upon a playful re-reading of the mythical history of the fig. The poet claimed that when Bacchus (Jove’s son, Apollo’s brother, and the god of wine and ecstasy) celebrated his triumph against Indians on the river Ganges, he placed upon his head a garland made of precious figs brogiotti instead of laurel – the Roman symbol of victory and glory for poets, military condottieri, and religious leaders.80 But poets who came later (literally ‘came from behind’, 76 A follower of Petrarch and Bembo, Molza authored verses for Giulia Gonzaga and his protector Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici as well as comedies and novelle. 77 From σΰκον, the Greek word for fig. 78 ‘Di lodare il mellone avea pensato, / quando Febo sorrise, e ‘Non fia vero / che ‘l fico’ disse ‘resti abbandonato’. / Però, se di seguir brami il sentiero, / che ’l Bernia corse col cantar suo pria, / drizzar quivi lo ’ngegno or fia mestiero’; ‘Capitolo de’ fichi’, in Molza, Capitoli erotici, pp. 43-58 at vv. 1-6. All references to the poem are to lines from this edition. 79 The fig was among the trees consecrated to Bacchus. 80 ‘Pur dirò, scorto omai dal tuo favore, / che d’assai vince il fico ogn’altra fronde; / perdonimi il tuo lauro, o mio Signore. / Cinto di fichi il crin, già su le sponde / del Gange trionfò pur tuo fratello, / tu ’l sai, al cui veder nulla s ‘asconde’ (Still I will say now in your favor / that the fig conquers every other branch easily / would that your laurel will excuse me, o my Lord / The ridge ringed by figs, along the shores / of the Ganges was in fact conquered by your brother /

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venner di dietro), Molza lamented, abandoned the fig and made use of laurel wreaths to celebrate poetic and military triumphs.81 Indeed, the laurel was used most often by early modern Italians to symbolize poetry, glory, and victory, but it was a plant that did not bear fruit.82 Thus the contrast between the laurel and the fig – and by implication between unproductive and fertile poetry, glory, and, by extension, sexual acts – could be used by Molza to introduce with subtlety his intention to speak against Bernesque sodomy. Why did Molza use the term fico (in its masculine gender form) rather than fica (the feminine form) as a symbol for the female sexual organ? A brief etymological digression will explain. In modern Italian sexual slang, fica or figa can refer to the vagina or to a sexually attractive woman, while figo indicates a kind of male ‘coolness’ and can refer to a fashionable man, with fewer overtones of actual sexiness. For current Italian readers, therefore, it might seem surprising that Molza uses fico instead. In the sixteenth century, however, Molza had to reckon with a very complex exegetical tradition regarding the symbolic meanings of fico as a fruit, which had an explicitly sexual meaning as it was traditionally associated with Dionysus and Bacchus. As divine protection for orchards (and often confused with a Priapus), an image of Dionysus/Bacchus or of a large phallus was often carved into fig wood, a phenomenon amusingly exploited by many Bernesque poets and by Molza himself.83 But faulty etymology, medicine and gastronomy were also nicely embodied in the word ‘fig’ and playfully employed in the poem. Strange as it may seem, figs were closely associated with the liver. In ancient Roman cookery, the Latin word iecur ficatum referred to animal liver fattened with figs.84 The shortened ficatum then became the word both as you know, since nothing escapes you); Molza, ‘Capitolo de’ fichi’, vv. 22-27. ‘O mio Signore’ is Phoebus Apollo, to whom the laurel was consecrated; Molza asks his forgiveness for praising the fig. Figs brogiotti were one of the best varietals: they were reddish in color and are compared by Molza to piropo (pyrope), a mineral variety of red granite. 81 ‘Non so come quest’ uso poi lasciaro / quei che venner di dietro ed in lor vece / il lauro assai più che le fiche amaro’ (I’m not sure why they gave up this way of eating them, / those poets who came later [from behind], / and in place of figs loved the laurel much more); Molza, ‘Capitolo de’ fichi’, vv. 34-36. 82 Not fruit eaten from the tree but a type of berry that was used in various ways. 83 ‘Quinci gli antichi ebber mirabil cura / d’intagliare I Priapi sol nel legno / del fico e fecer loro giusta misura’ (Hence the ancients took remarkable care / to carve Priapi only in fig-wood and did it according to nature); Molza, ‘Capitolo de’ fichi’, vv. 64-66. The story does not appear in the usual sources of Greek mythology. The double meaning points to the preference for the heterosexual coitus, as the verb ‘intagliare’ and the expression ‘giusta misura’ allude to the heterosexual (secondo natura, according to nature) act of penetration. 84 Galen, in De alimentorum facultatibus, even attributed healing properties to the liver of a goose fed with figs; this would later become known as a rare gastronomical delicacy. Apicius

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for liver and for the gastronomical practice that was used to fatten the liver of animals, creating a dish that was very popular in ancient Rome. From ficatum we have the Italian fegato and the Venetian figà for ‘liver’ as well as the vernacular term fica. This last was feminine since the Latin ficus, the fig tree, was gendered feminine, but the fruit it bore was masculine: fico.85 Molza thus lauded the masculine fico, as was customary in contemporary Italian when talking of the fruit, in order to praise the vagina (and the sexual act with women) – what we would now call fica.86 As mentioned above, Molza claimed that figs were divine, having been created by Jove, and that the ancients carved their Priapus only in f ig wood – implying, thereby, that they practiced only heterosexual sex. The explanation used by Molza plays on the action of ‘innestare’ (to graft) a fig tree and the heterosexual act. Both are acts of fertility.87 Turning to the origin of the human race, Molza recalls the ancient Mediterranean tradition that affirmed that the fig – not the apple – was the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden and caused the Fall.88 But even though he affirmed that the fig was the forbidden fruit, he claimed – with some fancy footwork – that it was not the cause of the original sin. Neither was poor Adam at fault, as he simply could not resist the sweetness of the fig. Instead, the Devil was to gives a recipe for fig-liver that could be roasted, fried, or prepared as a pâté; the habit of fattening animals continued throughout the Middle Ages. See Faas, Around the Roman Table, p. 258. Modern versions of ficatum include fegatelli in Italy and foie gras in France. 85 I am relying on Franco Júnior, ‘Between the Fig’, esp. pp. 11-12. 86 Caro, in his playful commentary on the poem, explains that ‘fig and nature are the same thing’ as ‘la fava, e ‘l Naturale, e Dio Priapo sono tutt’ uno’ (the fava, and the Natural, and Priapus the god are all one). He also adds that there is no doubt that ‘il fico e la fava insieme facciano ogni cosa’ (the fig and the fava together will make everything) and ‘quelli che vogliono che il medesimo facciano la fava e le Mele s’ingannano’ (those who want the fava and the Apples to make the same thing are fooling themselves); see Caro, Comento di Ser Agresto, p. 119. In 1924, in his collection Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, the English poet D. H. Lawrence plays on the gender of figs in his poem ‘Figs’: ‘The fig is a very secretive fruit. As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic: / and it seems male. / But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female. / The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit’. 87 ‘Cortese è di natura e dà ricetto / ad ogni frutto e chi nel fico innesta / non perde tempo e vedesi l’effetto’ (It is courteous by nature and gives shelter / to every fruit, and whoever grafts himself to the fig / wastes no time and will see the effect); Molza, ‘Capitolo de’ fichi’, vv. 70-72. 88 For the exegesis identifying the fig as the forbidden fruit and on its iconography in Romanesque art, see Franco Júnior, ‘Between the Fig’. Although Western tradition more frequently considers the apple as the tree of knowledge, in Genesis there is no mention of the type of fruit, whereas the fig tree is mentioned as one of the trees in the garden. When the Bible was translated into Latin, confusion between the neuter adjective malum (evil) and the noun mālus (apple tree) may be responsible for the traditional attribution. In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo represented the tree of knowledge as a fig tree and the Devil as a serpent with feminine traits.

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blame for tempting Adam and the fig, consequently, was responsible only for a positive event: the beginning of humanity. This entire poem on figs is constructed in the style typical of Bernesque poems: the beginning coincides with the exordium that presents the object to be lauded; the story of the mythical origin of the fig follows, along with enumeration of the properties that make it excellent: sweetness, vivid color, and its wood – the kind that can be carved with Priapus figures. The ancient myths and traditions lend a kind of dignity to the humble subject, as in the best humoristic tradition of Bernesque poetry. However, the poem is also an elaborately drawn euphemism for the superiority of the feminine fig and for heterosexual relations, targeted against poems dedicated to other fruits with sodomitical associations. To strengthen his position against sodomy, Molza added that he could not find any reason at all why someone would complain about figs, unless their taste (gusto) had been distorted by the consumer chasing after (dietro) peaches and apples.89 He presented, as a classic example, the pedant – portrayed mockingly over several verses much like the sodomite pedant of many sixteenth-century comedies, here also depicted as a stupid drunk incapable of speaking proper Latin. After a series of lengthier historical and mythical digressions, the poem ends with the acknowledgement of the fig’s superiority even to divine ambrosia. Molza’s poem touches with humor upon a series of learned discourses: ancient history and mythology, medieval romance and more contemporary literature, and the languages of botany and poetry. The laurel tree had a precedent in Laura and Petrarchan poetry; it was also a figure for chastity and for the triumph of high poetry. By conjuring up the superiority of the fecund fig over the laurel at the beginning of his poem, Molza affirmed the superiority of amore carnale over spiritual love alongside a rejection of classical Petrarchan poetry. The embodied imagination of the fig and its desirable material attributes made it the perfect metaphor for Molza to reject the widely affirmed and dominant poetic taste for refined and noble love in favor of carnal love and, at the same time, to reject the sodomitical tastes of those who sought to consume peaches and apples.90 This rejection 89 ‘Non truovo con ragion chi si querelle / di lei, se non qualchun ch’ ha torto il gusto dietro a le pèsche over dietro a le mele’ (I don’ t see the reason to fight over / her, if not because someone had misplaced their taste following behind peaches or apples); Molza, ‘Capitolo de’ fichi’, vv. 79-81. 90 The ‘Capitolo de’ fichi’ was probably written by Molza for his admission to the Accademia dei Vignaiuoli in 1532-1533 and was first published in Rome in 1539 by Antonio Blado, along with Caro’s Comento di Ser Agresto. Although this poem was written in Bernesque style and spirit, nonetheless it also expressed Molza’s opinion in the current questione della lingua, arguing in favor of the contemporary speech of Tuscany, against Bembo’s linguistic program to freeze poetic

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was extended in Molza’s second capitolo in terza rima from this same period, this time to extol the virtues of salad:91 The debate over who will be the winner / salad or melon is still open, but those who understand / such things say openly that salad should have the place of honor.92

Like other Bernesque poets, Molza constructs a hybrid poem in which the parodic obscenity of praising salad goes hand in hand with praise of this newly fashionable food – and mockery of the antiquarian scholarship and philosophy so popular in his time. The poem begins with an invocation to the poet Trifone Benci93 to help him sing the praises of salad and to tell its story. By explaining, over several terzine, the origin and inventor of a new vivanda – the salad – Molza’s intent was to mock, in Bernesque style, contemporary discussions of antiquarian scholarship – in particular grammatical works. He begins in an ironic mode by citing the medieval Dottrinale by Alessandro di Villedieu, the Calepino – a famous Latin dictionary authored in 1502 by Ambrogio Calepino (1440-1520) – and Priscian’s Latin grammar in 18 volumes that was very popular from the Middle Ages on. He then proceeds to use them merely to conclude that it would be harmful to know too much and that it would therefore be better simply to explain what salad was according to contemporary usage (per volgare) where it was clear that ‘everyone calls it after salt’.94 The organizing conceit of the poem remains sexual, however: as in the case of the capitolo on figs, the salad poem is a defense of sex with women. A salata/insalata was a mixture of greens upon which salt was sprinkled.95 forms in the earlier Tuscan forms of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The Comento on Molza’s poem was an obscene commentary that remarked line by line on the poem. On the Comento’s often being mistakenly dated to 1538, see the clarification given in Simons and Kornell, ‘Appendix’, pp. 1092-1093. Molza’s poem was later inserted, without the Comento, in the second edition of the Opere burlesche published in 1555 in Florence by Giunti. 91 ‘Capitolo dell’insalata’, in Molza, Capitoli erotici, pp. 59-74. All references to the poem are to lines from this edition. 92 ‘Sotto il giudico ancor la lite pende / qual debbia di ragion il pregio avere / l’insalata / o ’l melone, e chi s’intende / di cotai cose apertamente dice / ch’a l’insalata il primo onor si rende’; Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 185-189. 93 Benci was a friend of Molza as well as a diplomat, courtier, poet, and member of the Accademia degli Sdegnati (founded in Rome by Girolamo Ruscelli). He is also one of the protagonists of the dialogue by Modio, Il convito ovvero del peso della moglie. 94 ‘del sale ogni uom l’usi chiamare’; Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 85-87. 95 ‘E fu prima col sale accompagnata / da chi chi fosse il trovator dabbene / e così l’insalata fu nomata’ (And it was first accompanied by salt / by whoever the great inventor was / and so it was named salad); Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 103-105.

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In the classical world, salata meant herba salata – vegetables seasoned with brine. The phallic shape of the salt-cellar and the action of pouring a white substance over salad could have inspired the metaphor of salt-cellar as penis expelling salty semen and of salad as a euphemism for receptive female genitals. Salt was also a common metaphor for wit, ingegno, which in turn was a popular poetic euphemism for the phallus.96 In his etymology and history of salad, Molza applies a gastronomical description of the dressing of a tasty Italian salad to sexual preferences for women and even sexualized national identities: But then, as it happens / that you cannot find everything in one point, / he worked to improve it with firm hope / since he did not want / as before / to eat it dry / and added vinegar to it / and it was a great result / but in the end it was adding oil that made it a perfect dish.97

The story begins with a clarification about the great inventor of salad (‘il trovator dabbene’, v. 104) who was tired of eating his salad (i.e., his woman) ‘dry’ – that is, with no dressing but salt (‘Né volse, come pria, mangiar asciutto’, v. 109). Thus, he first tried adding vinegar (‘ché l’aceto v’ aggiunse’, v. 110) – that is, heterosexual sodomy – and, seeing the excellent results (‘e fu gran sorte’, v. 110), decided to experiment more, creating a dressing with salt, vinegar, and oil (‘alfin con l’olio ne cavò il construtto’, v. 111): At the same time that Molza plays with inventive sexual metaphors and embarks on humorous treatment of them, he is also describing and praising the soon-to-be-famous recipe for basic Italian salad dressing.98 Molza’s wordplay in this poem – as in the previous one on figs – is a fascinating balancing act that shifts back and forth between sexual metaphors and gastronomical observations. But since the goal of the poem is to advance the virtues of sex with women in contrast to sex with men, salad – not melons – deserve first place;99 96 At the beginning of the poem, Molza states that a respected poet had promised to sing the virtues of salad but then turned his ingegno in a different direction, towards sodomitical pleasures with men. See the explanation of salad in Toscan, Le carnaval du langage, vol. 3, pp. 1462-1465. 97 ‘Ma poi a lungo andar, come interviene / ch’in un punto trovar non si può il tutto, / entrò di migliorarla in ferma spene. / Né volse, come pria, mangiar asciutto, / ché l’aceto v’aggiunse e fu gran sorte: / al fin con l’olio ne cavò il construtto’; Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 106-111. 98 See Chapter One on the new fashion of salad. 99 ‘qual debbia di ragion il pregio avere / l’insalata / o ’l melone, e chi s’intende / di cotai cose apertamente dice / ch’a l’insalata il primo onor si rende’ (the discussion is still open / about who will be the winner / salad / or melon, but those who understand such things / say that salad should have the place of honor); Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 185-189.

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Molza states that it seems nonsensical to him for some foreigners – like the Spaniards – to prefer their salad dressed only with vinegar. The playful poetic game becomes a pretext for a brief excursus on gastronomic national identity and sexual chauvinism: They always seem foolish to me because they enjoy [salad/women] only with vinegar, as the great people of Spain do.100

The double meaning is clear: salad represents women, and the Spaniards – who use only vinegar on their salad (i.e. prefer sodomy either with men or women) – are despised for it, while the Lombards – who season their salad with the mighty ‘cascio parmegiano o piacentino’ – are cheerfully commended for their good taste and style.101 As Italians and Spaniards shared Europe-wide reputation as sodomites, Molza embarked on a spirited sexual and gastronomical defense of Italians’ ‘virility’ via an already celebrated Italian specialty – the noble parmesan cheese. Cheese was a notorious euphemism for the phallus due to its nourishing properties – indeed, its praises had already been sung by the poet Ettore Bentivoglio in his poem ‘In lode del formaggio’ – but specifically naming ‘cascio parmegiano o piacentino’ went beyond a simple sexual metaphor. The interlacing of gastronomic and sexual wordplay continues when Molza adds that, in the heat of summer, a simple salad decorated with small, beautiful flowers and a sliced cucumber is a divine dish: I don’t mind tossing a beautiful little flower or two in there / and now that it has gotten very hot / adding a sliced cucumber would make it a heavenly dish.102

The metaphor of the small flower tossed in the salad and accompanied by the sliced cucumber, though able to be interpreted as sexual because of the phallic metaphor of the cucumber and the sexual symbolism of the 100 ‘Sempre mi parve di color sciocchezza / che le fan con l’aceto sol la festa / come di Spagna una gran gente apprezza’ (they seem to me always silly / those who celebrate it only with vinegar / as the great people of Spain do); Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 136-138. 101 ‘Fanno meglio i Lombardi, ch ‘l gentile / suo cascio parmegiano o piacentino, / v’aggiungon con più saggio e chiaro stile’ (Lombards do it better / when their noble parmesan or piacentino cheese / they add / with wiser and more distinct style); Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 142-144. 102 ‘Qualche f ior leggiadretto e peregrino / non mi vi spiace ed or che ‘l caldo è grande, un citruolo affattarvi ho per divino’; Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 144-147.

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flower, actually seems to be genuine praise for the visual and gustatory pleasures inherent in a refreshing insalata di mescolanza. Therefore, while there is no doubt about the sexual meaning of salad in the poem, it is important to remember that Molza was simultaneously evoking images and sensory experiences of salad dishes common in his time. 103 This detailed description of a fresh salad in a round dish – il tondo – and the list of ingredients for its dressing is an inventive metaphor that alludes to the variety of sexual intercourse and erotic pleasure that can be enjoyed between men and women, but it is also homage to an attractive and now fashionable fresh food.104 As explored in the f irst Chapter, Molza’s poem fits perfectly in the context of the ongoing debate on the social and nutritional value of vegetables and raw greens. Images of salad across several works of the period, including this poem, signal its suggestion of elegant manners, social elevation, and close attention to taste and bodily pleasures.105 To conclude, variety in salad dressing (and variety in sexual practice with women) offer a secret to happiness, according to Molza. Unlike other Bernesque poems, which relied on similarity of shape to make a comparison between fruits or vegetables and parts of the body, this poem uses salad as a metaphor to convey the idea of what were considered, at the time, the erogenous parts of the lower female body and sexual acts connected to them. It is significant that Molza framed his discussion in the context of the new fashionable culture of salad.106 While his sexual allusions to women are in some places transparent,107 equally numerous are references to salad as a 103 The modern editor of the poem, Masieri (following Toscan), interprets every word and image of the poem in its sexual sense. See Masieri’s notes in Molza, Capitoli erotici, pp. 66-67, n. 46 and n. 50. Holding the text to a strict sexual meaning may result in a forced interpretation that says more about modern ideas about sex than Renaissance ones. 104 ‘A vederla nel tondo ci diletta / sol de la vista e drizza l’appetito / a chi n’avesse poco e ‘l gusto alletta’ (Seeing it in a round dish delights us / and just the sight of it arouses the appetite / in anyone who wasn’t hungry or didn’t have a taste for it); Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 124-126. ‘Il tondo, largo di ragion, sempre ama / ove menar si possa con prestezza / e l’ olio poi sovra ogni cosa chiama’ (The round dish, which is very open-minded, always loves / when it gets stirred up quickly / and then gets oil on top of everything); Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 133-136. These verses seem to allude to heterosexual coitus that is both ‘natural’ and ‘against nature’, to use sixteenth-century language. 105 On the cultural underpinnings of salad, see Chapter One and Giannetti, ‘Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning’. 106 See discussion at the end of Chapter One. 107 For instance, see this description of a husband returning home so tired he will not eat – but changing his mind after looking at the round dish (il tondo, both the round dish and his wife’s bottom) his wife presents him: ‘Viene la moglie, in vista alma e serena, / il tondo gli apresenta e,

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food worthy of a rich table – a food of which one never tires and that bears the vivid color of herbs that recall precious gemstones like emeralds.108 Molza thus constructs a poem in which the erotic connotations of salad and the licentious images they evoke go hand in hand with contemporary gastronomic observations and the fashion of salads as a fashionable dish for rich tables. As in other Bernesque poems, the word gusto and the verb gustare appear frequently, referring to the act of tasting not only as the ability to distinguish between good and bad but also as a nod to the idea of taking pleasure in food as well as in sex.109

The triumph of the phallus: beans, carrots, parsnips, and radishes On the first day of Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamento della Nanna e dell’ Antonia (1534), the courtesan Nanna, recalling her youthful days at the convent, shares with Antonia her memory of a sumptuous banquet with the abbot, abbess, priests, nuns, and novices that rapidly developed into an orgy. The arrival of a basket of glass fruits known as pastinache muranesi (parsnips from Murano) shaped ‘alla similitudine del K’[kazzo]) (in the likeness of the prick) were welcomed with great enthusiasm by the attendees, marking the beginning of one of the most sexually explicit scenes in Italian literature of the time. Could it be that Aretino’s literary invention was inspired by the Bernesque literature that he apparently disparaged but in which – in this case – he gladly participated? Certainly parsnips, along with carrots, fava beans, and radishes were the most common vegetables (which, confusingly, s’egli è saggio, / l’olio v ’instilla e l’insalata mena’ (His wife arrives / kind and serene / presenting him with the round dish / and if he is savvy / he adds there the oil and tosses the salad); Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 154-159. 108 For instance, see vv. 151-153 where salad is called ‘fregio / d’ogni ben ricca mensa’ (ornament of every rich table), and ‘Ogni herba, ch’io vi scorgo, a me un smeraldo / vivo rassembra (Every herb, that I glimpse there, resembles a bright emerald). In fact, Molza grants salad preeminence over salsa and agliata, famous dressings of the time. 109 For instance: ‘Ond’è che essendo in grazia de la gente / per così fatta via che, senza lei, / cosa non par che ‘l gusto ci contente’ (Wherefore having the people’ s favor / for the reason that without her / nothing seems to satisfy taste); Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 58-60. See also: ‘Tu il gusto ci conserve e rendi intero, / tu presto a chi ti cerca in ogni loco / solo di povertà rimedio vero’ (You [salad] preserve and make complete our sense of taste / you give to those who seek you in every place / the only real remedy to poverty’); Molza, ‘Capitolo della insalata’, vv. 198-201. One possible interpretation, according to Jean Toscan, is that ‘gusto’ can be a euphemism for the male member and thus salad the only ‘real’ (‘vero’, implying ‘natural’) remedy against sodomy (povertà). Toscan, Le Carnaval du langage, vol. 2, p. 1025.

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were usually called frutti – fruits – in the texts) that in Bernesque literature came to indicate the male sexual organ and its potency.110 Giovanni Mauro D’Arcano (1500?-1536), a prolific Bernesque poet, dedicated two capitoli in praise of fave111 – broad beans – also known in Florence as baccelli. La fava at the time meant the whole pod, not the single bean, making the association with the penis quite simple. In the ancient world, wealthy Romans enjoyed eating fava beans and there are a number of extant recipes for them in the manuscript attributed to the great gastronome Apicius.112 But during the Middle Ages, fava beans became increasingly associated with peasants’ food and rustic living; the beans could be dried to last for the winter and were consumed in soups and mushes or porridges by humble folk.113 As with other rustic foods, medical reputation matched social prejudice: fava beans were often depicted as hard to digest and good only for laborers accustomed to heavy work. But fava beans had an additional attribute that made them interesting to men across the social spectrum: Platina in his De honesta voluptate listed them as an aphrodisiac because of their ‘windy’ and thus inflating properties.114 This combined with the 110 I have translated k(azzo) as ‘prick’, because this term captures the intended bawdiness of the original better than the more antiseptic ‘penis’ or evasive ‘male member’. The basket of fruit appears in the majolica plate mentioned at the beginning of this Chapter, where a lower-class woman is sitting next to a basket, grabbing a bunch of ‘fruit’ (penises) to sell to other women. See Ajmar-Wollheim, ‘Spirit is Ready’, pp. 148-149. 111 Both capitoli were published for the first time in 1537 in an anthology of burlesque verses that was issued by Navò in Venice and included poems by Berni, Mauro D’Arcano, Della Casa, and Bini (I Capitoli del Mauro et del Bernia). Navò published them a year later in a second anthology and then again in 1539. The two poems then reappeared in the first Giunti edition, edited by Francesco Grazzini, in Florence in 1548. For a reconstruction of the Navò and Giunti editions, see Siddi, ‘Una letteratura’. All references to the poems ‘Capitolo primo della fava a Madonna Flaminia’ and ‘Capitolo secondo della fava a Madonna Flaminia’ by Mauro D’Arcano are to verses from the following edition: Marzo, Studi sulla poesia erotica, pp. 73-84, ‘Capitolo primo’ and pp. 85-99, ‘Capitolo secondo’. 112 Albala, Beans, p. 43. 113 Fresh peas, like fresh fruit, were in contrast intended for rich people. Maestro Martino de Rossi has a recipe for fava menata, a soup made with fava beans that have been dried and ‘franta’, or broken into pieces. In this recipe, Martino uses – for the first time – an onion-based soffritto that requires ‘bono olio’ (good oil); he suggests throwing some good spices into the soup when it is finished cooking. Interestingly, this soup – because of its laborious preparation and the final addition of quality spices – is not a peasant dish, even though it is made with dried fava beans. Maestro Martino also gives a recipe for a fresh fava bean soup with meat broth and another for fava beans filled with sugar and almonds; both seem to be refined dishes. Martino also lists a recipe for friger la fava that uses onions, sage, figs, apples, and herbs. For the recipes, see Martino da Como, Libro de Arte coquinaria, pp. 30, 36, 31, and 43-44. 114 ‘Yet, more surprisingly, beans inflate not just the stomach, but the whole body. This creates a kind of artificial aid to sex, an early modern Viagra, if you will’; Albala, Beans, p. 58.

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similarity of beans to testicles, complemented by the shell’s phallic shape, helped make the ‘fruit’ into a potent image for lust as well as for fertility.115 In this context, Capitoli were both an encomium to the fava as a sexual metaphor for the erect male sexual member as well as a playful reversal of the social prejudice and negative medical reputation of the humble legume. In the poetic reversal of the order of things, the fava was presented as a meal worthy of rich people and high prelates: once a food for poor friars, Mauro D’Arcano mused, now all of Italy preferred the fava to other ‘delicate and perfect morsels’.116 In praising the fava, Mauro – like others before him – mocked the humanistic image of the laurel wreaths that, he noted, were especially loved by poets and victorious generals. Despite what Caesar and Marcellus wore upon their heads, Mauro suggests, it is time to make a fava crown. This mocking of a classical humanistic honor is underlined by the poet’s refusal to explain the etymology of the word fava, as he implied pedantic humanists certainly would have done. Both capitoli were dedicated to a Madonna Flaminia and to women in general, inviting them to keep a fresh fava plant in their orchard and to eat its produce at every meal. Nonetheless, Mauro cautions, the fava is not intended solely for women as everyone liked it: men prefer to eat it ‘at tail end of the meal’ (dietro pasto) while women, who are more versatile, consume it ‘in the rear’ (dietro) and ‘in front of’ (dinanzi) – the same erotic innuendos we have traced through so much Bernesque literature.117 The taste for the fava bean is socially far-reaching, Mauro adds: priests and friars like it, some want it raw, and some prefer it well cooked. As is typical of Bernesque poetry, doctors are considered merely in order to dismiss their authority and to reveal their ignorance: some warn that the fava inflates the body when eaten dinanzi but not when consumed dietro the meal. Mauro decides to leave the final decision regarding timing (position) to the real experts: women.118 115 According to Platina, ‘It also stirs up lust, which they say is in the testicles, which are like beans’; Platina, On Right Pleasure, p. 311. For the diffusion of this idea in everyday life and the practice of love magic and divination, see Ruggiero, ‘That Old Black Magic’. 116 ‘La qual non è già pasto di tinello, / ma da ricchi, signori, e gran prelati, / […] fu cibo da frati, / or tutta Italia, e voi l’anteponete / a i bocconi perfetti, e dilicati’ (That is not a meal for the servant’s quarters / but rather of the rich, lords, and high priests / […] it was a food for the monks / now all of Italy, and you all prefer it / to the most delicate and perfect bites); Mauro, ‘Capitolo primo’, vv. 4-9. 117 ‘Generalmente ogni uom mangiar ne suole / di dietro al pasto, ma per suo appetito / dietro, e dinanzi ogni donna ne vuole’ (Generally every man is used to eating it / at tail end of the meal, but for her appetite / every woman wants it both in front and in the rear); Mauro, ‘Capitolo secondo’, vv. 202-204. 118 As noted earlier, it was commonly believed that legumes had an inflating property, a notion repeated here: ‘Dissero alcuni, che’ l corpo gonf iava / dico a mangiarla innanzi, che dapoi /

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The sexual tenor of the poems is intertwined with playful onomastic homage to ancient Roman families. As is well known, Mauro claims, ancient Roman republicans highly esteemed legumes, a staple food that symbolized frugality and virtue. So important were they, he proclaims, that some families named themselves after the most common legumes: gens Fabia from fave, Lentulus from lentils, and Piso from peas.119 Mauro jests, in fact, that Rome’s glory came directly from such common legumes. Eaten during banquets in ancient times, fava beans thus had the power to transform Hippocrates into Ippocrasso (word play on the name of a spiced medieval wine called ippocràsso that was also used by Boccaccio and other authors to signify porco grasso and a corpo grasso – fat pork and a fat body); the bean’s erotic properties explain Cleopatra’s greed as well as Penelope’s long faithfulness to Ulysses.120 Contrary to the opinion of doctors, the fava boasts medical and generative attributes: it was able to dry up harmful humors, produce heirs, and comfort men and women who always hold it dear. The fava bean exalted by Mauro soon found a strong competitor in Il ravanello (the radish), according to the title of a capitolo composed around 1535/6 and published for the first time in 1538.121 Il capitolo del ravanello (which for a long time was attributed to the painter Agnolo Bronzino and thus is rather better known than it might otherwise have been) is now del pasto sua virtù non operava. / Questo giudizio, Donne, sia di voi / che le mangiate, com’ho sopra detto, / dietro e dinanzi, e più spesso di noi’ (Some say that the body inflates / I say to eat it first, because after / the meal its [the fava’s] virtue won’t function. / This judgment, Women, is yours because you are those who eat them, as I said before / both from the front and the rear, and more often than us); Mauro, ‘Capitolo secondo’, vv. 241-246. 119 ‘seguiron quella via per innalzarsi, / e da piselli vollero i Pisoni, / e da lente i Lentuli chiamarsi. / Dal cece furon detti i Ciceroni’ (they followed that path to elevate themselves / [thus] based on peas they wanted to call themselves Pisonis / based on lentils Lentulis / and based on chick-peas they were called Cicerones); Mauro, ‘Capitolo secondo’, vv. 109-112. According to Pliny, Lentulus, a Roman patrician family, derived its name from the lentes (lentils) cultivated by the family’s oldest members. Likewise, the family names Fabia and Piso came from the Latin names of beans and peas that the families cultivated and sold. 120 On ippocràsso see Boccaccio, Decameron (IX.8 and VIII.9), Machiavelli’s Mandragola, and Lodovico Dolce’s Il ragazzo. On Cleopatra: ‘Quella che per Antonio e Cesare arse, / ne le sublimi cene, che fur fatte, / mai non potette di fave satisfarse’ (The woman who burned for Antonio and Caesar / in the sublime dinners that were prepared / could never satisfy herself enough with favas); Mauro, ‘Capitolo secondo’, vv. 145-147. On Penelope and Nausica: ‘La qual con gran stupor vide in Ulisse / la f igliuola d’Alcinoo [sic], e la moglie / casta vent’anni in aspettarlo visse’ (The daughter of Alcinus [Nausica] / saw [the fava] of Ulysses with great awe, as did his chaste wife / [Penelope, who] lived for twenty years awaiting him); Mauro, ‘Capitolo secondo’, vv. 187-189. 121 The poem was published in one of the Venetian Curzio Navò collections, Le terze rime.

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convincingly ascribed to Giovanni Bini,122 an important member of the Bernesque group. Certainly the capitolo partook of the cultural atmosphere of the two Roman academies – the Vignaiuoli and Virtù – and explicitly mentioned Mauro’s capitoli on fava beans: Mauro fills himself up with fave and pods, / but he would be more in the mouths of people [i.e., famous] / if he filled his gut with radishes.123

It is important to realize that the ravanello was quite different from the round red radish now used more as a garnish than a vegetable because of its spicy flavor. The early modern Italian version was sometimes round, but more often it was a long pale root common in vegetable gardens of the day, more like a modern-day green, black, or daikon radish in shape.124 Moreover, while in contemporary dictionaries a ravanello was a radish, the term could also refer to a rafano/ravano (horseradish).125 In any case, Bini’s poem clearly presents it as a phallic-shaped tuber similar to parsnips and carrots.126 More generally, the word radice (root) was a popular euphemism for the male sexual organ. The root/radish lauded in the poem was in fact defined by its generative function: 127 ‘This glorious root is / what will grow and maintain human progeny’.128 As a phallic tuber needed to satisfy women, the ravanello had been already the protagonist of a canzone a ballo attributed to Lorenzo de’ Medici and had appeared in one of Burchiello’s poems.129 122 See Latini, ‘Il ternario di un “poeta baione”’. All references to Bini’s poem cite verses from the edition included by Latini in her essay at pp. 44-46. The attribution to Giovanni Bini appears in a manuscript collection of various poems in the Biblioteca Estense in Ferrara, dated by Kristeller to the first half of the seventeenth century. 123 ‘S’empie il Mauro di fave et de baccelli, / Ma sarebbe più in bocca a le persone / Se s’empisse il budel de ravanelli’; Bini, ‘Capitolo del ravanello’, vv. 16-18. 124 Raphanus sativo is the botanical name of the plant. There are two varieties: radicula (round and red or long and white) and niger (long or round and dark). See Libro della natura e virtù, fols. 79-80. 125 ‘Ravanello, raphano, o vero radice’ (Radish, horseradish, or true root); Savonarola, Libreto de tute le cosse, pp. 83-84. 126 It seems that at the time the Italian expression ‘questo ravanelo’ (this radish head) was used as an insult similar to the modern English ‘dickhead’. The word is used in this sense in marginalia written by Bernardino Scardeone, a Paduan canon in 1560, on Giorgio Vasari’s Vite. See Sohm, ‘Giving Vasari’, pp. 78-79. 127 Toscan, Le carnaval du langage, vol. 3, p. 1428. 128 ‘Questa radice gloriosa è quella / Ch’augmenta e mantien l’umana prole’; Bini, ‘Il capitolo del ravanello’, vv. 62-63. 129 ‘radici vuol, ravanello, e carote, / quand’ella mangia fave par che gode’ (roots she wants, ravanello and carrots, / when she eats fave it seems that she is enjoying it); de’ Medici, Canzone a

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The sixteenth-century collection of bawdy poetry entitled Priapea, which was written in volgare by Niccolò Franco, compared fava beans, leeks, and ravanelli – all vegetables able to please any woman’s appetites.130 Bini’s capitolo was addressed to a compare (friend)131 and aimed to redress the poor medical reputation of the ravanello – ‘that such a sweet and savory fruit / be considered windy and unhealthful’ to make up for the fact that other poets – to be precise the ‘bestial mob of new poets’ had not yet sung the radish’s virtues.132 Written in playful response and counterpoint to Mauro’s poems on the fava, Bini’s capitolo also echoes the structure and style of the medical or gastronomical recipe. Most of the poem reflects on the fact that the ravanello is a fruit desired by women and that it is necessary to complement the fava. Women desire both fruits and enjoy the ravanello and the fava innanzi e dietro pasto (before/in front of and after the meal).133 The compare to whom the poem was addressed, Bini writes, is well suited to confirm this opinion because he offers the ravanello both before and after meals. Nonetheless, the author seeks to instruct his friend regarding the thaumaturgic virtues of the prodigious ravanello. The root could heal several women’s illnesses, fever, and bad humors; it therefore made unnecessary any other special medication. A woman could heal herself, in fact, just by putting the miraculous stem where she needed it most, and it would prove more useful than ‘a thousand ballo, fol. 27 (Canzone n. 104, ‘O buon mariti priego m’insegnate’). The poet asks good husbands how they are able to make women happy because he is not able to satisfy his woman. See Latini, ‘Il ternario di un “poeta baione”’, p. 35, n. 26. 130 ‘Donne, venite a me, se contentare / volete tutti i vostri appetitelli: / qui sono fave e porri e ravanello / e mille erbe che fanno ingravidare’ (Women, come to me if you want to satisfy / all of your little appetites / here are fava, leeks and a ravanello, and a thousand herbs that will make you pregnant); Franco, La Priapea, pp. 19-20 (sonetto xxi, vv. 1-4). Cited in Latini, ‘Il ternario di un “poeta baione”’, p. 36, n. 30. 131 Latini thinks this was a doctor: ‘Voi l’adoprate spesso a far christeri / Et dir solete che piace alle donne, / più che non fan le chiacchere a i Barbieri’ (You call him often to give enemas / and say women like him / more than chats in barber shops’); Bini, ‘Il capitolo del ravanello’, vv. 37-39. 132 See ‘ch’un frutto così dolce e saporito / Sia riputato ventoso e mal sano’; Bini, ‘Il capitolo del ravanello’, vv. 7-9; and ‘ma la rabbia mi monta che fra tanta turba bestial de’ poeti novelli nessun di quest’erba mirabil canta’ (But the anger is building in me as among the bestial mob of new poets / nobody sings yet of this wonder herb); Bini, ‘Il capitolo del ravanello’, v. 14. 133 ‘E le donne non vogliono fava sola, / ma tolto insieme, l’uno e l’altro frutto / se ‘l caccian ne la canna de la gola / Mangian il ravanel molle e asciutto / e inanzi e dietro al pasto et a merenda, / e senza romper l’inghiottiscon tutto’ (and women do not want only the fava / but take together both fruits [vegetables] / and put it down their throat / they eat the ravanello wet and dry / in front and after a meal as a snack / and without breaking it they swallow it up entirely); Bini, ‘Il capitolo del ravanello’, vv. 22-27.

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medical recipes’.134 Historical examples of women fond of the ravanello follow in yet another parody of humanist tracts: from the lusty Semiramis to the faithful Penelope – already mentioned in Mauro’s poem on the fava – the cross-dressed Issicratea, and the chaste and strong biblical Judith. All these women, Bini writes, went to great lengths to ensure they had their share of ravanelli. The end of the poem reassures the reader that it is not just women who loved the ravanello; men, too, do all they can to make sure they have good radish crops. The conclusion, like that regarding the fava, stresses the versatility and popularity of the root: even Jove, Juno, and, of course, Ganymede, all love the ravanello. Among this plethora of phallus-vegetable metaphors, an additional representative in Bernesque poems was the carrot. This particular root vegetable had had a long horticultural history in Italy. Carrots were known in ancient Rome, although they were smaller and tougher that modern ones, and were purple, red, black, or pale yellow in color; they were eaten either raw or cooked and dressed with a sauce.135 Apicius mentioned a number of recipes for carrots, but Pliny the Elder and other authors considered them more a medicine than a food. Certainly the phallus-shaped carrot had been conflated with male sexual activity since antiquity, and it was often confused with the parsnip.136 Interestingly, Pliny referred to the carrot and the parsnip with the term pastinaca, which had a long life and became common in the Italian language and literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as yet another humorous way to indicate the male sexual organ.137 134 ‘Qualunche donna una cura si mette, / di questa cosa dove più li duole, / li gioverà più che mille ricette’ (Any woman can heal herself / by putting this where she ails most / it will be more useful than a thousand recipes); Bini, ‘Il capitolo del ravanello’, vv. 59-60. 135 The orange carrot most common today is a variety that was selected by Dutch growers in the Netherlands between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Cultivated in the Islamic Empire, carrots continued to f igure in medieval Arabic cuisine. Muslim expansion brought carrots to Europe although they did not encounter immediate success because of their bitter taste. But according to Ibn Al Awam, an Arab agriculturalist in Andalusia, they had a second great virtue: they increased sexual appetite. See the website dedicated to the history of the carrot: www.carrotmuseum.co.uk 136 Carrots and parsnips, as now, were similar in shape; later, Linnaeus distinguished between them, calling carrots Daucus carota (from the Greek and Latin names) and parsnips Pastinaca sativa. On the term ‘carrot’, historical linguistics, and fallacious reasoning in etymology, see Nissan, ‘Etymothesis’. Platina mentions the two roots together in one paragraph, specifying that the parsnip ‘arouses passion’; Platina, On Right Pleasure, p. 227. 137 The term pastinaca/che appears in several texts of the period in addition to Aretino’s Ragionamento. In Boccaccio, Decameron, (X.6) , ‘India Pastinaca’ is one of the fabulous places named by Frate Cipolla in his tale to the crowd; ‘India Pastinaca’ became the invented place of publication of some editions of the anonymous prose work La Pazzia first printed in Venice in

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Le terze rime sopra le carote, two long capitoli by Mattio Franzesi, were published for the first time in the Giunti miscellaneous collection Secondo libro dell’opere burlesche in 1555, which was republished many times up to the eighteenth century. These poems, too, take the form of a medical, gastronomical, or aphrodisiacal recipe and exploit the language of medicine and humors, liberally mixing gastronomy, agricultural notions, and sexual allusions together. At the beginning of the first capitolo, Franzesi recalls the botanical information of his time regarding carrots and their sisterhood with parsnips, proceeding to describe the prevalent colors of the root: light yellow and dark.138 Both types of carrots, he explains, are good for guazzetti (a meat or f ish dish with a rich sauce) and for insalata cotta (cooked greens, a modest dish), where gusto triumphs. They excite the desire to eat, warm the body, aid diuretic function, and help digestion along. 139 This emphasis on their capacity to warm the body, along with Franzesi’s reference to salads and guazzetti, underlines the sexual connotations and the gastronomical associations of carrots in the erotic kitchen. In the best Bernesque tradition, Franzesi’s poem also parodies the Renaissance-inspired architectural and visual trionfi celebrating Roman history and great military battles: he reminds his readers that Tiberius had carrots sent from Germany for his men, while Caesar’s soldiers, even without bread, were able to beat Pompey’s soldiers by feasting on the mighty carrot.140 Therefore, Franzesi concludes – with a playful reference to Molza – the poets who carved Priapus from fig wood would have been better off honoring the 1541. There are also references in Masuccio Salernitano’s and Piovano Arlotto’s collections of novelle. 138 ‘Ma una sorte è come bomberaca / gialla, e lucente, l’altra è pavonazza, / scura, over nera, come la triaca’ (but one type is like the bomberaca [Arabic gum] / yellow and bright, the other is pavonazza [purple] / dark, or black as the theriac); Franzesi, ‘Sopra le carote à M. Carlo Capponi’, vv. 7-9. On the colors, see Denker, ‘Carrot Purple’. 139 ‘Son l’una, e l’ altra di sì fine razza / a far dolci guazzetti, e insalata / cotta, ch’l gusto ne trionfa e sguazza. / Che da lor del mangiar viene eccitata / la voglia, hanno virtù di riscaldare, e la vescica ne resta sgombrata’ (Both one and the other are of the highest quality / that they make both stews and cooked greens delicious / so that taste triumphs and rules. / Eating them arouses the appetite, / they have the virtue of heating the body, and emptying the bladder); Franzesi, ‘Sopra le carote à M. Carlo Capponi’, vv. 10-14. 140 ‘E poco innanzi si finisse il giuoco / tra Cesare e Pompeo, che li soldati / di Cesare pane havendo, o nulla, o poco, / d’altra radice d’herba alimentati / che di carote, non fur per più giorni, onde i nemici restar superati’ (and a little before the conflict between Cesar and Pompeo ended / Cesar’s soldiers having little or no bread / were given only other roots such as carrots to eat for many days, and thus conquered their enemies); Franzesi, ‘Sopra le carote à M. Carlo Capponi’, vv. 82-87.

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god of orchards by putting a carrot in his hand.141 The erotic connotation in favor of sodomy (with both men and women) in Franzesi’s carrot odes is quite clear, but the poem, interestingly, also initiated a mock discussion concerning the role and power of words related to food in contemporary society – especially words spoken by poets and courtiers. In his second capitolo dedicated to carrots, Franzesi introduces the expressions piantar carote and cacciar altrui carote (to plant a carrot and to ‘throw carrots’, or lead somebody to believe something not true), which have an explicit sexual sense but also held the contemporary meaning to speak falsehoods or to tell lies and be believed.142 The poet takes this opportunity to discuss the environment of the court and its courtiers, real compliments versus adulation, and straightforward versus deceitful words.143 Indeed, Franzesi most probably invented the verb carotare (to tell lies) and the name carotiere for the person who spoke falsehoods.144 The poet muses over the light and dark colors of the carrot only to conclude that they represent liars and lies at different levels. In the end, he admits that it is better to mix truth and lies, inviting his readers to make a mush of carrots with vinegar and spices. The poem ends with a long series of terzine in which many contemporary disciplines that involved the cultivation of skills were cast in disparaging terms as false and unworthy of trust. Painting tells lies about nature, 141 ‘Quei che di fico formar la figura / del Dio degli orti, e gli dier per insegna / quel che s’adopra nella mietitura / dovevano piantarli in mano, e ben più degna / di lui cosa era, una grossa carota’ (Those who formed from fig wood the figure / of the god of orchards, and gave him as a banner / that which is used in the harvest / should have planted in his hand a big carrot, / and much more worthy of him it would have been); Franzesi, ‘Sopra le carote à M. Carlo Capponi’, vv. 127-132. 142 ‘da questo si deriva il carotare / cioè piantar carote, e carotiere / un che sta nel piantarle singulare’ (from this comes the verb carotare that is to plant carrots, and carotiere / someone who is good at doing it); Franzesi, ‘Capitolo secondo sopra le carote’, vv. 31-33. Although this playful game on words addresses the serious theme of the relationship between poets and their lords, the sexual meanings are ever present. In contemporary Italian sexual slang, a ‘buggerone’ was someone who lied and, at the same time, was a sodomite. Franzesi uses the word ‘carrot’ instead to paint a negative portrait of the humanist pedant, an ignorant teacher fond of young boys, and a despised figure that Ariosto mocked in one of his Satire and that Aretino fully developed in his comedy Il Marescalco. 143 This echoes a famous discussion of patronage and court poets that took place in St. John the Evangelist’s episode in the immensely popular epic poem Orlando furioso. See Ugolini, ‘Self-Portraits’, and Mac Carthy, ‘Ariosto’. 144 The verb appears in several Accademia della Crusca dictionaries and in literary works such as Ortensio Lando’s Commentario di tutte le cose, Giulio Cesare Croce’s Bertoldo con Bertoldino e Cacasenno, and Lorenzo Lippi’s seventeenth-century mock-epic poem Il Malmantile riacquistato. The meaning plays on the similarities between the ease of planting carrots in favorable soil and that of planting lies in a credulous mind.

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literature is deceitful in and of itself; medicine conveys one lie after another to the sick; astrology does the same with its forecasts on future cardinals; and, finally, alchemy melts riches away with false promises.145 The poem scornfully concludes that someone skilled at falsely complimenting men and women, was the only person who would be able to plant carrots the whole year, regardless of the season. It seems that, for Franzesi, the carrot is to be prized above the fava or the fig not only for its sexual versatility but also for its ability to undermine the truth regarding the great arts and new disciplines of the Renaissance. Is this a plea in favor of everyday culture and practice? A hope for a culture that everyone could share and understand? Despite all his sexual punning, Franzesi uses the metaphor of the carrot – and its light and dark colors – to represent truth and lies vividly at a time when troubling questions about distinguishing between them were being raised.

Conclusion What is particularly impressive about the Bernesque poems on fruit and vegetables and their humorous erotic word play is the wide range of their engagement with and challenge to the broader cultural world of their day. Along with provoking questions about sexual practice they address gender hierarchies; the prevailing negative view of sodomy; medical practitioners’ and humanists’ questionable reliance on ancient authority; agricultural ideals; Greek and Roman history; and even the linguistic debates of the time. Moreover, they did all this frequently in terms of a newer measure of value that was gaining ground at the time: gusto. Writing their humble fruit and 145 ‘ma ciascun’arte par che s’assottigli / nel piantarle, vedete la Pittura / acciochè l’occhio gran piacere ne pigli, / con la diversa sua manifattura, / e con mostrar il falso altrui per vero, A cacciato carote alla Natura: / la poesia ch’è altro: ch’un intero / campo pien di carote favolose / come si legge in Virgilio e Omero? / La medicina con su erbe e cose, / che fa? Caccia carote a tutti i mali, / infin che l’uom per sempre si ripose […]’ (but each art seems to wear thin / in planting them, as you can see Painting does / in order for the eye to take great pleasure / with its different manners / and with showing people fake for true / [Painting] lies to Nature / and what else is Poetry / an entire field full of fabled carrots [lies] / as you can read in Homer and Virgil? / Medicine with its herbs and things / what does it do? / Throws carrots [lies] at all illnesses / up to the point when the person rests in peace); Franzesi, ‘Capitolo secondo sopra le carote’, vv. 100-121. Although the idea that poets lie is a Renaissance commonplace, we should not forget that Franzesi, like many poets of his time, was dependent on patrons to secure his material existence. It may be that this poem was also intended as an invective against an ungrateful patron.

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vegetable poems, the Vignaiuoli and Virtuosi mocked the cultural humanistic milieu in which pedantic conversations about very little of practical or contemporary import were often the norm, and embraced the popular belief that saw humanism and sodomitical encounters as closely connected. At the same time, these poets exploited the sexual humor available through comparisons of fruits and vegetables to sexual organs and sexual acts to exalt sodomy as an honorable activity that seemed to increase their own homosocial bonds and the superiority of their own cultural choices and sexual practices. Ravanelli and carrots, figs and parsnips, peaches and apples constituted the perfect vehicles to address desires of the flesh that went against the grain of dominant Platonic philosophy and Petrarchism that exalted love with women as chaste and courtly.146 Specifying that women, too, renounced figs in favor of apples and peaches may have been merely the expression of a male sexual fantasy – we find the same fantasy in a sonetto lussurioso by Aretino147 – but it was a fantasy that confirmed what seemed to be the central message of Bernesque poems on fruit and vegetables: the truly honorable sexual activity was sodomy. Certainly, the harvest and bounty that Berni augured for his fellow poets played on fertility and the production of offspring but the poems that followed his lead in their eroticism ignored marriage and its reproductive promise to assert the superiority of sodomy, sexual play, pleasure, and gusto, as positive ends in their own right. Were these works simply registering or taking note of changing sexual practices in sixteenth-century Italy? Or was practice reasserted, confirmed, or even spurred by these works, which could be more widely read and disseminated in the age of print? The divide between experience, practice, and discourse, obviously, remains difficult to assess.148 To make a comparison with the visual arts, the representation of pagan mythology and the love 146 Also striking in this phallocentric view of sexuality is the positive spin given to passive sodomy, which was seen as dishonorable but more acceptable when the passive partner was a young adolescent. 147 Aretino’s sonetti lussuriosi are a set of sixteen poems that he wrote to accompany Marcantonio Raimondi’s famous engravings of sexual positions; see sonnet 8 ‘E saria pur una coglioneria’ (And it will still be a balls-up). Talvacchia comments on this sonnet as follows: ‘Endless female lust finishes here on a note of internalized misogyny, preceded by one of the many requests for sodomitical relations from the female partners, often as in this case, disparaging the man’s demurral in not wanting to take up the “modern manners”’; Talvacchia, Taking Positions, p. 97. See text of the sonnet and illustration reproduced on pp. 208-209. 148 Many recent scholarly works have shown the degree to which literary works and cultural artifacts, from art to humble objects, were in dialogue with practice and everyday experience. See Simons, Sex of Men. These studies are forms of ‘embodied history’.

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affairs of the gods in the sixteenth century provided a convenient, more decorous way of dealing with sexual matters between men and women for a cultured elite. A less elevated audience could enjoy representations of sexual subjects via humor and the metaphorical play on plants and objects whose sexual meaning was clear to virtually anyone who could read or hear them.149 Still, the message proclaimed by the Bernesque poems – that sodomy was an honorable activity – seems to press beyond the limits of contemporary morality – at least that aggressively advocated by both civil and church authorities. Nonetheless, and in contrast to the visual arts, Berni’s and his followers’ poems incurred official censorship only later when most were included in the Index in 1559.150 In any case, these poems, prose commentaries, and epistolary exchanges helped shape among the Bernesque poets a masculine friendship and a homoerotic sexual identity that did not find easy expression elsewhere. In the Roman and Florentine palaces and gardens where these academy members met regularly for dinner, the pleasure of food and wine, recitations of poems and after dinner speeches, as well as all-male companionship and collaboration strengthened male bonding and, with it, the possibility of homoerotic relationships. The fruit and vegetable imagery employed in their texts, furthermore, had the ability to exalt sexual pleasures of all sorts using gastronomical and culinary metaphors. The ‘embodied imagination’ of fruits and vegetables reveals a highly articulated food discourse that resonated with people’s experience, their everyday language, and their ongoing practices. It also shows that a discourse on gusto was very much present during a period when and in a cultural environment where taste had no need to be rehabilitated from its confinement to the dimensions of physicality,151 as a number of scholars have claimed recently. Quite the contrary: in these fruit and vegetable poems gusto (as word and concept) was positively endowed with the physicality of the pleasures of food and sex, which often intertwined. The conceptual pairing of gluttony and lust from the medieval tradition had lost its sway, giving way to a much more nuanced world of food, taste, and pleasure. 149 Matthews-Grieco, ‘Satyrs and Sausages’. 150 Berni’s works were inserted in 1559 Index of Prohibited Books, then confirmed in 1564, but after a hiatus they continued to be printed. 151 Von Hoffmann, From Gluttony, p. 176: ‘All these discourses celebrating taste that spread in the eighteenth century only became possible because taste, for long confined to the strict dimension of physicality, the foundation of its bestiality, became equipped with a form of interiority, thought of as a human prerogative’.

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Sella, Esule, ed. and trans. Carmina Priapea. I versi di Priapo. Traduzione note e una lettera a Priapo di Esule Sella. Turin: Fogola, 1992. Vasari, Giorgio. ‘Giovanni da Udine’. In Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari, edited by Gaetano Milanesi, vol. 6, pp. 549-565. Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1998.

Secondary Ajmar-Wollheim, Marta. ‘“The Spirit is Ready, but the Flesh is Tired”: Erotic Objects and Marriage in Early Modern Italy’. In Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, edited by Sara Matthews-Grieco, pp. 143-169. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Albala, Ken. Beans: A History. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007. Albala, Ken. Eating Right in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Bartali, Serena. ‘Prìncipi, gemme, vermi e orologi: dall’encomio rinascimentale a quello barocco nella lirica italiana’. PhD diss., Universität Tübingen, 2014. Bayer, Andrea, ed. Art and Love in Renaissance Italy. New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2008. Exhibition catalog. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Benigno, Francesco. ‘Dialoghi dell’al di là. Immaginario ultraterreno e urgenze politiche nella cultura politica italiana del Seicento’. In E-Spania Revue Interdisciplinaire d’ètudes hispaniques médiévales et modernes. 21 Juin 2015, online dal 26 mai 2015: El conde Lucanor/Utopías, sueños y quimeras/Rome vue d’Espagne, edited by Ricardo García Cárcel and Araceli Guillaume-Alonso‎ . [DOI.org/10.4000/e-spania.24526] Bentz, Katherine. ‘Ancient Idols, Lascivious Statues, and Sixteenth-Century Viewers in Roman Gardens’. In Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300-1600, edited by Marice Rose and Alison C. Poe, pp. 418-449. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. Boggione, Walter, and Giovanni Casalegno. Dizionario storico del lessico erotico italiano. Milan: Longanesi, 1996. Brestolini, Lucia. ‘La poesia misogina’. In La poesia comico-realistica dalle origini al Cinquecento, edited by Paolo Orvieto and Lucia Brestolini, pp. 219-238. Rome: Carocci, 2000. Chambers, David. ‘The Earlier “Academies” in Italy’. In Italian Academies in the Sixteenth Century, edited by David Chambers and François Quiviger, pp. 1-14. London: Warburg Institute, 1995. Cohen, Simona. Animals as Disguised Symbols in Renaissance Art. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008.

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Corsaro, Antonio. La regola e la licenza. Studi sulla poesia satirica e burlesca tra Cinque e Seicento. Manziana, Italy: Vecchiarelli, 1999. Cosentino, Paola. ‘L’Accademia della virtù: dicerie, cicalate di Annibal Caro e altri virtuosi’. In Cum Notibusse et comentaribusse: l’esegesi parodisca e giocosa del Cinquecento, Viterbo 23-24 Novembre 2001, edited by Antonio Corsaro and Paolo Procaccioli, pp. 177-192. Manziana, Italy: Vecchiarelli, 2002. Dall’Orto, Giovanni. Tutta un’altra storia. L’omosessualità dall’antichità al secondo dopoguerra. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2015. Denker, Joel S. ‘The Carrot Purple’. In ‘Vegetables’, Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking 2008, edited by Susan Friedland, pp. 63-70. London: Prospect Books, 2009. Faas, Patrick. Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Franco Júnior, Hilário. ‘Between the Fig and the Apple: Forbidden Fruit in Romanesque Iconography’, Revue de l’histoire des religions, 2006/1 (Volume 223), p. 2-2 (1-38). [DOI: 10.4000/rhr.4621] Frantz, David O. Festum Voluptatis: A Study of Renaissance Erotica. Columbus: Ohio State Press, 1989. Giannetti Ruggiero, Laura. ‘The Forbidden Fruit, or the Taste for Sodomy in Renaissance Italy’. Quaderni d’Italianistica 27.1 (2006): 31-52. Giannetti, Laura. ‘Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning, or the Triumph of Greens’. California Italian Studies 1.2 (2010). [ DOI: 10.5070/C312008890] Giannetti, Laura. ‘The Satyr in the Kitchen Pantry’. In Cuckoldry, Impotence, and Adultery in Europe (15th-17th century), edited by Sara Matthews-Grieco, pp. 103124. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Grieco, Allen J. ‘From Roosters to Cocks: Italian Renaissance Fowl and Sexuality’. In Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, edited by Sara Matthews-Grieco, pp. 89-140. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Latini, Francesca. ‘Il ternario di un “poeta baione”: il Capitolo del ravanello’. Per leggere, i generi della lettura 26.1 (Spring 2014): 7-61. Lawrence, David Herbert. ‘Figs’. In Birds, Beasts, and Flowers: Poems. London: Martin Secker, 1923. Longhi, Silvia. ‘Francesco Berni. Rime’. In Poeti del Cinquecento Poeti lirici, burleschi, satirici e didascalici, edited by Guglielmo Gorni, Massimo Danzi, and Silvia Longhi, vol. 1, pp. 623-890. Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 2001. Longhi, Silvia. Lusus. Il capitolo burlesco nel Cinquecento. Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1983. Mac Carthy, Ita. ‘Ariosto the Lunar Traveler’. In Modern Language Review 104.1 (January 2009): 71-82.

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Martines, Lauro. Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Marzo, Antonio. Studi sulla poesia erotica del Cinquecento. Con appendice di testi. Lecce, Italy: Adriatica Editrice Salentina, 1999. Matthews-Grieco, Sara. ‘Satyrs and Sausages: Erotic Strategies and the Print Market in Cinquecento Italy’. In Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, edited by Sara Matthews-Grieco, pp. 19-60. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Morel, Philippe. ‘Priape à la Renaissance. Les guirlandes de Giovanni da Udine à la Farnésine’. Revue de l’art 69.1 (1985): 13-28. Moroncini, Ambra. ‘The Accademia della Virtù and Religious Dissent’. In The Italian Academies 1525-1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation, and Dissent, edited by Denis Reidy, Jane E. Everson, and Lisa Sampson, pp. 88-101. London: Routledge, 2016. Nissan, Ephraïm. ‘“Etymothesis, Fallacy, and Ontologies”: An Illustration from Phytonymy’. In Language, Culture, Computation: Computational Linguistics and Linguistics, edited by Nachum Dershowitz and Ephraïm Nissan, pp. 207-365. Tel Aviv: Springer, 2014. Norton, Marcy. ‘“Tasting Empire”: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics’. American Historical Review 111.3 (June 2006): 660-691. ‘IV Nota su Andrea Lori’. In Ludi esegetici (Berni, Comento alla Primiera-Lasca, Piangirida e Comento di maestro Niccodemo sopra il Capitolo della salsiccia), edited by Danilo Romei, Michel Plaisance, and Franco Pignatti, pp. 329-330. Manziana, Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2005. Pilcher, Jeffrey M. ‘The Embodied Imagination in Recent Writings on Food History’. American Historical Review 121.3 (June 2016): 861-887. Quellier, Florent. Gola, Storia di un peccato capitale. Translated into Italian by Vito Carrassi. Bari: Edizioni Dedalo, 2012. Riley, Gillian. The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships. Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Romei, Danilo. Berni e berneschi del Cinquecento. Florence: Edizioni Centro 2P, 1984. Romei, Danilo. Da Leone X a Clemente VII: scrittori toscani nella Roma dei papati medicei (1513-1534). Manziana, Italy: Vecchiarelli, 2007. Romei, Danilo. Introduction to Francesco Berni, Rime, edited by Danilo Romei, pp. 5-18. Milan: Mursia, 1985. Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime, and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Ruggiero, Guido. ‘Hunting for Birds in the Italian Renaissance’. Introduction to Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, edited by Sara Matthews-Grieco, pp. 1-16. Farnham, England, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010.

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Ruggiero, Guido. ‘Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality’. In Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, edited by James Grantham Turner, pp. 10-30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Ruggiero, Guido. ‘That Old Black Magic Called Love’. In Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance, pp. 88-129. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Savoretti, Moreno. L’orto delle muse. Studi sulla poesia bernesca del Cinquecento. Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2016. Siddi, Ignazio. ‘“Una letteratura da uomini nobili e da signori” le miscellanee burlesche dei Giunti e dei Navò nel Cinquecento’. In Idee di letteratura, edited by Marina Guglielmi and Duilio Caocci, pp. 153-171. Rome: Armando, 2010. Simons, Patricia. ‘The Phallus: History and Humor’. In The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History, pp. 52-78. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Simons, Patricia. The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Simons, Patricia, and Monique Kornell. ‘Appendix: The Date of Annibal Caro’s Commento’, in ‘Annibal’s Caro After-Dinner Speech (1536) and the Question of Titian as Vesalius’s Illustrator’. Renaissance Quarterly 61.4 (Winter 2008): 1069-1097. Sohm, Philip L. ‘Giving Vasari the Giorgio Treatment’. I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 18.1 (Spring 2015): 61-111. Talvacchia, Bette. Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Toscan, Jean. Le Carnaval du langage le lexique érotique des poètes de l’èquivoque de Burchiello a Marino (XV-XVII siècles). 4 vols. Université de Lille III: Atelier Reproduction des Thèses, 1981. Ugolini, Paola. ‘Self-Portraits of a Truthful Liar: Satire, Truth-Telling, and Courtliness in Ludovico Ariosto’s Satire and Orlando Furioso’. In Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 40.1 (Winter 2017): 141-159. Virgili, S., and D. Neri. ‘Mela rosa e mele antiche. Valorizzazione di ecotipi locali di melo per un’agricoltura sostenibile’. In I Quaderni 5b, pp. 53-65. Ancona, Italy: ASSAM, 2002. Vitullo, Julian M. ‘Taste and Temptation in Early Modern Italy’. Senses and Society 5.1 (March 2010): 106-118. Von Hoffmann, Viktoria. From Gluttony to Enlightenment: The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. [Expanded, revised, and translated edition of Goüter le mond: Une histoire culturelle du goüt à l’époque modern. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2013.] Waddington, Raymond. Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

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Wolk-Simon, Linda. ‘Dish with a Satyr Head and Fruit’. In Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, edited by Andrea Bayer, p. 219. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Wolk-Simon, Linda. ‘“Rapture to the Greedy Eyes”: Profane Love in the Renaissance’. In Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, edited by Andrea Bayer, pp. 43-58. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Zanrè, Domenico. Cultural Non-Conformity in Early Modern Florence. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.

Web resources The World Carrot Museum: www.carrotmuseum.co.uk [last accessed date 3-12-2017] Medici Archive Project database: www.medici.org [last accessed date 21-4-2016]

4. Femininity and Food Culture in Renaissance Italy Abstract This chapter considers the often overlooked role of women’s voices in the social, symbolic, and cultural meanings of food as well as women’s role in relation to food culture, especially in reconsidering unequal gender stereotypes. The following pages analyze not only the way that gendered discourse on food was understood by ordinary women and men – and how food was gendered – but also how their lives were lived with gusto and pleasure. The volume concludes with three particularly revealing examples of women’s voices: the letters of Isabella D’Este, of Suor Virginia Galilei, and the thoughtful, gender-sensitive treatise by Moderata Fonte. These sources provide a feminine perspective on food and permit women the final, crucial word in this study regarding how imagination and practice interacted in Italian Renaissance food culture. Keywords: women, gusto, appetite, taste, gender

Introduction A significant male-oriented emphasis in the written food culture of the early modern period in Italy seems almost a given. The new genre of health and food treatises in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries featured male authors or professional cooks who published books relating their work in the kitchen for Renaissance princes and courts; these printed texts usually did not mention women except in tangential remarks.1 The lack of writings 1 Messisbugo, Libro Novo, fol. 39v, mentions the work of women in the kitchen: ‘ch’io non spender tempo e fatica in descrivere diverse minestre d’hortolami o legumi e in insegnare di frigere una tencha, o cuocere un luzzo sulla gratella., o simili altre cose, che da qualunque vile feminuccia otimamente si saprieno fare’ (I won’t waste time or energy describing the many soups of vegetables and beans or teaching how to fry a tenca [fish] or cook a luzzo [fish] on the

Giannetti, L., Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy: The Renaissance of Taste. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463728034_ch04

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on food that speak to or about women means that modern studies of women and food culture or practice in the early modern period have often had to rely on prescriptive and moralistic treatises, where calls for restrained eating and prohibitions regarding women’s consumption of ‘delicate’ foods were routinely restated.2 More recently, though, other sources have been explored by historians and art historians, who have sought to investigate the place of women at the elegant table in Renaissance courts, women-only banquets, and issues of domesticity and commensality.3 Finally, studies on sixteenth-century convents have explored the role nuns had in preparing various dishes that they used not just as foods but also as medicines.4 Nevertheless, we still know relatively little about what early modern women thought about food, how they prepared food, and the place of cooking in their everyday lives. In the face of this dearth of sources, we need to examine texts that, although not directly linked to food culture, provide evidence of practices and ways of thinking about food that were often distant from and/or responded critically to the assumptions of prescriptive literature. These include sources such as private letters, imaginative literature, and dialogues authored by women and/or featuring female characters or speakers.5 This chapter grill, or other similar things, that any lowly woman knows perfectly well how to do). There are two exceptions to this generalization: ‘lustful foods’, which women had to avoid, and nutritional foods, which pregnant women had to eat. Moralists and authors of food treatises were ready to recommend foods and dishes that were thought to aid with procreation, fertility, and successful pregnancies to women. At the top of the list for fertility resided leeks; beans were considered good for menstruation; and the seeds of the luxurious male aphrodisiac asparagus were believed to promote conception; see Riddle, Contraception and Abortion, p. 108. In any case, interest was directed at what a mother should eat to deliver a healthy baby, not at women as women. Traffichetti, L’arte di conservare la sanità, contains a section on pregnant women and what they should eat in order to protect the fetus; see Marafioti, ‘Prescriptive Potency’. 2 As is well known, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries women became privileged objects of attention in prescriptive texts on oeconomica that advised men how to teach their wives and daughters domestic skills, virtuous behavior, and good food habits. Recent studies on women, food, and gender in Italy include Muzzarelli and Tarozzi, Donne e cibo, and Muzzarelli and Re, Il cibo e le donne; they focus on the Middle Ages and the period after the 1700s. The topic of gender and food is much more fully explored for modern and contemporary Italy, especially in relation to feminism, the slow food movement, and food activism. A seminal introductory study is Counihan, ‘Gendering Food’. 3 Smith, ‘Gender, Ownership’. McIver, Cooking and Eating, uses a novel variety of sources to bring attention to gender issues. See also Smith, ‘Family and Domesticity’. 4 Strocchia, ‘Nun Apothecaries’. In 1583, Suor Maria Vittoria Verde, a cloistered nun in the Dominican convent in Perugia, started to write a notebook in which she collected 170 recipes for everyday cooking at the convent. 5 On dialogues authored by women or featuring female speakers see Cox, ‘Female Voice’.

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engages, therefore, with women’s voices and men’s voices, primarily when they respond to women’s roles around food and food production in order to consider whether the social, symbolic, and cultural meanings of food served a gendered purpose, for example, and perhaps most significantly, to strengthen or diminish unequal gender relations, as was the case for social distinctions. Turning to advice and strictures that conduct books and moralistic treatises offered women on food, the following pages investigate how such discourses were understood and responded to by women, and study whether food was imbued with gender-specific attributes and qualities in contemporary culture. By considering this broader group of sources, we can begin to open up a vista on gendered conceptions of food culture, tracing women and food in relation to each other through prescriptive diatribes, imaginative visions, and testimonies from everyday life.

Prescriptive sources, women, and food A number of gender stereotypes from the period echo Aristotle’s ideas on sexual difference, affirming that women were irrational and intemperate, weak, cold, and moist, while men were rational and temperate, strong, hot, and dry. These assumptions often went hand in hand with humoral theory, which stated that the humors – black and yellow bile, blood, and phlegm – defined the body’s essential nature and its temperaments, called ‘complexions’ – melancholic, choleric, sanguine, and phlegmatic – that had significant implications for perceived differences between men and women. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century medical authorities and food treatise authors, as we have seen, categorized food according to this system and advised eating the food most suited to a given individual’s complexion; thus, in theory, women should have followed a different diet from that of men. But doctors did not usually develop in any detail this gendered vision of the humors when they wrote about food and health.6 What we find instead are sporadic observations in health and food manuals that women have weak complexions and stomachs, and should not follow the fashion of drinking cold wine.7 Or that the honestà of a noble woman was more commendable 6 According to Albala, Eating Right, p. 151: ‘dieticians were reluctant to specify any broad differences in diet according to gender’. 7 In this, women were equated to old men; see Paschetti, Del conservare la sanità, pp. 310-311. Paschetti also advised that women, being ‘humid’ by nature, must exercise more to be healthy, particularly when they are fat or pregnant.

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than that of a peasant woman (una casta contadina) because of the fragility of her complexion, which was determined by the type of foods she ate and her lack of experience with and resulting intolerance to physical exertion.8 Gender and class biases were often intertwined in these medical observations, even if they were ultimately based upon an Aristotelian model that saw women as less complete than men and as lacking the heat that made men superior. In addition to this Aristotelian discourse doctors and authors of food and health treatises found sources of wisdom in the religious and theological narrative of original sin, which attributed to Eve the responsibility for the Fall and marked women forever with the stigma that they were not able to control either their desires or themselves. Although original sin did not necessarily involve the sin of immoderate eating, consuming the forbidden fruit was seen as the first turning away from God: the underlying sin behind all sins that led to all others, especially carnal sins. Not only prescriptive and religious but also narrative and artistic sources from the period often present the image of a woman who had to be disciplined because of her ‘natural’ immoderate desire to eat and drink.9 In visual representations, gluttony was often depicted as a self-indulgent woman, as seen for example in the mid-fifteenth century sculpture on the exterior of the ducal palace in Venice, where a woman holds a decorated cup full of wine in one hand while, with the other, she bites into a leg of roasted fowl, by definition one of the most luxurious foods at the time. The misogynistic tradition of depicting women as unrestrained gluttons10 – it suffices to recall the paradigmatic example of the female protagonist of the Corbaccio – had a counterpart in the hagiographic tradition of representing women saints starving to death or regularly abstaining from food and drink 8 See Guazzo, Dialoghi piacevoli, fol. 375r: ‘Il medesimo dico delle donne nobili, & d’alto affare, la cui honestà è tanto più degna, gloriosa, quanto esse per la delicatezza della complessione, per la qualità dei cibi, per l’ intoleranza delle fatiche & per altre circostanze sono più soggette al pericolo del dishonore’ (I say the same of noble and highborn women, whose honesty (honor) is much more worthy, glorious, as a result of their delicate complexions, and the kind of food they eat, and their intolerance of tiring labor and for other reasons they are more subject to the danger of dishonor). 9 The narrative of Eve’s role in original sin was contested by Agrippa, who made Adam guilty. The Venetian writer Moderata Fonte, through her character Corinna, defended Eve, claiming that she ate the forbidden fruit because she wanted to acquire ‘knowledge of good and evil’, while Adam was moved ‘by greed’; see translation by Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 94. Another defense of Eve appeared in Bernardo Spina, according to Girolamo Ruscelli; see Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 94, n. 60. 10 The Italian original is golosa, not easily translated as glutton; an alternative translation could be ‘greedy’.

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as a way of battling temptations and the allure of gluttony – gola – a tradition that featured positive accounts of the extremes of real-life examples of food denial by holy women such as Catherine of Siena.11 Indeed, the medieval devotional practice of women fasting to death continued during the early modern period and beyond, and has even been interpreted as a way for women to affirm their individuality and autonomy.12 This rare and elite practice did not of course define the more usual female experience of food, although it remained an association that overshadowed the way women were thought about in relationship to food. During the fifteenth century, writers who addressed women’s behavior vis-à-vis food in the family and home frequently did so from the pulpit in sermon literature. Preachers such as Giovanni Dominici (1355-1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380-1444) advocated that women exercise maximum restraint in eating and drinking as well as when cooking for the family. These men, like many other fiery preachers of the day stressed that the simple acts of eating and drinking aroused a woman’s basest senses and encouraged both lust and loss of bodily control. The booklet Regola di governo di cura familiare (1401) by the noted Dominican preacher Giovanni Dominici, dedicated to Bartolomea degli Alberti after the banishment of her husband Antonio from Florence and intended as a guide for educating children and running the household, is a significant example. Dominici confirmed the widely accepted view that women inherently lacked the ability to resist the temptations of the senses, and that this was especially true in the case of food and drink.13 In addition, he inveighed against the bodily senses and the uses of worldly goods by women, insisting on the importance of downplaying the sense of taste, of using food in its natural state, and of actively avoiding attractive combinations of foodstuffs. He explained to Bartolomea that God, the ultimate chef, had already placed appropriate flavors in all foods, and that therefore there was no need to give taste a boost with the use of extra flavorings and sauces.14 11 Walker Bynum, Holy Feast, and Mazzoni, Women in God’s Kitchen. 12 Bell, Holy Anorexia. Although it must be added that starving to death to assert autonomy and individuality is a sad comment on the status of women at the time. Bell studies 261 women who lived between 1200 and 1900. 13 On Giovanni Dominici and his cultural agenda in fifteenth-century Florence, see Debby Nirit Ben-Aryeh, ‘Preacher’s Agenda’. 14 ‘Ma ben dico non ponga studio di far savori e lusingar il gusto, mentre per se è sufficiente al necessario cibo, per non avere a lodare cuoco o creato ingegno, ma solo lo’ infinito’ (But, to be correct, she should not work to make sauces and enticing tastes, whereas lauding God is sufficient for the necessity of food, not the cook or one’s creativity’). Salvi, Regola del governo, p. 50.

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Among his other proscriptions, Dominici asserted that figs did not need the addition of salt, nor should pears be served with a salsa, melons with a condiment of candied fruit (mostarda), or peaches alongside a garlicky sauce.15 Families had to be wary of dilicatezze (a certain preciousness or pretentiousness) in matters of food: moderation and simple foods were recommended for the wife, who was to avoid preparing any singularità (extravagant/singular foods) without her husband’s permission.16 Domenici’s ideas did not differ much from those of other religious writers of the time, but his very successful career as a preacher – first in Venice and later in Florence – certainly helped the diffusion of such ideas.17 These cultural connections between femininity and restraint, on the one hand, and between femininity and gluttony or greediness, on the other, helped reinforce a divided and extreme vision that depicted women as either entirely at the mercy of their senses or completely victorious in their battle to control them. It was as if the perceived relationship between women and food was a two-faced coin that could be easily flipped to obtain the desired image of woman as either evil or good.

‘Sarà adunque il suo cibo parco e di vivande communi’18 The discourse promoted by preachers arguing that serving simple food was a moral requisite for the good household recurred in numerous tracts and conduct books for women published during the sixteenth century.19 These writings often singled out not wives or even nuns but rather 15 ‘Fico non ha bisogno di sale, né di salsa pera. Non si richiede mostarda co’ poponi, né agliata con le pesche’; Salvi, Regola del governo, p. 50. 16 ‘Guardati da singularità o scandalo della tua famiglia’ (watch out for any irregularity or scandal happening in your family) and ‘così dico ne’ cibi tuoi, accordati con lui: e sanza sua licenza non fare singularità’ (I would say the same regarding the food you prepare, find an agreement with him: and without his permission, do not prepare anything too unusuall); Salvi, Regola del governo, pp. 51 and 90. Interestingly, while Domenici asks Bartolomea not to cover God-given flavors, he appears quite knowledgeable regarding how to combine the most attractive and luxurious fruit of the time – figs, pears, melons, and peaches – with sauces, or mostarda, which in turn required a good quantity of expensive sugar. 17 On Giovanni Dominici as the founder and then spiritual director of the convent of Corpus Domini in Venice, see Bornstein, ‘Small World’. See also Bornstein, ‘Giovanni Dominici’, on the influence Dominici exercised in Venice. 18 Dolce, Dialogo, fol. 24v. 19 This is not the place to recall the vast critical literature that examines sixteenth-century conduct books for women. Two examples are Lenzi, Donne e madonne, and Zarri, Donna, disciplina. More recently, see Sanson and Lucioli, Conduct Literature. Although prescriptive ideals

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widows – ordinary women for whom fasting was to become a rule of life. Several moral treatises, inspired by Juan Luis Vives’ De Institutione Feminae Christiane (1524), affirmed that widows had to abstain as much as possible from food as well as from all other pleasures of the body connected to the senses.20 Bishop Agostino Valier (1531-1606), in his Institutione d’ogni stato lodevole delle donne cristiane (1575), recommends maximum restraint in eating and drinking for all and particularly for young widows, since it is through the sense of taste that the Devil is able to set his trap for unwary female sinners. Indeed, Valier went so far as to warn widows not to even enjoy fasting too much because it could become debilitating or lead to sickness and thus they would not be able to properly serve God.21 The Jesuit Fulvio Androtio (Androzzi, 1523-1575), in his posthumous Opere Spirituali (1579), reiterated the idea that food is for sustenance of the body not for pleasure, and recommends exercising conscious restraint while eating, carefully leaving aside the most appealing foods so as to not nurture the sinful dangers of appetite.22 The moralist Giulio Cesare Cabei (1530-1622) epitomizes this way of thinking at the end of the sixteenth century by affirming that a widow – and a young one in particular – do not have any choice but to fast, as ‘her abstinence should be the poison and death of mad lust’.23 To overcome lust, a sin of incontinence, women were to avoid giving in to the sinful desire to eat. However, a new devilish temptation seems to edge out medieval gluttony in these texts, namely a taste, a gusto, for appealing and flavorful dishes. do not depict what was happening in society at the time, they nonetheless reveal an ideological framework that we often find discussed in texts across different genres. 20 See Campbell, ‘Old Age, Women’. For a useful overview of the status of widows in the sixteenth century, see Pucci, ‘Finalmente libera’. 21 ‘Per mezo del gusto fa grandi insidie il demonio a tutte le creature et alla vedova ancora: perciò ha d’astenersi dai cibi troppo delicati […] Si diletti de’ cibi ordinari e ne pigli tanto quanto può bastare per conservazione della vita […] Ma ben avertisca che non si diletti tanto del digiuno che rendi il corpo infermo’ [my emphasis] (The devil performs great insidious tricks through taste on all creatures and on the widow even more: for this reason, she must abstain from foods that are too delicate […] She must enjoy ordinary foods and take only as much as is required for the preservation of life […] But she must be careful to not enjoy her fast so much that she renders the body infirm); Valier, Institutione d’ogni stato, p. 103. 22 ‘quando mangiate con la famiglia […] non dovete in tutto alienarvi da quelli cibi, ma gustar qualche cosa di tutti, o d’una buona parte, e lasciare occultamente quel che più diletta’ (when you eat with your family […] you should not distance yourself from those foods, but rather taste a little bit of everything, or of most things, and leave concealed the thing that you most enjoy); Androtio, Terza parte delle opere, fols. 20r-24v, esp. 23r. 23 Cabei, Ornamenti, fols. 59-60: ‘così deve fare la nostra vedova disponendosi che l’astinenza sua abbia a essere il Tosco e la morte della furiosa libidine’.

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This vision of the ideal widow’s eating behavior was virtually the norm in prescriptive literature,24 and it extended to married women as well. One of the most successful conduct books for women in the sixteenth century, Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo de la institution delle donne secondo li tre stati che cadono nella vita umana (Venice, 1545), provided an excellent example of advice to the young unmarried girl, the married woman, and the widow.25 As part of her education, the manual insists, the young unmarried woman has to learn not only how to cook and work in the kitchen but also to eat vivande communi (common foods, in implicit opposition to refined foods) frugally and to avoid foods that could excite her young mind and arouse lust.26 Once married, Dolce’s woman had to organize meals for the family and prepare dishes that satisfied her husband while still demonstrating moderation and restraint. Becoming a widow meant again that she had to be measured in her spending on food and in the foods she consumed as well as shun tasty food. Dolce’s comments summarizes the traditional view that food eaten by women and prepared for the family had to follow rules of moderation and decorum.27 In his and similar Renaissance treatises, the stress on simple, common dishes for women to eat – and to prepare for their families – is distinct from the medieval emphasis on women needing to punish their bodies through renouncing food, sleep, and other worldly pleasures – without, however, putting aside earlier deep suspicions of the possibilities food offered for encouraging female sinfulness. Late medieval women’s fasting prepared them to receive the body of Christ in the Eucharist, helped them deny sinful bodily pleasures, and – in denying the flesh – emphasized their spirituality; therefore, their food practice was intimately related to religious piety. For authors of sixteenth-century conduct books, in contrast, the focus is on moderate food intake, with humble and common foods appearing as the best choice for women of honor. These texts make a direct connection between tasty foods – or foods that are attractive – and lust. Their use, 24 With one notable exception, Orazio Fusco’s treatise La vedova. See Sanson, ‘Widowhood and Conduct’. 25 Dolce’s work was a translation and adaptation of Juan Luis Vives’s De institutione feminae Christianae (1524 and 1538). 26 Dolce, Dialogo, fol. 24v. Dolce’s Dialogo had several editions after the princeps of 1545 (1553, 1559, 1560, 1622). 27 Dolce, Dialogo, fols. 53v and 74r-v. This view remained common with later authors; see for instance Guazzo (1530-1593), who in his Dialoghi piacevoli (first edition 1586), affirmed forcefully that cooking vivande ordinarie was one of the necessary virtues of the good and honorable wife. See Guazzo, Dialoghi piacevoli, fol. 381r.

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therefore, should be highly restricted – if consumed at all, they should be taken as medicine, not food. After all, flavorful foods excited the bodily senses, especially of women. Taste, therefore, maintained the medieval association of food and sin but did so in a new form. A woman can be revealed as not honorable – many conduct books affirmed – should she have a particular taste for unusual vivande. Bernardino Carroli, a nobleman and teacher living in the second half of the sixteenth century, wrote yet another treatise on Christian education and running the household. As Carroli explains, greedy women who wander the marketplace, driven by their insatiable desire to eat delicacies such as chestnuts and sweet wafers, end up in sexual perdition.28 In the dialogue, he attributes to unruly women, easily corruptible, a preference for cherries and melons.29 His prescriptive discourse about specific foodstuffs exposes a misogynist preconception regarding tastes that only women, supposedly, have for certain foods.30 According to the priest and moralist Francesco Rappi, who wrote a treatise dedicated to the convent of the Murate in Florence (1515), foods that inflame lust are to be avoided.31 It is as if a direct relationship 28 ‘A punto hò veduto di queste pazzarelle, che vogliono andar a quanti mercati si fanno la settimana, e si partono la mattina di casa […] e s’accompagnano con un suo vicino’ (in fact, I have seen these types of crazy women, who want to go to every marketplace each week, and leave home in the morning with one of their neighbors); ‘voglio ancora non sia golosa, perché questo vitio è pessimo in qual si voglia persona, ma più in donna’ (I also want her not to be greedy, because this vice is very bad in any person but particularly in a woman); Carroli, Instrutione del giovane ben creato, fols. 172-173. 29 ‘perché essendo questa sua golosità da un tristo e ribaldo saputa, gli basterà l’animo con un soldo di festa e cerase o con un mellone che gli appresenti aver da lei tutto quello che vole’ (if a cad or a wicked man finds out about her greediness, he will only need to offer her some small coins, cherries or a melon and he will get all he wants). ‘Et io so, che una tale per gola d’haver castagne, e zaldoni, andò a un trebbo (i.e. veglia, meeting with friends, etc.), fu condota in modo, dentro una camera, che se gli stocorrono intorno due buoni compagni (and I know that a woman for greediness to have chestnuts and sweet wafers, went to a meeting with friends and was led inside a room with two good fellows…) (my emphasis); Carroli, Instrutione del giovane ben creato, fols. 174-174, quoted in Filocamo, ‘Hungry Women’, p. 103. Interestingly, zaldoni, or sweet wafers – celebrated by Lorenzo de’ Medici in his Canzona de’ cialdoni – appear in virtually all the aristocratic cookbooks but were considered a basic dish that was easy to prepare. See for instance Messisbugo’s Banchetti and Scappi’s Opera in general. On cialdoni, see Krohn, ‘Wafering Iron’. 30 As we have seen, cherries, chestnuts, and melons, besides being expensive luxury foods were rich with symbolic sexual allusions. In everyday reality, fresh fruit, along with sweets and wine, was appreciated by men and women of all social classes, but in prescriptive literature only women had to abstain from such delights. 31 Rappi, Nuovo thesauro, recommended that women avoid hot aromatic foods, black pepper, canapa (hemp) seeds, salad, meats, and, surprisingly, fish which was considered neither hot or particularly aromatic; quoted in Muzzarelli, ‘A tavola’, p. 88.

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was thought to exist between women’s moral and/or sexual honor and their consumption of common, inexpensive, plain foods; these kinds of foodstuffs were considered best for keeping women disciplined. Ultimately, contemporary prescriptive advice for women centered on simple foods and the shunning of tastiness; these confines served the purpose of rendering gender relations yet more unequal in the name of avoiding sin, leaving no space for women’s sensual pleasures.

Women drinking wine Not only consuming vivande non ordinarie but also drinking wine was associated with women’s lustfulness and greediness. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century moralists and authors of conduct books drew attention to the fact that women should either not drink wine at all or drink it only moderately. Baldassare Pisanelli, a sixteenth-century physician, upheld with moralistic fervor the old prohibition against wine for women, stating that ‘with its use they close the door to virtue and give entry to all the vices’.32 Giulio Cesare Cabei specifically advised young women and widows to avoid banquets because they are presided over by intemperate Bacchus.33 Men, too, were subject to strictures against overindulging in wine, but for women the medical discourse added a significant negative dimension by stressing the notion that the colder nature of women was more susceptible to the heating effects of wine. This, writers warned, alters the natural order of things, thus threatening to erase a crucial gender distinction between the sexes.34 Indeed, drinking in taverns could be positively associated, for men, with masculinity, but the opposite was true for women, who by drinking in such places (or at all) could lose their honor and even their very nature.35 32 ‘Il vino fu negato anticamente alle Donne, perché con l’uso di quello chiudono la porta alla virtù, e danno l’ingresso a tutti i vitij’; Pisanelli, Trattato della natura de’ cibi, fol. 220. 33 Cabei, Ornamenti, fol. 58. 34 Gratarolo, De vini natura (1565), provides a synthesis of the Aristotelian thought that was the basis for Renaissance medical knowledge. The consumption of wine, which heats up the cool bodies of women, makes them more susceptible to sexual desire, especially during the summer. See Gratarolo, De vini natura, pp. 21-22. 35 ‘Raro sarà femina impudica qual non sia cupida e incontinente al vino’ (It is rare to have a licentious woman who is not also lustful and unrestrained with wine); see Alberti, De iciarchia, Book 1: p. 32; Antoniano, Della educazione Christiana, dedicates Chapter Sixteen (Book Three) ‘Della sobrietà in specie delle figliuole femine’, to the importance of sobriety in daughters. See pp. 380-381.

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The prescriptive rule that women should abstain from wine in general while men could drink it moderately did not square well with the everyday pragmatic fact that plain water was often unsafe to drink and that wine was actually a healthier choice for both men and women. Indeed, wine consumption was very common in early modern Italy. Most upper-class households had at least one wine cellar and special rooms for making vinegars; working-class houses often had a special place to store wine, oils, and food supplies, all facts that point to the high consumption of wine despite its negative reputation in prescriptive literature.36 Wine was served with and without meals; at home and in osterie, at inns, and during journeys.37 Most culinary treatises included sections on wine and its characteristics but did not elaborate on when to serve it and did not distinguish between men and women regarding its use.38 More importantly, wine was considered a medicine in itself: according to Galenic medicine it cured several illnesses and helped eliminate bad humors. It was in fact considered an almost universal remedy when used in moderation.39 Why was it, then, that only women were to abstain from it, at least according to moralists? It seems clear that prohibiting the consumption of wine to women served to reinforce unequal gender distinctions both at home and in public. Was a taste for wine among women actually the victim of such prescriptive discourses? Apparently not. Bacchus often seems to have won out over the fire and brimstone of preachers and even doctors’ fears of overheated, manlike women, as we shall see. In contrast to most prescriptive texts and more attuned to actual practice, Lodovico Dolce, for one, was in disagreement with common moralizing and medical advice regarding wine, and acknowledges that he could not condemn it ‘since its use is common today to both sexes’. 40 Domenico Romoli, known as Il Panunto – the scalco (steward) of Cardinal Ridolfi and then Pope Paul III – also opts for a more realistic picture of wine 36 McIver, Cooking and Eating, pp. 59-65. 37 Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, p. 168. 38 Capatti and Montanari explain that the presence of wine in cookbooks of the period is implicit, as wine was used as an important ingredient in cooking and had different purposes, from diluting to moistening to flavoring; see Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, p. 169. 39 Montanari, ‘Civilization of Wine’, p. 143. On the positive properties of wine as a crucial nutrient for the body, especially the sick and aged, see Gentilcore, Food and Health, pp. 163-164. 40 ‘L’uso del vino non lo posso dannare, essendo hoggidì commune all’un sesso & l’altro’. Still, relying on common medical and prescriptive advice, he added that modest consumption was good for health and for preserving chastity but that the more susceptible unmarried young woman should not indulge in ‘precious and delicate wines’ (le si tolgano i piu pretiosi et delicati vini); Dolce, Dialogo, fol. 24v.

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consumption and displays a certain irony about the negative vision of moralists. Romoli dedicates several chapters of his recipe book to wine, its qualities, and its types, and half-jokingly confesses that he is so passionate about wine and arguments about it that he cannot stop talking about it. Although he condemns immoderate consumption of wine by anyone and repeats many old clichés, he reveals some skepticism regarding the usual link between immorality, health, and wine, making fun of the historical examples endlessly repeated by many authors. Recalling that, in ancient Rome, men were permitted to kill their women if they were discovered drunk, he – like Dolce –ironically adds that ‘if one punished with death women who drink wine, there would be few in the world’, 41 suggesting that in his day drinking wine was common for women. Signif icantly, Romoli notes that it would be a real cruelty to deprive women of tasting (gustare)42 such an excellent drink, especially as women ‘are so sober and moderate in drinking in comparison to men’ that it would actually be better to prohibit men legally from drinking wine while allowing women that pleasure. 43 What Romoli depicts – women able to enjoy wine without being stigmatized – is a revolutionary image that stands at the opposite pole from the upside-down world of sixteenth-century artistic and comic representations in which women’s drinking serves as a sign of immoderate and dishonorable behavior. For Romoli, in contrast, women are said to consciously appreciate excellent wine with an innate moderation that men lacked, thus appearing, for once, as models of good behavior rather than as objects of disdain, derision, or disapproval. This is an important instance of a more positive idea of gusto in the sixteenth century becoming relevant as a new measure of value. 41 ‘se hoggidì si punissero con la morte le donne che beono vino, poche sariano al mondo’; Romoli, La singolare dottrina, fols. 336v-337r. 42 English does not convey the complex meaning of the term, which might be better (if repetitively) translated as ‘tasting its flavor with pleasure’. 43 ‘Non già che io non laudi che non ne beano, perché sarebbe crudeltà che stessero in questo mondo prive del gustare un liquore così eccellente, anzi dico che è mala cosa se non ne beono massimamente che per l’ordinario son tanto sobrie e sì moderate nel beverlo, rispetto a gli huomini, che bisognerebbe che si facesse legge, che gli huomini non ne bevessero e esse sì, poi che son così temperate in esso, e gli huomini sì intemperati’ [my emphasis] (I don’t praise the idea that they don’t drink it, because it would be a cruelty if in this world they were deprived of tasting such an excellent spirit; indeed I say that it is a bad thing if they don’t drink even more as normally they are so sober and moderate in drinking it, in comparison to men, that a law should be made prohibiting men from drinking wine and allowing women to do so, as they are so temperate in doing so, and men so very intemperate); Romoli, La singolare dottrina, fols. 336v-337r.

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Romoli’s radical position was, however, too radical for wide acceptance and ingrained judgments, such as the association of wine and sin for women, which die hard. Nonetheless a more moderate position gained purchase in some tracts at the end of the sixteenth century. In the Dialogi del Eccellente Medico M. Giorgio Pittore Villingano (1550) dedicated to the maintenance of good health that follows, broadly speaking, the traditional prescriptive Galenic and Hippocratic ideas discussed above, two speakers converse about wine, its quality, and its provenance. 44 Poligolo claims that sweet wine, which everybody loves, is best, noting that women f ind it excellent (‘Io haverei detto che il dolce fusse stato il migliore perché piace a tutti, ed è giudicato ottimo dalle donne’45). Teofrasto objects, asking with unquestioned masculine superiority whether Poligolo thinks that all things women consider good are actually good. Unsurprisingly, Poligolo replies in the negative, defending his comment by claiming that, like a good man, he only agrees with women regarding sweet wine because he also likes it. Here, in two lines, the discerning capacity of women for wine (or anything else) is as simply admitted as dismissed. Still, lurking in this moment of male superiority is the well-hidden possibility that a man might affirm that women have a preference for sweet wine and that their opinion matters. 46 Whether regarding sweet wine or plain, the taboo against drinking wine that is so powerfully stated in contemporary prescriptive literature, is clearly gendered – but, equally clearly, it was often disregarded.

Ortensio Lando’s Commentario Moralists’ warnings against fancy home cooking may have been in part a reaction to the early modern popularity of foods with strong and complex flavors enhanced by the heavy use of spices that stretched back to the Middle Ages. The widely enjoyed blend of sweet and savory that some historians think had come to Italy through Arabic cuisine 47 tended to emphasize the color and scent of food, another sensual aspect that many moralists found troubling. Varied flavors and sauces were used either to 44 Dialogi del Eccellente Medico M. Giorgio Pittore Villingano, del modo di conservare la sanità. 45 Dialogi del Eccellente Medico M. Giorgio Pittore, fol. 43. 46 Dialogi del Eccellente Medico M. Giorgio Pittore, fol. 43. 47 The degree of influence Arabic/Muslin cuisine had on the development of taste in Italy and Europe is a debated issue among historians. Paul Freedman in his book Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, gives a brief assessment of the debate; see Chapter One and especially pp. 26-28.

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intensify or to contrast natural flavors both for medical and gastronomic reasons – that is, both to balance the humors of the eater and to display the bravura of the cook and/or his/her patron.48 But the sixteenth century was also a period when new trends in food culture were emerging. The most significant of these, as we have seen, were the new fashions for vegetables, fresh fruit, and less exotic ingredients, all corresponding to a decrease in meat consumption and an increase in the use of herbs as condiments. Cheese lost most of its reputation as a rustic, unsophisticated food and the already famous parmigiano reggiano became a prized Italian specialty. 49 Many of these novel changes implied a shift toward simpler cuisine characterized by the quality and freshness of ingredients, something that would eventually become an ideal of Italian cookery. A gastronomic tour of regional Italian specialties is at the core of the Commentario by Ortensio Lando (1548), a Baedeker of early modern Italian products and cooking. The text was written by a physician and literato (who introduced Thomas More’s Utopia to Italian readers) just before the great cookbooks of the second half of the sixteenth century that enshrined the traditions of Italian cooking. In Lando’s work – a fictional narrative nonetheless featuring a veritable catalogue of local foods, produce, and wine – Italian cities appear according to their gastronomic specialties; for instance, Ferrara is named for its famous salsiccie, Venice for its seafood, Brescia and Bergamo for their wines, and Treviso for crayfish from the river Sile.50 Published at the end of the Commentario is a brief and playful treatise called Catalogo de gli inventori delle cose che si mangiano & beveno (Catalogue of the Discoverers of Things that People Eat and Drink). This catalogue is organized around imaginary and historical characters who were the inventors and first to eat certain prepared dishes.51 Lando cleverly presents the Commentario as a translation of a work by an anonymous author from the world of Utopia. But are these dishes simply flights of fantasy from an imagined utopian world? Perhaps in the sense that not everyone could afford most of the dishes described – fresh fish, sweets, precious fruits, expensive meat, and ravioli filled with cheese – but in fact these were for the most part real dishes rather than fantastical culinary creations. Still, in between descriptions of real dishes, Lando placed good-humored and 48 Astarita, Italian Baroque Table, pp. 88-89. 49 Montanari, Cheese, Pears, and History, pp. 22-23. 50 Lando, Commentario, pp. 9-16. 51 The Catalogo de gli inventori playfully recalls a celebrated encyclopedic work of the time on a ‘history’ of inventions/discovery, Polidoro Vergilio (1470-1555) De rerum inventoribus, published in Venice for the first time at the end of the fifteenth century.

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spirited inventions that satirized humoral ideas, classical examples, and noted food ‘secrets’. He mentions a certain lustful Susanna Melina, who would eat chilled purslane (porcelana and portulaca in Italian) to calm her unnatural passionate heat, as well as an ancient Roman gentleman called Pollio, who was so greedy for delectable foods that ‘he used to throw his servants into the pond to ensure that the fish would become tastier from eating notoriously flavorful human flesh’.52 Lando’s creative tales make fun of moralistic and medical tropes regarding food and gender, lusty women, and greedy Roman men. Lando, however, was primarily interested in the concept of novelty in food and taste. He attributed to many fictional women the ‘invention’ of particularly savory modern dishes where fresh herbs took the place of heavy spices; thus we meet Gasperia, a virtuous and modest woman from Como – who was the first to stuff fish with herbs, cherries, raisins, garlic, and other tasty things – and Hippodamia Rauraca – who invented the recipe for cooking fish in vinegar or in wine, adding to it parsley, nuts, and must (sapa, juice made from crushed grapes).53 Common in the Catalogo are mentions of pasta: The peasant woman Libista invented ravioli – both the filled pasta and the filling itself, which we call today malfatti;54 Meluzza comasca (from Como) conceived of lasagna and macheroni with garlic, spices, and cheese;55 when she died she was buried with honor because of her culinary inventions. Lando also presents women as creators of upper-class, sophisticated dishes such as salads and cheeses improved with expensive spices. He writes that Melina from Reggio, for example, was the first chef to make a fashionable 52 ‘Susanna Melina fu la prima che mangiasse porcelana, persuasa di raffreddar per cotal mezo la lussuria sendo molto fredda’ (Susanna Melina was the first who ate purslane, which is very cold, persuaded [that it] cooled down her carnal desire); Lando, Commentario, p. 129. ‘Vedio Pollio: fu il primo che accompagnasse il cacio con le frutta: era costui si vago delle cose delicate, che gittava i servi nelle piscine, accioche i pesci diventassero di più grato sapore mangiando le carni humane di sapor dolcissimo’ (think of Pollio: he was the first who ate cheese with fruit […]); Lando, Commentario, p. 130. 53 ‘Gasperia comascha femina virtuosa e pudica […] fu la prima che empisse alcuni pesci di erbe, di marasche, di uva passola, di aglio e altre cosarelle’ and ‘Hippodamia Rauraca, fu la prima, che cuocesse il pesce hor nel vino, hor nell’aceto, e che vi accompagnasse il petrosello, le noci, e la sapa’; Lando, Commentario, p. 115. 54 ‘Libista, […] fu l’inventrice di far raff ioli avviluppati nella pasta e di spogliati detti da’ Lombardi mal fatti’. Today there are at least two words for pasta filled with meat, cheese, or vegetable: ravioli and tortelli. For Lando, ravioli (raffioli) could be ‘avviluppati nella pasta’ (pasta wrapping around a meat and vegetable filling) or ‘dispogliati’ (naked, just the filling without the pasta), now called malfatti; Lando, Commentario, p. 126. 55 ‘Meluzza comasca fu l’inventrice di mangiar lasagna, macheroni con l’aglio, spetie e cacio, […] e honorevolmente fu per le sue inventioni sepelita’; Lando, Commentario, p. 126.

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carrot salad and to cook cheese on a hot spit with sugar and cinnamon.56 The Commentario and the Catalogo were written by someone who was not an expert in food, and are thus particularly interesting as they express a vision of food and fashionable dishes that is equally distant from the practical steward’s cookbook, the prescriptive education manual for women and men, and the moralistic injunctions of doctors, priests, and preachers. Not only was Lando not interested in humoral physiology, advice for women, or any hierarchy of foods and senses, instead he was fascinated by novel practices and uses in the Italian food landscape of the mid-sixteenth century that he both documents and cleverly fantasizes about. Significantly, Lando included women as well as men as the ‘inventors’ of dishes whose components reflect the new interest in simpler dishes, natural flavors, vegetables, herbs, fresh pasta, and seafood.57 Most notably, then, he recognized women as necessary co-protagonists in the tale of the gastronomic revolution of sixteenth-century Italian cuisine.

Isabella d’Este and novelty foods Years before Lando wrote his intriguing catalogue of new dishes, Isabella d’Este Gonzaga (1474-1539) – born in the court of the Este in Ferrara and to become marchesana at the Gonzaga court in Mantua – wrote an impressive number of letters that discuss life at court, diplomacy, politics, art, music, fashion, and food with relatives, friends, rulers, and the most renowned artists and writers of her time.58 The conversations found in her letters about food, agricultural innovations, taste, and food preferences all point to the idea that food was an important form of cultural communication 56 ‘Melina da Reggio fu l’inventrice del fare le insalate delle carote e di far cuocere I caci cavallucci nel schidone con prestissimo fuoco e con sopra porvi zuchero e canella copiosamente’; Lando, Commentario, p. 128. 57 Two other authors in the seventeenth century, Neapolitan steward Antonio Latini (1642-1696) and Antonio Frugoli, followed Lando’s lead and/or plagiarized him by claiming that particular dishes and drinks had been ‘discovered’ by someone. See Latini, Lo scalco alla moderna (published in 1692-1694), and Frugoli, Pratica e scalcaria (1638), both quoted in Astarita, Italian Baroque Table, p. 47. 58 I consulted the letters housed in the Mantua State Archive through the remarkable online resource IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive, available at www.idealetters.web.unc.edu/lettersplatform. Abbreviations hereafter in references to these documents: Archivio di Stato di Mantova (ASM), Archivio Gonzaga (AG), Busta (file, B.) Libro (copybook, L.), fol. (page, recto/verso). The English translations of letters quoted in text and notes is from Deanna Shemek: d’Este, Selected Letters. If there is no mention of Shemek’s edition, the translation is my own.

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and a crucial part of the familiar, diplomatic, economic, and political life of this uniquely powerful and visible Renaissance woman.59 Isabella in a sense foreshadows Lando’s Catalogo and its female protagonists as a discoverer of new dishes and edible specialties. Many of her letters linger with humor and cleverness on food preferences and her sense of taste; on new dishes to try; on recipes to exchange. They make requests to her agents in Venice, Florence, and elsewhere for specific foods; detail searches for cooks and trincianti (meat carvers); even flag the emotional impacts of appetite. Letters about music, art, theater, and literature interweave with letters that discuss different types of cheese and vegetables, new dishes, and novel cooking techniques; there is no alteration in style as she moves among these diverse subjects, all of which feature taste and all of which clearly fascinated her. Interestingly, one of Isabella’s favorite activities was precisely what preachers abhorred most: sampling new foods and enticing ways of preparing vegetables and fish. Often sharing discoveries with her brother Alfonso d’Este, the duke of Ferrara, she wrote to him in February 1519 with a recipe for cabbage (verza).60 She reminded him that she had occasionally sent him Savoy cabbage seeds; here, then, she continued was a recipe for preparing, cooking, and dressing the vegetable with oil and vinegar to serve it as a salad. Though cabbage was no ‘new’ vegetable, cabbage salad was a novelty in Isabella’s kitchen – and in her time, when the fashion for greens and vegetables eaten raw was just beginning – as we have seen – to gain a certain popularity. She added that she was convinced her brother would appreciate this stranieza – this unusual ‘whimsical’ dish’.61 This letter is merely one among many in which Isabella encouraged her brother to try a new dish – often fish from neighboring Lake Garda – that she had tasted 59 On the importance and meaning of exchanging letters for d’Este, see Shemek, ‘In Continuous Expectation’. 60 ‘Ill.mo xx. Mandai a V. Ex. altre volte alcune semente di verze per mangiar in salatta. Hora gli mando de le verze proprie accio la ni possa far la prova. Il modo de acconciarle e questo. Bisogna tagliar via quello torso duro, poi il resto metterlo à bollire in aqua per uno pochetto sino à tanto che sia divenuta la verza alquanto tenera: poi levarla di l’aqua et conciarla con olio et accete in foggia di salatta. V. Ex. vederà poi se gli piacerà questa stranieza. Et allei mi rac. do sempre’; ASM, AG, B. 2997, L. 36, fol. 32r., 27 February 1519. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 436 (letter 600). 61 d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 436. After sending her brother the recipe for cabbage salad, Isabella engaged in a lengthy discussion with him about the cabbage seeds that she had sent but he had never received. In the final letter of the exchange, Isabella detailed the moment when she gave him the seeds and Alfonso admitted to losing them. See excerpts from the letters in Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 188.

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first. In November 1521, she wrote him to present ‘our new dish’: two fresh carp and a trout marinated in vinegar. Since she had found them to have an excellent taste (optimo gusto), she was sending a sample with a request that he let her know whether he liked them or not. She added some practical advice on how to eat the fish, recommending the removal of some of the vinegar from the carp and suggesting warming up the trout in a pan before it was served because, she explained: ‘It seemed to me better that way’.62 In 1523 Isabella wrote to her collaborator Hieronymo Sextola (Coglia or Coia) with the instruction to send to Alfonso and her uncle Sigismondo some precious trout and agoni (a lake fish) from Garda that she had been able to procure with ‘some efforts’.63 The gift is accompanied by advice: the agoni should be cooked on a grill, ‘in the same way that we cook sardines’ because ‘you will find that they are very good that way’.64 It is noteworthy that Isabella repeatedly recounts her own personal sensory experience of each innovative recipe – how it tasted to her – rather than simply repeating recipes from gastronomical books. The noun gusto and the verb gustare always refer in her letters to a practice – often her own – described with pride and pleasure rather than to an ideology or to a desire to assert her status or distinction. Isabella clearly appreciated tasting new vivande and sharing her ‘discoveries’. In another letter from 1519 she assumed that her brother, tired after a long trip, needed qualche stranieze (something novel or unusual) to revive his appetite, so she sent him some of the most prized vegetables of the season: artichokes and a few blackberries in a small basket. She joked that she would have liked to pretend they were from her own garden, fooling him like when he had tricked her into believing a fennel candied with vinegar was from Ferrara, whereas it had come from Spain.65 Artichokes were very 62 ‘questi giorni passati mi venne volonta di far prova di far conciare carpioni freschi e truta in l’accete parendomi havessero ad esser boni: cossì havendo fato far tal concia et essendomi a juditio mio reuscita con optimo gusto, mi è parso mandarvi a V.Ec. acciò lei anchor gusti questa nostra nova pietanza […] la truta è vero che la faccio scaldare nella padella, parendomi sia meglio cossì’; ASM, AG, B. 2998, L. 38, fol. 47v., 6 November 1521. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 454 (letter 632). Quoted in Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 238, and McIver, Cooking and Eating, p. 81. 63 ‘Et con fatica si hanno potuto haver’; ASM, AG. B. 2998, L. 41, fol. 61r., 21 January 1523. 64 ‘Et se advertireti ad far cocere li agoni suso la gratella, al modo delle sardelle, trovareti che sono molto boni’; ASM, AG, B. 2998, L. 41, fol. 61r., 21 January 1523. Quoted in Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 238, and McIver, Cooking and Eating, p. 81. 65 ‘esser fastidita per il longo viaggio suo, et perhò havere bisogno di qualche stranieze che gli inducano appetito’ and ‘Mi affaticaria ben voluntieri in volergli dare ad intendere che fossero nati nel giardino mio a diporto, quando mi persuadessi la dovesse crederlo così facilmente come i feci di quanto V. Ex. tia me disse circa quello fenocchio confetto in lo accete, quale veniva de Spagna’; ASM, AG, B. 2997, L. 36, fols. 31v.-32r., 26 February 1519. In d’Este, Selected letters, p. 435 (letter 599). Quoted in Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 112.

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much enjoyed at the Este and Gonzaga courts, and Isabella’s correspondence reflects this interest in the newly fashionable vegetable. A few years later she supervised the planting of artichokes that Sigismondo sent her from Ferrara and thanked him with some irony, observing that she was hoping to rid herself of her appetite for them now that she could have them from her own garden.66 Apparently, they did not thrive, however, for in 1532 Isabella wrote to the marchesa of Massa, Ricciarda Malaspina, thanking her for the artichokes she had sent and explaining they were particularly appreciated because ‘they are something new, since for now we find only a few here’.67 Clearly, local vegetables and fish of high quality were extremely prized, and it is fascinating to see in these brief exchanges a sort of friendly competition as well as an ongoing exchange of seeds, plants, advice, and recipes among family members and fellow rulers. Isabella seems to have been a particularly aggressive purveyor – and distributor to her friends and relatives – of many food specialties: most often vegetables, fresh fruit, sweets, cheese, and fish.68 Other delicacies that were sought after and highly prized at Mantua and Ferrara, by Isabella, her brother, and her husband Francesco Gonzaga were mushrooms and truffles. A very young Isabella wrote in jest in 1495 to Alfonso that she had no more truffles to send him since so many had been sent already that the land was depleted. Nonetheless, given her craving for shellfish – which, she noted, is no less than his craving for truffles – she promised to send him some as an exchange.69 A few days later she sent the bag of promised

66 ‘Vostra Signoria ni ha mandato le piante de carchioff i in tanta copia che potrò molto ben sperar de tormine la voglia et tuorla anchor ad altri’; ASM, AG, B. 2998, L. 38, fol. 43r., 7 November 1521. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 453 (letter 630). 67 ‘l’altro per esser cosa nuova perché di qua per anchor non si ritrova se non puoco. Goderogli molto volentieri per amor suo et sua memoria’; ASM, AG, B. 3000, L. 51, fol. 8v., 16 April 1532. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 558 (letter 789). 68 Especially during her first years in Mantua, Isabella sent food gifts that traveled with her letters to her family in Ferrara, perhaps to reinforce her own memory of them. Fruit was also highly appreciated at both courts. Isabella’s appetite for consuming and cultivating fruit, for making preserves used in desserts, and for gifting prized condiments of meat is a constant presence in her correspondence. See, for example, various letters from 1511 on, where Isabella ordered fig plants and other ‘fruit-bearing trees’ for her new garden at Palazzo di Porto; in d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 352 (letters 476 and 477). 69 ‘Se già parecchi zorni non ho mandato a la S. V. tartuffole la debbe pensare chio non habia avuto. Credo che per innumerabile quantità de quelle chio gli ho mandato se sia desimenzato questo paese però ho scripto a Verona potendone haver le mandaro a V.S. Ma perche io non tengo minor voglia de cappe che lei faccia di tartuffole la prego’; ASM, AG, B. 2992, L. 6, fol. 9r., 7 November 1495. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 79 (letter 101).

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truffles, letting Alfonso know that she ordered her staff to look for more in various places.70 Was the teasing in the f irst letter intended to play on the notorious reputation of truffles and shellfish as aphrodisiacs?71 Truffles were well known at the Este court; the physician Michele Savonarola (c. 1385-1466), who served the court in the fifteenth century, dedicated an entire section to the tartufola in his Libreto de tute le cosse che se manzano (c. 1450-1452). The entry on truffles illustrates their nutritional property, includes several suggestions for cooking, and adds in conclusion that truffles are a meal ‘perfect for old men with beautiful wives’.72 According to Platina, too, truffles are a nourishing food capable of arousing passion; for this reason, he explains ‘the aphrodisiac tables of voluptuaries and nobles often use it so that they may be more ready for passion’.73 Was Isabella aware of this reputation of truffles and thus mocking her brother? We cannot be sure, yet certainly, over the following years, several letters sent by Isabella accompanying truffles or ordering her factors to find them74 testify to the fact that truffles had ascended to a high status after earlier medieval discussions on their uncertain nature among naturalists and doctors.75 70 ‘Per el presente cavallaro mando a S.V. un sachetto de tartuffole: quale se degnarà godere per mio amore et ho scripto in diversi loci per haverne’ (by the present horseman I am sending Your Excellency a bag of truffles: please deign to enjoy them for love of me; and I have written to various places to look for more); ASM, AG, B. 2992, L. 6, fol. 14v., 26 November 1495. 71 The sixteen-year-old Isabella, newly married, wrote to a Lady Polissena who had visited the Gonzaga court but did not stay two weeks because she claimed she wanted to eat oysters and mussels but the Gonzaga court too far from the sea and thus could not satisfy her appetite. Taking offense at this, fearing that Polissena’s taste for oysters was driven by desire for Francesco, Isabella warned her – jokingly or not – that if Polissena did not change that particular appetite, she might well be served a less appetizing dish that included poison. ASM, AG, B. 2904, L. 136, fols. 4v.-5r., 4 March 1490. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 27 (letter 10). 72 ‘E più finalmente qui dirò ch’ ‘el pasto da vegi che hano belle moglie’. Savonarola, Libreto, p. 80. Quoted in Giannetti, ‘Satyr in the Kitchen’, p. 105. 73 ‘Hinc est quod hoc crebro utantur venereae delicatorum ac lautorum mensae quo in venerem promptiores sint’; Platina, On Right Pleasure, p. 410-411. 74 See the letter to the Commissario of Capriana where Isabella asks for truffles to send to the Duchess of Ferrara ‘che ce ne ha ricercato con gran instantia per ritrovarsi gravida’ (that she had requested from us with great insistence, hoping to becoming pregnant); ASM, AG, B. 2997 L. 33, fol. 11v., 9 May 1516. Quoted in Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 115, n. 125. See another letter to the Commissari of Volta and Capriana where Isabella urgently asks that they find more truffles to deliver directly to her scalco, probably for some official dinner at the court; ASM, AG, B. 2997, L. 34, fol. 26r., 8 March 1517. Quoted in Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 115. 75 The reputation of truffles as a high status food is confirmed by Matthioli in his sixteenthcentury botanical commentary, I Discorsi di M. Pietro Matthioli Sanese, fol. 313r.: ‘sono notissimi a ciascuno […] cavansi dunque copiosi da i nostri contadini, per esser molto in pregio appresso à

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Mushrooms were definitely more problematic than truffles, not only because of the danger inherent in them76 but also because of their reputation as a vegetable difficult to digest and likely to generate destructive humors. Still, Isabella d’Este and her family did not heed doctors’ common warnings regarding mushrooms and sought to have a constant supply for the Gonzaga court. In the spring of 1499, Francesco sent his wife two giant mushrooms foraged in the Marmirolo park during a hunt. He hoped that Isabella would appreciate them for the novelty of their size and bantered: ‘We expect that you will congratulate us that in our park gigantic things are beginning to grow’.77 Was Francesco playing upon the idea of the giant fungus priapeius mushroom that recalled the shape of a well-developed phallus? We cannot possibly know precisely what he wanted to communicate to his young bride – though his gusto for bantering about sexual matters with his friend, the Bolognese jurist and cleric Floriano Dolfo, is well documented.78 Nevertheless, the phallic shape of mushrooms was common knowledge and phallic mushrooms appeared in the herbals and plant encyclopedias of the time. During the second half of the sixteenth century, botanist Ulisse Aldrovandi painted a famous acquerello of the so-called phallus impudicus mushroom.79 Leaving aside the sexual meaning of mushrooms, we know that Isabella particularly loved brognoli, small, compact mushrooms, and asked her agent to procure them for her.80 She especially liked receiving mushrooms as i magnati’ (they are very well known by everyone […] thus they are hunted in great quantities by our farmers, as they are prized by the nobles). The truffle was usually served cooked at the end of the meal (see for instance the recipe in Platina, on Right Pleasure, pp. 410-411). On medieval discussions regarding the ‘complexion’ of truffles, see Carnevale Schianca, La cucina medievale, p. 649. 76 Savonarola’s Libreto opens a section on mushrooms stating that they are divided between those that are poisonous and those that are not. He then adds: ‘Inanti che più ultra passa, voglio qui dolerme [de alcuni fioli] de Eva che per uno bochone se mete al periculo de la morte’ (And here, before going any further, I want to grieve for those children of Eve who, as a result of a single bite, brought upon themselves the danger of death); Savonarola, Libreto, p. 80 (‘Fongi e sponzoli’). 77 ‘esser grati almeno per la novità de la loro grandezza. Expectamo ben che la si congratuli cum noi, che nel parcho nostro cominciano a nascer cose zigantesche’; Francesco II Gonzaga, 12 May 1499, quoted in Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 114. 78 See the fascinating article by Bourne, ‘Mail Humor’, esp. pp. 207-211, on the correspondence between Floriano Dolfo and Francesco Gonzaga. 79 Now housed at the University of Bologna, AMS Historica, Collezione digitale di opere storiche. On the phallus impudicus, also called Satirione, see Giannetti, ‘Satyr in the Kitchen’, p. 120-121, n. 36. 80 Isabella asked her agent Vincenzo Preti to buy them in Bologna: ‘haveremo a caro che facci hopera de haverni, et ce li mandi per il primo ti occorra, perché molto ni piaceno et satisfanno al gusto nostro.’ ASM, AG, B. 2998, L. 42, fol. 32r., 15 April 1523. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 475 (letter 663).

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gifts,81 procured them for her scalco (steward and banquet organizer), and frequently sent them to relatives and friends. Though mushrooms still had a bad reputation in food treatises as vegetables linked to base soil, dirt, and humidity – and, furthermore, were considered dangerous for digestion – their reputation and the disciplined eating it reflected was simply ignored at her court. Even the indisputable danger of poisonous mushrooms, still a real problem, could be averted with experience and did not prevent the Gonzaga court from regularly enjoying such a prized treat as foraged mushrooms. Once again, a yawning gap existed between prescriptive literature and practice, as far as the pleasures of gusto and good eating were concerned. Isabella’s appetite for fruit is another constant presence in her correspondence. As already mentioned in Chapter One, the prestige of fruit – raw and cooked – among Italian aristocrats was widely recognized during the early modern period. The courts of Ferrara and Mantua not only reflected this but also played an important role in cultivating, selecting, and the consuming of fruit of all sorts. The archeobotanical data from the Vasca Ducale in fifteenth-century Ferrara, as we have seen, confirms the high favor in which fruit was always held at the Este court. Although we do not have archeobotanical data for Mantua, many letters written by Isabella mention the subject, specifically detailing her taste for fruit and her preoccupation with the problems inherent in planting and growing fruit trees, pruning them, monitoring their water intake, and controlling pests. There is no mention of doctors’ preoccupation with the supposed cold and damp quality of fruit that is so prominent in their treatises and in the prescriptive literature reviewed earlier. Isabella sent fruit and preserves as gifts to her close and distant relatives, to rulers and diplomats in Italy and Europe, and to her husband Francesco, who was often far away from Mantua following the path of his military career as a noted condottiero.82 A constant in her letters is appreciation for the quality and freshness of fruit; she consistently asked for the best available on the market when she could not have fruit from her own garden. She also 81 See letters in 1522 to her friend Alda Boiarda where Isabella thanks her correspondent for sending mushrooms and other precious gifts such as pears, grapes, and birds (ortolani); ASM, AG, B. 2998, L. 40, fol. 35r., and L. 41, fol. 45r. Quoted in Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 114. 82 For instance, Isabella wrote to her mother in March 1490, sending a gift of food (a number of carp, trout, citrons, and quinces) for her mother, father, brother, and sister; ASM, AG, B. 2904, L. 136, fol. 14v. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 30 (letter 15). In July 1495, she sent different types of wine, melons, preserved pears, and brognolata, a preserved confection, to her husband Francesco, who was away on a military campaign against the French army; ASM, AG, B. 2992, L. 5, fol. 61r. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 76 (letter 97).

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received gifts of fruit, as many letters testify. In April 1492, when she was still a young bride in Mantua, she received dried figs from her sister-in-law Elisabetta Gonzaga in Urbino. It was Lent, and Isabella writes that she is grateful for the gift, which she is reciprocating with two big cheeses; she jests with Elisabetta that she will think of her while she ‘is eating lean’ and her sister-in-law can think of Isabella while eating fat, likely calculating that by the time the gift reached Elisabetta, Lent would be over.83 The most prized fruit of the time were pears; it appears that Isabella also loved the renowned quality of bergamotte pears. In October 1517, when corresponding with the Este family gardener in Ferrara, she asked him to send pear trees to plant in Mantua, declaring that, having tried many qualities of pears she could conclude that ‘to our taste the bergamotte are the best’.84 Like the pere moscadelle of chapter One, pere bergamotte were a renowned type of pears, famous for their aroma and taste. According to agricultural expert Agostino Gallo – and to Giacomo Castelvetro – they were so delicate that they did not last long. Clearly Isabella was willing to invest money and time procuring them.85 Isabella’s court was well supplied with cooks, stewards, and kitchen servants, but the Marchesa reveals in her correspondence how important it was to her to be personally invested in the management of food provisions, in the planting of new trees and vegetables at her Palazzo di Porto garden, and in the exchange of recipes and food items. She took an active role in directly organizing the court kitchen. Several letters attest over the years to her continuous search for a cook who would be at the level of those at 83 ‘in cambio di li quali mando a lei due forme di formazo de pesi cinque l’una che sono le più belle se sono ritrovate in questa nostra tera aciò che la S. V. habia memoria de me quando se manzarà grasso: cussì como ho io de essa adesso che se manza de macro’; ASM, AG, B. 2991, L. 2, fols. 9v.-10r., 14 April 1492. Quoted in Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 226. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 48 (letter 52). 84 ‘la lettera vostra et insieme la cista con li peri che ce havete mandati, quali veramente me sono piaciuti molto per essere boni e belli, vi ne ringratiamo assai et già havendoni approvato de più sorti, ritrovamo che al gusto nostro li bergamotti sono li migliori’ (my emphasis) [we thank you very much] for the letter and the basket of pears you sent us, which we really enjoyed greatly because they were good and beautiful, and having tried many different types, we conclude that to our taste the bergamotte are the best). ASM, AG, B. 2997, L. 34, fol. 85r. Quoted in Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 116. 85 ‘Fra queste sorti di peri [i.e., dell’autunno] vi è il bergamotto, il quale è forse il più saporito & più delicato d’ogni altro; ma non si conserva molto tempo’ (Among these types of pears [autumn pears] the bergamot stands out as perhaps the most flavorful and delicate; but it does not last long). Agostino Gallo, Le vinti giornate dell’agricoltura, fol. 106. Castelvetro states in his Racconto that [il pero bergamotto] ‘è di succo tanto delicato che niente più’ ([the bergamot pear’s] juice is so delectable that nothing is better); see pp. 17-18.

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the Este court. She searched for cooks and apprentices in Mantua and its territories, in Ferrara, and at other courts in Italy. In 1506 she wrote to her relative Ferdinando d’Este asking him as a favor to place a good apprentice that she was sending to him at the service of his cook, so he could learn new cooking skills for a few months and then return to Mantua.86 We do not have Ferdinando’s response, but he may not have been ‘happy’ to share his cook’s experience with an apprentice heading back to another court. During that same period, Christoforo da Messisbugo was working at the Estense court, and perhaps Isabella’s request could not be granted as the famous cook did not want to share his recipes and techniques or did not have time.87 Later the same year, Isabella’s factotum Benedetto Capilupi wrote to Girolamo Ziliolo, a courtier in Ferrara, letting him know that he had been finally able to find a buono coco (a good cook) for the Marchesa who would be provided with all the supplies needed to set up his kitchen in Mantua.88 Years later, in 1518, it seems that Isabella was finally happy with the cook she had; thus she sent back to the Marchese of Monferrato a cook that he had recommended to her because what she needed now was instead an apprentice who ‘would train in this art under another, old cook of mine’ – someone she would never let go.89 There is no way to know if this ‘old cook’ was Massimino, who years later was allowed to leave her court in order to become her son Cardinal Ercole’s 86 Malacarne’s Sulla mensa, especially pp. 31-34 cites several letters related to the search for a cook by Isabella d’Este. I have relied on his research for this section. ‘Sono molti anni che havimo desiderio di havere un cogo che ni piacia et sia sufficiente. Ne mai, per disgratia nostra se havimo potuto imbater. Havendo hora per le mani uno nominato Agreste, exihibitor presente, el qual ni è laudato di grande inzegno, che essendo sotto qualche homo da bene el si faria […] se la desidera di farmi cosa grata, voglia fare che il cogo suo gli mostri, gli insegni per qualche mesi: aciò che di lui si possiamo poi servire’ (It has been many years that we desired to have a cook who will please us and will be adequate. It is our bad luck that we have never found one. Having now discovered one named Agreste, who brings the current letter, who is commended for his ingenuity and can improve [further] under the guidance of some great cook […] if you desire to do us a favor, could you please make your cook teach him for a few months: so that we could then employ him in our service). ASM, AG, B. 2994, L.19, fol. 24r., 15 July 1506. 87 This is the hypothesis advanced by Malacarne, Sulla mensa, p. 33. 88 ‘è venuto lui medesimo ad offerirsi al servitio nostro cossì lo havemo acceptato et ritorna a Ferrara a tuor le robbe sue’ (he came to offer himself to our service and thus we have accepted him and he is now returning to Ferrara to get his cooking gear); ASM, AG, B. 2994. L.19, fol. 37v., 11 August 1506. 89 ‘però ch’el bisogno ch’avea d’un cocho non era de persona simile, ma d’uno gargione, che si allevasse sotto un altro cocho mio vechio in questo mestiero, qual no levaria per alcuna cosa dall’officio suo’; ASM, AG, B. 2997, L. 35, fol. 32r., 22 February 1518. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 427 (letter 584).

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cook. But in January of 1533 she wrote a short unhappy letter to Massimino telling him that she agreed to let him go and serve Ercole, something that she would not have done ‘for any other person in the world’.90 Not even a month later, Massimino left Ercole to become the personal chef to Ferrante, Isabella’s other son, in Rome. At this point she wrote to Ferrante, informing him that her acceptance of this change of staffing was contingent on the implied requirement that Massimino had to return to her sooner or later. She complained of depression, of feeling ‘an immense need’ for her cook’s presence: since Massimino’s departure, she had found herself so lacking in appetite that it seemed as if her desire to eat had disappeared completely upon his departure. Isabella explained that she had searched for a new cook but could not find one who was able to ‘prepare anything that tastes good’ or to renew her appetite and her pleasure in eating. The letter ends with the statement that Ferrante, a young man and a soldier, does not need tante melodie (‘such melodies’ [implied: fine foods]) for his stomach – a suggestive metaphor that draws on an oft-felt and expressed parallel between the appetite for food and the appetite for music.91 It also suggests Isabella thought that she, as an older and powerful woman, had different needs in terms of nutrition and in terms of the pleasures of eating. The moralistic advice of eating ordinary foods was certainly not meant for her and other women of similar status. At the same time, when claiming that she needed a good cook for herself and her delicate stomach, Isabella seems to refer to the common dietary belief that physical, masculine work required a different diet. In a second letter a few days later, however, Isabella seems more willing to accommodate her son instead of her own delicate stomach and desire for fine cooking. Did she change her mind because she did not want to displease or deprive Ferrante, like an ideal mother worried about the diet of her child? The letter opens with an explanation that even if she could 90 ‘Tu poi ricordati che si contentassimo ch’tu andassi a server Mons. Rev. nostro figliuolo et privarci di te, il che non haverissimo fatto ad altra persona del mondo’ (You should remember that we agreed that you could go on to serve our son the Reverend Monsignor and that we would be without you, something that we would not have done for any other person in the world); ASM, AG, B. 3000, L. 51, fol. 83v., 29 January 1533. 91 ‘et perché mi patisco bisogno grandissimo che per il vero mi trova da certo tempo in qua in tanta deritione di appetito perché doppo la partita di Massimo e doppo la morte di Piangilato non mi può apparir coquo ch’sappi componer cosa che mi gusti anchor che in diversi lochi ho pur fatto far delle pratiche assai. V.S. che non ha bisogno de tante melodie per haver il stomaco da giovane et da soldato mi farà piacere e commodo grandissimo in volermini compiacer […] egli si contenti di venirgli perché non mi piacque mai che alcun mi servi contro sua voglia’; ASM, AG, B. 3000, L.51, fols. 85r-v, 3 February 1533. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 564 (letter 798).

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expect the most ‘delicate’ dishes from a cook, she would not employ someone who was unwilling to serve her.92 Besides, she added, Massimino – who had always been too willing to indulge the ‘inordinate’ appetites of her late husband – would now be able to become rich by satisfying Ferrante’s appetite93 the implication seems to be that Ferrante’s noted copious and masculine appetite both for food and sex were similar to those of his father, a man well known at the time for his vigorous exercise and his broadcasting of his many extra-marital sexual exploits.94 The sharply distinct tone of the two letters, sent in little over a week – the first almost begging her son to send back her favorite cook; the second appeasing him with the excuse that she understands that Massimino does not want to leave Rome to return to Mantua – is difficult to assess. Which Isabella are we reading here? The woman with a delicate stomach and a particular taste for good food asking for what she needed or the marchesana who wanted to maintain an excellent relationship with her son, the powerful Ferrante, prince of Molfetta and future Viceroy of Sicily? Most probably both. In any case, Isabella’s concern for having food that ‘tastes good’, her search for new vivande, her exchanges of recipes, and her appreciation for unusual food gifts were a constant in her correspondence that cannot be explained solely in terms of health problems and a delicate stomach. Early modern proscriptions regarding the act of eating insisted on disciplining the body and its appetites, in general calling for moderation – and even fasting and abstinence – especially, and often specifically, by women. What we can surmise from Isabella d’Este’s food letters reveals a very different world of practice, where there was an emphasis on the relevance of gusto and appetite in everyday eating for women as well as men. Obviously the powerful and rich marchesa of Mantua cannot be considered representative of all women from the period: the tables of nobility and elites in sixteenth-century Italy were famous for their splendor, richness, and extravagance, and those of the Gonzaga court were no different. What emerges from her correspondence, however, is not so much a concern for pomp and magnificence – although we do of course find discussion of elegant 92 ‘Se da un coquo che mal volentieri mi servissi potessi aspettarmi le più delicate vivande che si potessero desiderar, havendolo a miei servicij, lo licenziaria’; ASM, AG, B. 3000, L. 51, fols. 88v.-89r., 11 February 1533. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 564 (letter 799). 93 ‘voglio ben creder non essere mai veduto un coquo alcuno se sij inrichito a server la b. (buona) m. (memoria) del Ill. S. Vostro padre et ora con V.S. Massimino serà per farni molto acquisto per esser stato sempre di natura troppo ossequante alli disordinati soi appetiti’. ASM, AG, B. 3000, L. 51, fols. 88v.-89r., 11 February 1533. In d’Este, Selected Letters, p. 564 (letter 799). 94 Regarding the ‘virile’ reputation of Francesco II Gonzaga, see Bourne, ‘Mail Humor’.

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dinners offered for illustrious visitors and description of festivities to which the marchesa was invited in Mantua and outside her territory. Instead, we see in her letters a keen interest in eating well and in trying new vivande or new ways of preparing food that are not necessarily bound by fashionable contemporary gastronomic treatises that were written by famous cooks and stewards. What the marchesa desired was a cook who could prepare something that tasted good to her using foods that appealed to her taste, her desire for variety, and her pleasure taken in eating well – in sum, gusto. While her letters do contain scattered references to the theory of humors or to the gendered assumption that men need a less delicate cuisine than do women, contemporary medical notions and moralistic beliefs are largely absent and often blatantly ignored in her correspondence. It is true that manners and household books of the period do not pay much attention to taste: contemporary medical texts stress that food was to be used as a medicine and not for pleasure; moralists’ treatises recommend that women should limit their diets to ordinary foods. But here in Isabella’s letters we discover a different world of practice and a different cultural vision of eating: a culture of taste and pleasure in food that is at odds with prescriptive literature. Massimo Montanari has suggested perspicaciously that we consider more carefully the ‘mechanism of formation of taste’ in sixteenth-century Italy, which he sees as shifting attention from abundance and greed to focus more on food that is rare, new, and interesting – food that simply appeals to taste.95 This emerges clearly in Isabella’s letters. The alimentary culture of sixteenth-century Italian courts – and, as we shall see, of convents and of wealthy cities such as Venice, Ferrara, and Rome – reveals the development of a positive sense of taste in everyday practice that was also picked up and reinforced by imaginative literature, as we have seen. Nonetheless, a widely accepted historical narrative affirms that there was no developing sense of taste and/or discussion of it, at least until midseventeenth-century France.96 Do we have to wait for Montaigne’s famed ‘new’ sense of self to allow for a discussion of novel foods and ways of cooking, personal idiosyncrasies, individual taste, and even stomach problems? In Isabella’s letters we find a clear articulation of a discourse on taste and good taste that historians of food often argue did not exist in the sixteenth 95 Montanari, Il cibo come cultura, p. 87. 96 Referring mainly to banquets in France in the seventeenth century, Von Hoffmann argues that ‘specialists in food history have shown that there were at the time indications of a higher form of sensibility toward the pleasure of the palate, yet most often this sensibility was not expressed and most definitely not written down’. Von Hoffmann, From Gluttony to Enlightenment, p. 30.

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century – or, if so, only in well-disguised form as ‘low’ humor in essentially insignificant grotesque and comic literature.97

Il merito delle donne and a gender-neutral conception of food and taste Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Venetian writer Moderata Fonte98 wrote her celebrated all-women dialogue Il merito delle donne (written in 1592; published posthumously in 1600), which displays a distinct interest in matters of food, health, taste, and consumption in the context of a discussion about gender inequality and marriage, on the first day of the discussion and the natural world on the second. Even in her first work – the unfinished epic romance I tredici canti del Floridoro (1581) – there was a passage in which she called for equality between the sexes, asking: If men and women share the same bodily form, if they are composed of like substance, if they eat and speak in the same way, why should they be thought to differ in courage and intelligence?99

If few women were successful in life, Fonte argued, it was for cultural reasons, not for their physical nature or substance, since in essence they were equal to men.100 This revolutionary idea that women and men were in their very substance equal – and thus the inferiority of women had no foundation in nature – returns forcefully on the second day of the dialogue. Here, the main character – the savvy and cultured Corinna 101 – delivers a long discussion 97 ‘There were actually very few discourses on taste at that time, except perhaps in the context of comedy. Food was indeed omnipresent in grotesque literature or narratives of Cockaigne and was especially popular during the sixteenth century, as evidenced by the success of François Rabelais’. Von Hoffmann, From Gluttony to Enlightenment, p. 30. 98 Moderata Fonte was the pseudonym of Modesta Pozzo (1555˗1592). 99 Translation by Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 262. ‘Et perché, se comune è la figura, / se non son le sostanze variate, / s’hanno simile un cibo e un parlar, denno / differente aver poi l’ardire e ‘l senno?’; Fonte, Tredici canti del Floridoro, p. 61 (canto 4). 100 Finucci, ‘La scrittura epico-cavalleresca al femminile’, p. 221. 101 Moderata Fonte belonged to the class of cittadini and so do her seven protagonists. The cittadini, like the Venetian nobles, were a legal and hereditary class situated just below the nobility in status. A lower level of government offices and a number of special privileges were reserved for them, making them in essence an elite below the noble elite. Fonte’s female characters are cittadine of differing marital status and age, and are learned to different degrees; all defer to the authority of the young unmarried Corinna, a character who stands in stark contrast with the young subservient virgin of the prescriptive tradition.

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on natural science, the earth, medicine, herbs, animals, and food, the latter treated with a balanced, near gender-neutral approach. Using seven female interlocutors allows Fonte to present a varied dialogue in which the traditional gendered division between men and women in matters of food and health dissolves into a broader and deeper discussion of the worth of women and the worth of food. The traditional association between femininity and restraint repeated in most prescriptive literature is simply absent. Moreover, neither of the two dominant medical/moralistic views regarding women and food – avoidance of delicate dishes and dietary restrictions only for women – is present in the dialogue. When the characters converse at length on the importance of healthy eating and the appropriateness of certain foods for certain illnesses – along the general guidelines of Galenic medicine – the discussion is gender neutral and regularly questions old clichés. Instead, Fonte’s text advances new ideas that focus on matters of taste, delicious food, and pleasure in eating. The word gusto and the expression al mio gusto (to my taste) recur frequently; this and the dialogue’s emphasis on the pleasure to be found in food and eating makes Fonte’s work stand out from most other published tracts of the time on medicine and food, where the main concern was whether a certain food was good or bad for one’s health and for the humors of the body. In fact, the conversation’s most interesting aspect for our analysis turns on its concern with ideas of taste and pleasure. Appropriately, the dialogue is set in Leonora’s beautiful garden, a sort of terrestrial Paradise enriched by fruit trees, bushes, and flowers that demonstrate both her taste and her desire for pleasure – a desire that the dialogue depicts in a positive way. Beautiful sights delight the seven women as they taste the most delicate wines, fruits, and sweets, and conduct their male-free conversation about men and women, food and taste, medicine and nature. Significantly, the pleasures of good food, wine, and conversation are enhanced, according to Corinna, by the fact that this paradise does not allow men to be present.102 The young rich widow Leonora, who is ‘in no hurry to find herself a new husband’, hosts the group of friends in the palazzo she inherited from her aunt, where she lives in the ‘greatest happiness, without a man’.103 It is 102 ‘Avete lasciato di dir il meglio – disse Corinna –. Voi non dite che fra le altre sue grazie, egli vi ha questo, che non vi sono uomini’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 21. ‘You are all forgetting the best bit in your praises of the garden, you haven’t mentioned that among its other charms there is the very important fact that there are no men here’; Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 53. 103 ‘Parmi – soggiunse Leonora – che io mi viva in riposo e che io senta una somma felicità nel ritrovarmi senza, considerando quanto sia bella cosa la libertà’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 17. ‘For my part, I derive the greatest happiness from living in peace, without a man’; Cox,

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notable that Fonte presents an older widow, Adriana, as the dialogue’s queen: instead of a modest and Counter-Reformation widow soberly enduring appropriately severe mortification of the flesh, this is an impressive, savvy, and yet still honored woman who enjoys the pleasures of life even without her husband.104 The widowed Leonora exhibits similar characteristics. From a discussion of marriage, men, and the status of women in society on the first day the dialogue’s second day moves on to life on earth, animals and plants, remedies for common illnesses and medicine,105 and then slides into the subject of consumption of wine and food as the link between diet and medical advice in the context of common knowledge. The women begin a conversation about wine after praising myrrh (oil) as a curative remedy for stomachaches: Adriana points out that the best therapy to comfort the chest and stomach is a sweet wine such as malvagia moscatella (malmsey made of Muscat grapes). The other women agree, laughing and referring to doctors’ recommendations, with which they are evidently familiar: ‘A drop of malmsey, taken without food, is very good for weak stomachs, especially in those of cold complexions’.106 Corinna, the sage of the group, then offers the fairly typical advice that drinking light wine in moderation is good, making clear that it is a good thing for everybody – men and women – in a gender-neutral vision. Indeed, Corinna often labels as ‘fables’ ( favole or nonsense) stories from Pliny and other ancient authorities that enshrine negative gender Moderata Fonte, pp. 46-47. Leonora, unwilling to remarry, has little in common with the widow protagonist of a treatise that was published in the same period in Venice: Dello stato lodevole delle vedove (Of the Praiseworthy State of Widows). In this work, the Jesuit priest Fulvio Androzzi (Fulvio Androtio, 1523˗1575) recommends that a widow ‘fasts’ from all the senses, avoiding any pleasure in talking, laughing, eating, drinking, sleeping, or dressing lavishly. She also must avoid the company of female strangers, stay home, and not participate in banquets. See Androtio, Opere spirituali… Terza parte, fols. 14r.-17v. It would be tempting to hypothesize that Fonte knew of this work or of similar ones that circulated widely in her time in Venice. 104 ‘e così di commun consenso elessero per loro Regina Adriana, per essere donna di nobilissimo ingegno; e benché fusse assai attempata, come quella che passava li cinqanta anni, era nondimeno molto piacevole e di benigna ed allegra natura’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 23. ‘And by common accord they elected Adriana as their queen, knowing her to be a woman of great discernment and someone who, though no longer young (for she was past fifty), was nonetheless very humorous and of a generous and cheerful nature’; Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 57. 105 The difference between the f irst and second part of the dialogue has been the object of some discussion among scholars. Meredith Ray puts that discussion in perspective: ‘Fonte uses the literary platform of the second day to “write back” to existing and emerging traditions of scientific and medical discourses, reappropriating these arenas for women and demonstrating a mastery over them that becomes deeply intertwined with her broader feminist argument about female superiority’. Meredith K. Ray, ‘Prescriptions for Women’, p. 136. 106 Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 172. ‘Si certo – dissero ridendo le altre donne – la malvagia è buona a digiuno così un pochetto per li stomachi deboli e frigidi’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 117.

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characteristics about women, their health, their ideal diet, and their bodies.107 For example, earlier in the conversation, when Leonora ironically asks about a medicine to cure women of the love they unjustly show to men, Corinna replies that Galen did not write about this medicine since it was not in his interest as a man: ‘the wolf doesn’t eat wolf’.108 Thus, while the general direction of the conversation on food and medicine is conducted in a way that reveals a sophisticated understanding of Galenic precepts, there are many moments when irony and witticisms critique such learned discourses by returning the attention of the discussants to the practical realities of their own everyday experiences. When Corinna talks about the power of herbs and plants to cure various illnesses, for example, Cornelia adds that she prefers white cabbage and cardoons eaten with fowl to all the medicaments mentioned.109 Corinna, a well-educated, independent young dimessa,110 is positioned by Fonte as the protagonist of the dialogue to reverse many of the stereotypical affirmations regarding the different humoral complexions of women and men – and thus the long-standing concept of ‘natural’ differences between male and female bodies. Based on those differences, for instance, women were regularly advised to avoid meat – especially the theoretically hotter flesh of birds, as we have seen. Instead, the learned Corinna encourages her companions to eat precisely these: the meats of highly valued birds, partridges, and quails that were usually reserved for aristocratic men, arguing that they are ottimi al gusto (excellent according to taste), nutritious, and easy to digest.111 Not only, then, should women eat meat, but also they deserve the best meat possible. 107 See, for instance, the legend about the properties of the hyena’s body parts: ‘Io trovo scritto – disse Corinna – a questo proposito, che se un uomo porterà al lato manco gli intestini dell’iena che, di certo, qualunque donna mirerà, infiammarà del suo amore stranamente. Or lasciamo andar queste favole’. Fonte, Il merito delle donne, pp. 116-117. According to Cox, ‘The target of Corinna’s sarcasm here may well be Pliny’; Moderata Fonte, p. 172, n. 105. 108 ‘It woul hardly have been in their interests, for wolf doesn’t eat wolf’; Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 171; ‘che non era il fatto suo, perché lupo non mangia di lupo’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 116. 109 ‘Le verze bianche, o cardi – disse Cornelia – che s’usano il verno cotte con gli uccelli, mi vanno più a gusto che queste vostre decozioni e medicine’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 122. ‘“Well, I prefer the white cabbage or the thistles (but ‘cardoons’ is the right translation for ‘cardi’) we eat in the winter with fowl over all these decoctions and medicines of yours,” said Cornelia’; Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 177. 110 A dimessa (or, more rarely, dimmessa) was a member of a female tertiary order (founded in Vicenza toward the end of the sixteenth century); the term could also indicate a respectable unmarried woman living at home; see Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 45, n. 5. 111 ‘Egli è vero – rispose Corinna – pure io me tenirei sempre più a i predati che a i predanti, come al colombo, alla starna, alla tortora, al tordo, alla quaglia, alla pernice, che sono ottimi al

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During a discussion about fish, Corinna responds to Cornelia (who praises fish over meat because she likes it most of all and feels it suits her better) with a comment that uses humoral theory itself to dismantle some of its most impactful gender biases: ‘You must have a complexion that tends toward the hot and the dry, because fish is bad for those whose complexion is dominated by phlegm’.112 As a woman, according to humoral theory of phlegmatic, cold, and humid complexion, Cornelia should avoid moist foods such as fish, but Corinna knows that Cornelia is young and therefore assumes she has a hot and dry complexion and will enjoy fish.113 While Corinna is using concepts that pertain to a traditional humoral context, she does so in order to affirm that a young woman could in fact have the same complexion usually attributed to men. This statement confirms her opinion concerning women’s and men’s equality as well as her gender-neutral vision regarding food, taste, and culture. When the discussion turns to fruit, which was notoriously condemned by doctors of the time according to humoral theory, as we have seen, most of the interlocutors acknowledge their love for and consumption of pears, apricots (armelini, in Venetian and Trevisan dialect for apricots borne by a tree from Armenia), plums, peaches, grapes, figs, and melons, but ask whether such fruits had good or harmful properties, or could be employed as medicine. Savvy Corinna responds to their queries with a few traditional clichés: apricots decay in the stomach, walnuts and nuts cause headaches, peaches used to be poison, and so on. But significantly, at the same time she corrects such clichés pointing out that apricots ‘are good to eat’ and many kinds of ‘grapes are delicious’,114 essentially offering taste as a crucial factor gusto, di leggiera digestione e di prezioso nutrimento’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 87. ‘“That’s true,” said Corinna. “But rather than the predators I’d still prefer to eat the prey-birds like doves, turtle-doves, thrushes, quails, and the different kinds of partridges, which are delicious to eat, light to digest, and very good for you”’; Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 138. The only meat that does not appear on this list is pork, which was, as we have seen, often considered a lowly meat fit for rustic people. The pig had playfully entered the conversation earlier, however, when the pragmatic Leonora affirmed that, every Carnival, women should get a pig instead of a husband, to keep them well-nourished with fat (‘O quante – disse Leonora – farebbon meglio, innanzi che tuor marito, comprare un bel porco ogni carnevale, che starebbon grasse tutto l’anno’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 69, and Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 114. 112 Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 142. ‘Voi – rispose Corinna – dovete essere di complession più tosto calida e secca, perché il pesce a i flematici è molto nocivo e, benché sia dilettevole al gusto, è di leggerissimo nutrimento per la sua gran umidità’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 91. 113 Cornelia is described at the beginning of the dialogue as ‘young and married’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 15. 114 Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 173. ‘Son buoni – rispose Corinna – ma gli armelini presto si corrompono nel stomaco’; ‘l’uva è di molte sorti e molto gustevole’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 118.

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that overcomes more traditional medical concerns. Homage to medical tradition, necessary for lending authority to the scientific discussion of the second day, is here balanced by the weight of Corinna’s own gustatory experience. And when the discussion touches the controversial subject of melons and Adriana simply admits – against the noted warnings – that she has eaten ‘too many melons’115 during the summer and so anticipates a quartan fever for the winter; Corinna responds judiciously that moderation in eating melons and careful choice of good fruits can supersede their supposedly cold and humid quality. After analyzing different fruits and their properties, Virginia expresses her desire that there be a way to preserve fresh fruit so it might be enjoyed for the entire year; Corinna observes that fruit does not need to be preserved, in that ‘sono più per diletto del gusto che per necessità del vivere’ (they are more for the pleasure of taste than for a necessity of life)’.116 For these women, then, fruit is a delicious temptation that could be enjoyed regularly – not because they are women who like the sweetness of fruit – as moralists and doctors often claimed – but because fruit is tasty and suits their personal taste.117 Although the pages dedicated to food and wine in the second book of Fonte’s dialogue reveal typical preoccupations of the age regarding the medical understanding of food, this text’s presentation of this material is very distant from that of contemporary dietary treatises. First of all, the discussants are, obviously, women; the points of view presented are more varied than usual. The ancient authorities, moreover, are considered with some caution and criticism of them is often openly expressed, sometimes under the guise of play. Even more remarkably, no foodstuff appears imbued with gender-specific attributions, and meat – the most masculine of foods – is here offered for women, too, and is treated as an ideal food for both men and women. Finally, vegetables, fish, meat, fruit, and wine are discussed in a positive way with the goal of offering women theoretical and practical knowledge.118 In sum, women and men reading Il merito delle donne had 115 ‘se per mangiar troppo meloni questa estate, io mi apparecchio una buona quartana per questo inverno’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 119. ‘by eating too many melons this summer, I’m storing myself up a nice quartan fever for the winter’; Cox, Moderata Fonte, p. 174. 116 My translation and emphasis. ‘Li frutti – aggiunse Corinna – son a nostri tempi più per diletto del gusto che per necessità del vivere’; Fonte, Il merito delle donne, p. 124. 117 For instance, ‘sono solamente dalli sfrenati fanciulli e dalle donne molto le giuggiole desiderate’ (only by unrestrained children and women are the jujube greatly desired); Durante, Il tesoro della sanità, fol. 188r. See also the quotation from Carroli, Il giovane ben creato, note 29 in this chapter. 118 For a summary of structure and argument of Il merito delle donne see Cox, Moderata Fonte, pp. 6-9.

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access to a gender-neutral vision of taste, dietetics, and health that was very different from the one put forward by clerics preaching from pulpits and scholars from university rostrums – a vision that helps balance our own picture of the food culture of the time.

Virginia Galilei (1600-1634): Her modest pantry and gusto for food Fonte’s Il merito delle donne describes a group of women for whom a privileged social position in Venice as well-to-do cittadine119 offered the possibility of gathering and discussing both important and trivial topics in a free conversation without the presence of men. During that same period, after the Council of Trent, a less privileged group of women – nuns – had to live in strict clausura in cloistered convents in Venice and elsewhere in Italy. Although the traditional historiographical narrative points out all the limitations placed on nuns after Trent’s enforced monachization, many nuns found a way to express themselves through music, theater, the arts – and the production and consumption of food.120 Suor Arcangela Tarabotti is a celebrated example of a woman who suffered forced monachization by her father but was nonetheless able to author several works while in the convent – as well as to maintain relationships with intellectuals in Venice and Europe. Along with her literary activity, she took advantage of her knowledge of how to produce food specialties and sweets to give as gifts – an important aspect of sustaining relationships with relatives and friends outside the convent for many nuns. Tarabotti, for example, with a letter to an unnamed correspondent sends him some bozzoladi (a Venetian sweet), accompanying the gift with excuses since she cannot provide him with a copy of the book he is seeking.121 On a humbler level, Maria Vittoria della Verde, a Dominican nun in Perugia, did not write treatises or letters but kept a notebook from 1583 to 1607 that contains 170 recipes for the daily and festive meals of her sisters.122 The notebook was never published and was (apparently) not the actual convent cookbook, but it is noteworthy for the wealth of information it provides on available 119 On cittadini/e see footnote 101 in this Chapter. 120 See Pomata and Zarri, I monasteri femminili come centri di cultura. As Zarri’s studies have shown, the convent allowed a certain freedom to follow intellectual interests that often women outside could not enjoy. 121 Tarabotti, Letters Familiar, letter 159, p. 207. 122 Her recipes were collected in a manuscript edited and published by Casagrande in [Della Verde], Gola e preghiera.

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ingredients, and the description of actual recipes.123 Interestingly, della Verde writes down her recipes as if she were an accomplished cook for a rich family: she lists expensive spices and illustrates recipes for birds roasted and in guazzetto, pigeon stew, pies with sugar, and even an insalata da carnovale that mixes offal with boiled eggs and is dressed with vinegar and parsley.124 Hardly how we imagine a frugal convent diet post-Trent, but some of these recipes were apparently actually prepared for her sisters in the Dominican convent of S. Tommaso in Perugia. A unique, rare, and often poignant account of the interest that food, wine, and food production held for nuns in Italian convents at the beginning of the seventeenth century can be found in the collection of letters (from 1623 to 1633) written by Virginia (Suor Maria Celeste, 1600-1634), the oldest daughter of Galileo Galilei, to her famous father.125 They represent a detailed and thought-provoking perspective on food culture and taste that complement the testimonies offered by Isabella d’Este’s missives and Fonte’s dialogue. Maria Celeste’s lively and spirited letters dwell on the everyday and on her often difficult life as a Poor Clare in the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, where she lived with her sister Livia (Suor Arcangela, 1601-1659). The members of the order lived in absolute poverty and had to count on donations and alms to survive, as many of her letters testify. In fact, Maria Celeste relied heavily on her father for many of her and her sister’s necessities, including food, and reciprocated with little gifts of special dishes that she prepared and cooked with much care and love for him.126 On top of this often grim situation, she and her sisters had to observe frequent times of fasting over multiple periods in the year, further reducing their already humble diet. Despite these straitened circumstances, she reveals through her letters that 123 It is possible that other documents like this exist, still hidden in archives or libraries throughout Italy. 124 [Della Verde], Gola e preghiera, p. 118. 125 Galilei, Lettere al padre. For an English translation, see Sobel, Letters to Father. 126 Among Maria Celeste’s other duties was that of convent apothecary; her fascinating letters are concerned with procuring herbal ingredients and spices, preparing pills to ward against the plague, and struggling to find cures for the nuns’ illnesses. See, for instance, her recipe for a ‘lattovaro preservativo della peste’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, pp. 92-96 at 95-96 (letter 53, ‘il giorno dei morti del 1630’ [2 November 1630]). It was made with ‘fichi secchi, noci, ruta e sale, unito il tutto con tanto mele che basti’ (dried figs, walnuts, rue, and salt, all mixed together with as much honey as necessary). Maria Celeste instructed Galileo to take ‘la mattina a digiuno quanto una noce, con bervi dietro un poco di greco o vino buono; e dicono ch’è esperimentato per difensivo mirabile’ (a walnut-sized amount in the morning on an empty stomach, washing it down with a bit of Greek wine, or good wine; and they say it has been proven to be an incredible defense).

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the pleasures of good food, wine, and gusto were not met with holy silence even inside her convent. The perspective that Maria Celeste’s letters offer on matters of food and drink, taste and preference, and even domestic work is obviously quite different from that of Isabella d’Este. Maria Celeste was a poor nun who, according to Counter-Reformation preachers and moralists, should have been content with the little she had. The ideal model, presented in most manuals of good behavior for nuns, always included the mortification of the senses and of taste in particular. Theologian Carlo Andrea Basso, in his seventeenth-century book on the ‘perfect nun’, explained that it was not food itself but appetite that was the cause for sin. One sinned not just by eating tasty things but also by eating coarse and vile foods because ‘it is the affect (the feeling of pleasure) involved in eating’ that creates the sin.127 According to Father Marc’Aurelio Grattarola’s (1549-1615) Prattica della vita spirituale per le monache (1603), the true nun has to content herself with what the convent offers, namely ‘common’ foods. She should not seek foodstuffs that please her palate and should consume only what is necessary for her physical survival. Besides observing the rules of fasting, she should not eat or drink outside her regular meals, or complain when her food has no flavor.128 Moral proscriptions regarding food were reinforced in frescoes painted on the walls of female refectories and, significantly, their themes were markedly different from those found in the refectories of male monasteries. Images studied for an earlier period in three female refectories – Sant’Apollonia, Sant’Onofrio, and San Girolamo in Florence – have figs as the only fruit on the Last Supper table. Other foodstuffs represented are lamb and bread, with their obvious Christological significance. In contrast, ‘oranges, cherries, lemons and apricots are depicted in some of the tables in the Last Supper images in the male refectories’, suggesting a much less limiting male dietary ideal.129 Maria Celeste, then, should not have been interested in food, wine, and taste, or spent her time seeking the pleasures they offered and that, she admitted, she found so desirable. And yet, she was and she did. And this was clearly not just as a matter of survival. 127 ‘non è il cibo, ma l’appetito del cibo causa del peccato perciò alcune volte si mangiano cibi delicati, senza colpa, ne peccato di gola, e mangiando altri cibi grossi, e vili si commette peccato perché l’affetto col quale si mangia è quello che fa il giuoco’ (it is appetite for food not food itself that is the cause of sin because sometimes one can eat tasty foods without guilt or sin of gluttony; other times one can eat coarse and vile food and sins because of the feeling of pleasure involved in eating); Basso, La monaca perfetta, fol. 513. On Basso and other post-Tridentine writers, see Zarri, ‘La perfetta claustrale’. 128 Grattarola, Prattica della vita spirituale, fols. 30-31. 129 Hiller, Gendered Perceptions, pp. 165˗166.

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Nonetheless and always f irst, the industrious Maria Celeste had to overcome the simple issues of adequate food and the nutritional problems created by the poor food provided in the convent: as she explained in one letter, this usually consisted almost solely in ‘bad bread, ox meat, and wine that is becoming vinegar’.130 Thanks to her father and to other external donors such as Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini, a patron of Galileo Galilei, Maria Celeste from time to time received substantial and even luxurious gifts of food, wine, spices, dishes, glass jars, cloth and fabric, blankets for winter, material for sewing, and sometimes money. One of the most common exchanges between the convent and her father’s house, were the flasks that she sent back and forth to have filled with ‘good wine’ for her, her sister, and the other nuns. She reciprocated with products from the convent’s garden or candy that he had asked her to make from fruit. She sent cosarelle (little things): they might be pastries, jars of jam, quinces, or pears, often sent with the accompanying statement that the gift was ‘seasoned by poverty’ (condito di povertà) or ‘a present from a poor little girl’ (regalo da poveretta).131 Once she sent a single cooked pear (choosing among the beautiful ones she had received from her father), telling him that she had learned a new way of cooking it;132 other times she sent fruit candied with honey or sugar (rarely) and candied morsels (morselletti) made of a whole lemon or its peel. In one letter she describes how she made the morselletti di cedro (candied citron morsels) and adds that she is waiting to hear from her father what he liked best. She was ready to accommodate him with every esquisitezza (delicacy) that she was able to make or procure for him.133 A recurrent topic in her letters is gusto del mangiare – a taste (and pleasure) for eating – a phrase that tends to arise most often when Lenten food restrictions or periods of fasting limited the nuns’ diet; when illness or depression took away a nun’s gusto del mangiare;134 or when special gifts 130 ‘la provigione che ci dà il monastero è di pane assai cattivo, di carne di bue, e di vino che va in fortezza’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 49 (letter 20, n.d.). 131 ‘e non avendo altro, gli mando un poco di cotognato condito di povertà, cioè fatto con mele’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 75 (letter 40, 22 November 1629). 132 ‘gli mando una pera cotta, di quelle così belle che mi mandò ultimamente. Ho imparato questa nuova foggia di cuocerle, che forse più le piacerà’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 64 (letter 33, 10 December 1628). 133 ‘Avrò caro di sapere se quelle poche paste che gli mando gli saranno gustate, non essendo riuscite a mia intiera sodisfazione, forse per il desiderio che io ho che le cose che fo per lei siano di tutta quella esquisitezza che sia possibile’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 185 (letter 109, 17 September 1633). 134 Maria Celeste, in her role as convent apothecary and healer, notes in many letters that appetite was important in everyday life and its lack often meant illness.

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from Galileo or others enlivened the food available.135 Maria Celeste also made tongue-in-cheek comments on her own gusto del mangiare and gola, that is, her desire for the pleasures of eating that, once in a while, could be satisfied, usually thanks to the gifts the nuns received. A good example is found in a letter written during the fall of 1633 in which Maria Celeste writes of her worries about a young nun, Suor Maria Boscoli, who was so sick she could not eat. Looking to remedy this lack of appetite, Maria Celeste thought of preparing a nutritious broth of grey partridge, which she hoped would be tasty for the sick woman. She asks her father to send birds, which were abundant where he lived, and concludes her plea with the revealing phrase ‘such a gift would be much appreciated’, adding the personal note ‘now that my own appetite has been whetted’.136 Maria Celeste could have asked for beef, pork, or domestic poultry – such as chicken or duck. Instead, she asked for specific birds, demonstrating knowledge of the medical theories of her time that highly regarded the especially nutritious quality of bird’s meat and its essence in a meat broth. But her own appetite also played a part as well in the request and she appears unafraid to acknowledge her desire. Moreover, in her reference to her own appetite – whetted by the idea of the grey partridges – we recognize the common contemporary belief that eating birds was one of the greatest pleasures of the day, reserved for the tables of high society – and, as we have seen, usually for men. Certainly this was a food that a Poor Clare – according to moralists or fathers of the Church – should have shunned as a form of sacrifice offered to God. Yet this appears not foremost on Maria Celeste’s mind: in a November 1633 letter she thanks her father for sending a basket of gray partridges and thrushes, informing him that the sick nun to whom she had given three of them was ‘greatly pleased’.137 As for the other birds, she writes, she enjoyed the pleasure – the gusto – of sharing them with her friends, cooking the thrushes in guazzetto (a sauce, probably spicy and wine based) since they were less fresh and had to cook slowly for the whole day. She concludes triumphantly and without the slightest sense of guilt: ‘Thus, for once, I truly surrendered myself to gluttony’.138 Succumbing to 135 Some foods were particularly appreciated: sweets, cookies, specialty cheeses, ricotta, wine, birds, citrons, peaches, and other fruit. 136 ‘Se V.S. potessi per mezzo nessuno far questo regalo, adesso che mi ha aguzzato l’appetito, sarebbe gratissimo’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 198 (letter 114, 22 October 1633). 137 ‘che ne fece grande allegrezza’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 210 (letter 120, 23 November 1633). 138 ‘E poiché I tordi arrivarono assai stracchi, è bisognato cuocerli in guazzetti, e io tutto il giorno sono stata lor dietro: sì che per una volta mi son data alla gola per davvero’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 211 (letter 120, 23 November 1633).

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gluttony once in a while for this thoughtful woman was a pleasure, not a sign of immorality, even in a convent. Indeed, the desire for tasty, rich meat may even have contributed to a miraculous recovery or two in Maria Celeste’s humble convent. In another letter sent in November 1633, we learn that ‘a poor young woman’ was so sick that she had no appetite for anything except some game (qualche salvaggiume).139 Her desire could not be satisfied, apparently, and the sick nun’s health deteriorated to such an extent that she was administered last rites. Then, unexpectedly, after eating a large meal finally featuring game, she experienced a rapid recovery, miraculously feeling better, being eager to talk, and happily eating – though only ‘tasty things’ (cose gustose).140 It is tempting to think that perhaps the poor nun feigned her illness so that she could have what she desired most: hearty and delectable game meat. Maria Celeste, who had tended to the nun through the night and fed her during her illness, was left quite surprised, and reported the nun’s words: ‘I cannot believe that when one stands on the verge of death it is possible to eat the way I do. Yet for all that, I have no desire to turn back’.141 No comments by Maria Celeste followed her report on the continuing good health of the young woman, but we might imagine that she, like many men, was thought to have been cured by the health-giving properties of game – for once supporting doctors’ prescriptions even as she broke their gendered restrictions. The possibility of eating decent food during Lent and other periods of fasting was an ongoing preoccupation of Maria Celeste’s sisters. In spring 1628, Maria Celeste reassured her father, who was clearly worried for her health, that she was not ‘observing Lent’ on the orders of the doctor; although young, she had already lost her teeth (perhaps a result of her normally poor diet), therefore she asked him to send some ‘mutton’ requesting that ‘it be fatty’. The letter adds that her sister Arcangela would be happy to have a few little things for her evening meal and that both daughters would be very grateful if he could send a little white wine.142 Maria Celeste apparently had 139 ‘Se la buona sorte faceva che V.S. trovassi almeno una starna o cosa simile, l’avrei avuto carissimo per amor di quella poverella giovane ammalata, la quale non appetisce altro che a qualche selvaggiume’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 208 (letter 119, 18 November 1633). 140 ‘nel plenilunio passato stette tanto male che se li dette l’olio santo, ma adesso è ritornata tanto che si crede ch’arriverà alla nuova luna. Discorre con una vivacità grande, e piglia il cibo con agevolezza purché siano cose gustose’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 209 (letter 119, 18 November 1633). 141 ‘Non credo già che quando si è in termine di morire si mangi come fo io. Con tutto ciò non mi curo di tornare indietro’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 209 (letter 119, 18 November 1633). 142 ‘Per non trasgredir al suo comandamento tanto onorevole, gli dico ch’io, per comandamento del medico, non fo quaresima, et che, per esser sdentata avanti tempo, havrò caro s’ella mi

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health problems and had been given leave by her doctor to follow a special Lenten diet. During the same period, she also writes to thank her father for sending her and her sister a basket of unspecified cibi di Quaresima (Lenten foods). The letter explains that they both greatly enjoyed the gift – especially her sister – assuring her father that she is on a strict diet and specifically avoiding eggs because she wants to obey her father.143 Years later, in a letter written during Lent in the last year of her life, 1633, Maria Celeste thanks her father for so thoughtfully sending her a food (una vivanda) more suited to her taste and to her health ‘than any other Lenten food whatsoever’ that she was about to enjoy with ‘double pleasure’ because it came from her father’s hands.144 These few examples suggest that even a Lenten food required for religious fasting was often judged in terms of its taste and its impact on health. From this perspective, rich fatty meats and white wine were suitable and appropriate even in a cloistered convent during Lent. The importance of having a regular supply of good wine in the monastery of Arcetri was a constant concern. Many letters discuss the production of wine in the convent’s vineyard, the wine that could be purchased outside, the wine that was becoming vinegar in the basement, and the wine that Maria Celeste asked for and usually received from her father. There is no mention of wine for the Mass but rather an ongoing concern for good wine as something the nuns appreciated immensely during their meals; as a crucial component for medicaments; as a medicine in itself. Maria Celeste returned two empty flasks to her father in 1631, explaining to him that she had survived a fainting spell (scesa) thanks to his white wine, which she had used to make herself soups.145 During the same period, she asked again for the same white wine to make a strengthening tonic drink (white wine infused with metal filings) for her sister Arcangela, claiming the faith her sister had in the remedy would be more important than the remedy itself – an early manderà un poca di carne di castrato, che sia grassa, che pur di questa ne mangio qualche poca. Suor Arcangela si contenta di qualche cosetta per far colatione la sera; et particolarmente un poco di vino bianco ci sarà molto grato’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, pp. 54-55 (letter 26, 25 March 1628). 143 ‘I cibi da quaresima ci sono stati gratissimi, e particolarmente a Suor Arcangela. Io vivo tanto regolatamente, per desiderio che ho di star sana, che V.S. non deve dubitare ch’io disordini; e dell’uova non mangerò per obedirla’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, pp. 56-57 (letter 28, 8 April 1628). 144 ‘con mandarmi V.S. una vivanda più conforme al gusto e sanità mia di qual si voglia altra quadragesimale. La ringratio pertanto infinitamente, e mi preparo a goderla con gusto raddoppiato, per esser accomodata da quelle mani tanto da me amate e riverite’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 110 (letter 58, 13 March 1630). 145 ‘Rimando due fiaschi voti; et veramente che se, in questa scesa ch’ho avuto, non fosse stato il vino bianco di V.S., l’havrei fatta male, perché sono vivuta di pappe e zuppe, quali non m’ hanno nociuto per esser fatte in vino così buono’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, pp. 120-121 (letter 72, July 1631).

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modern placebo effect.146 Excellent wine for soup, medicine, and sipping was much appreciated, as Maria Celeste told her father when reporting on a gift Monsignor Piccolomini, as we saw above, had sent and that virtually all the sisters had tasted (quasi tutte le monache assaggiarono).147 It is clear that wine, in accordance with contemporary medical theories, was considered by Maria Celeste and the other nuns as an essential nutrient that their convent could not do without. It is equally clear that it was considered an important pleasure that they could enjoy together. Concepts of health and taste are very much intertwined in these letters, but in a different way than they were in the mainstream view of moderation that dominated the more traditional sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical understanding of food and eating. According to Alvise Cornaro, the Venetian nobleman who championed a regime of strict diet for living longer,148 one had to be wary of the foods one most liked. Crucially, he stoutly maintained that the sense of taste was not a reliable indicator for the healthiness of food; it was better to trust the physical effects of food on the body. Thus, Cornaro stressed, that he adhered to the lessons learned in his youth when eating melons, raw salad, fish, pork, and other dishes that had, for him, a good taste but in the end made him sick. Maria Celeste was also very attentive to issues of health, which she had to deal with every day in the convent, but she, unlike Cornaro, did not demonize taste. Quite the opposite, in fact. Many of her letters dwell on the topic of health and taste as a strictly linked pair whereby food could be a medicine but at the same time should be pleasing and tasty: gustoso.149 Food and wine that had a good taste would have better curative properties; could bring the sick and even dying back to health and life; and were, especially, meant to be enjoyed together, in company, even by poor nuns in a humble convent. 146 ‘et anco desidero un fiasco del suo vino bianco, per farlo acciaiato per Suor Arcangela, alla quale credo che più gioverà la fede che ha in questo rimedio, che il rimedio stesso’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, pp. 123-124 (letter 75, 30 August 1631). 147 ‘Ero anco adunque in obbligo di accusarle ricevuta del vino eccellentissimo che ne mandò Monsignore, del quale quasi tutte le monache assaggiarono’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 193 (letter 122, 8 October 1633). 148 See Chapter Two, pp. 103-104. 149 ‘Suor Luisa se ne sta in letto con un poca di febbre, ma i dolori sono assai mitigati, e si spera che sia per restarne libera del tutto con l’aiuto de’ buoni medicamenti, li quali se non sono soavi al gusto come è il vino di costí, in simili occorrenze sono più utili e necessari’ (Sister Luisa is in bed with a light fever, but her pains are thoroughly alleviated and it is hoped that she’ll be free of them completely with the help of some good medications, which if they are not as delightful to the taste as this wine here is, in such cases they are more useful and necessary); Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 195 (letter 113, 15 October 1633).

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As noted above, novelty foods or rare and expensive provisions sometimes entered the convent thanks to Galileo and other donors, sparking joy and excitement among the nuns. Fruit, sweets, cheese, and caviar were among the most appreciated gifts that enhanced the nuns’ everyday meals and piqued their taste. Arcangela’s taste for caviar finds a place in Maria Celeste’s letters when they relate a curious misunderstanding over a present sent by her father. It seems that Arcangela not only loved caviar but also had a taste for a special cheese from Holland. As a result, when one day Galileo sent her a package of caviar that was wrapped in such a way that it seemed to be this favored cheese, Arcangela – anticipating the taste of Dutch cheese – was disappointed when it turned out to be caviar instead. Perhaps we should comment de gustibus non est disputandum – especially among poor nuns often striving merely to have enough to eat – but, attentive to her sister’s disappointment, Maria Celeste asks her father to send some cheese before the end of Carnival to make her sister happy.150 Cheese in general was very much appreciated: in September 1633, Galileo wrote to Maria Celeste announcing that he was sending seven buffalo eggs. Happy to receive the gift, Maria Celeste reports that, naïvely, she was ready to make a large frittata, believing them to be real eggs until she realized what they were: a delicious variety of mozzarelle di bufala. As the thoughtful and humorous woman that she was, Maria Celeste used this episode to joke with her father and tell him that she was a bufala as well (a female buffalo, with a second meaning of being the victim of a hoax or false rumor) and that her silliness about buffalo eggs made her sister laugh at her foolishness.151 150 ‘Suor Arcangela, quando l’altro giorno vedde l’involto di caviale che V.S. mandò, restò ingannata, credendosi che fossi certo cacio d’Olanda, ch’è solita di mandarne, sì che, se S.V. vuol ch’ella resti satisfatta, di Grazia, ne mandi un poco avanti che passi Carnevale’ (The other day, when Sister Arcangela saw the package of caviar that Your Lordship sent, she was fooled, believing it certainly to be Dutch cheese, which you have often sent, for which, if Your Lordship wishes for her to be content, by Grace, please send a bit before Carnival ends); Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 79 (letter 42, 21 January 1629). On gifts of caviar, she writes, ‘le frutta che V.S. ha mandate, mi sono state gratissime, per esser adesso, per noi, Quaresima, sì come anco a Suor Arcangela il caviale, e la ringraziamo’ (I was so grateful for the fruit that Your Lordship sent, since it is now Lent for us, just as Sister Arcangela enjoyed the caviar, and we thank you); Galilei, Lettere al padre, pp. 32-33 (letter 9, n.d.). ‘Vincenzio c’inviò ieri sera un buon alberello di caviale, del quale Suor Arcangela ringrazia V.S., per esser questa sua e non mia porzione, perché non fa per me’ (Vincenzio sent us a nice package of caviar yesterday evening, for which Sister Arcangela thanks you, as she’ll also have my portion since it doesn’t do me any good); Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 80 (letter 43, 19 February 1629). 151 ‘vi fo sapere ch’io sono una Bufola assai maggior di quelle che son in coteste maremme, perché vedendo che V.S. mi scrive di mandar sette uova di cotesto animale, mi credevo che

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There is no trace in these letters of the ideas, popularized by preachers and moralists, that nuns in clausura should deprive themselves of good, tasty, and decent food in order to please God. Certainly Maria Celeste was in the ‘fortunate’ position of being able to receive help from her father and other donors, but the fact remains that her letters reveal an impressive gap between theory and practice – at least regarding life in a closed convent – that cannot be ignored. The concern Maria Celeste shows in her letters for the concrete consequences of not eating decent food and, simultaneously, her appreciation for every good morsel that entered the convent represents a significant departure from the image that has come down to us from prescriptive literature for nuns as well as from the widely accepted image of the consistently frugal diet and overall deprivation that features in chronicles and historical accounts of daily life in Italian convents.152 Appetito and gusto are two very common words in Maria Celeste’s letters and, in theory at least, they should not be there at all. ‘Appetite’, Stephen Mennell rightly reminds us, ‘is not the same thing as hunger’.153 And it is not the same thing as eating. Maria Celeste’s letters uncover a very different side of the experience of eating with gusto; they force us to think about how important the meaning of appetito and gusto del mangiare was in a historical period characterized by dearth and famine, even for nuns – despite the severe claims of religious prescriptive literature. When we think of how appetite is most often seen as being represented in the literary imagination of the Renaissance, it is usually the image of the gluttonous parasite, the sumptuous banquet, or the famished servant that comes to mind. But between the extremes of impoverished fasting and gluttonous gorging, there existed a wide range of different manifestations of the idea and practice of appetite as well as of the enjoyment of eating. It is especially telling to see these so strongly affirmed in a Poor Clare’s letters. veramente fossino uova, e facevo disegno di far una grossa frittata’; Galilei, Lettere al padre, p. 181 (letter 107, 3 September 1633). 152 See for instance the chronicle and necrology from a fifteenth century Venetian convent: Sister Riccoboni, Life and Death, pp. 18-19. For a broad view on religious women and food that moves beyond deprivation in pre- and early modern Italian convents see Callegari, ‘Fast, Feast and Feminism’. On expenditures for food in early modern Venetian convents see Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic, pp. 174-181, and Weaver, Convent Theater, pp. 28-29; on baking in Venetian convents see Laven, The Virgins of Venice, pp. 108-112; on the convent’s economy in Renaissance Florence see Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries, pp. 72-98. For the medieval period, see Mazzoni, The Women in God’s Kitchen. 153 Mennell, All Manners of Food, p. 20.

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Conclusions We have seen throughout this chapter that a traditional view of the relationship between prescriptive and moralistic literature about food and the lived experience of women in the sixteenth century is challenged by women’s own words, which reveal an often yawning gap between the two. The construction of female gender identity as inscribed through idealized notions of food and correct moral behavior in the kitchen and in eating, is, as a result, much more complex than even current scholarship tends to portray. The large corpus of Renaissance prescriptive literature refers to women as stereotypical subjects (the perfect widow, nun, or wife) – stable ideals largely unaffected by the society and the environment in which they lived. Obviously, such a simple and restrictive picture cannot correspond or translate straightforwardly into everyday reality. At the same time, the images conveyed by prescriptive literature certainly do provide a perspective on the social rules that were established to keep at bay practices and customs considered inappropriate. If the perfect nun is instructed not to complain about her convent’s food and not to ask relatives to send her food provisions and other little pleasures not available in clausura, we are encountering a strong indication that such instructions served a purpose and that those things often happened. In turn, the ascetic life that a widow ideally had to conduct via fasting and total abstinence from wine and enticing foods was in many ways a disciplining response to the fear that some widows, especially young ones, might actually enjoy their lives without the husband imposed on them by the arranged marriages of the day. Likewise, continued suspicion of unusual vivande and new dishes may indicate that the search for decent – not to mention good and tasty food – was becoming more common – even in an epoch of dearth and poverty – as an ideal of gusto and the pleasures of eating. This was the case not only for men but for women, who seem to have been gaining ground against a traditional vision of moral frugality and healthy eating dominated by restraint. Finally, the prohibition against eating ‘hot’ foods that could theoretically excite the senses of ‘naturally’ colder women, making them lusty like men, had much to do with the perceived necessity of keeping women chaste in a patriarchal system. In sum, the picture painted by prescriptive literature regarding women and food portrays a traditional and reinforcing set of fears about women and their behavior that is not only misleading but also distant from everyday practice, even as it alerts us to those constraints and fears that underlie the dynamics of gender roles in the period regarding food, taste, and sense perceptions.

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For Maria Celeste, then, a little bit of gluttony was more than acceptable while restraint, even during Lent, had its limits in the face of both health and gusto. Good food – she and her sisters and even her father recognized – could help with healing; therefore, taste itself was a crucial component of food as medicine. Most significantly, the pleasure of eating good food, at least once in a while, was openly recounted, appreciated, and not demonized. In the lived experience of eating for the Marchesa of Mantua, which she discusses with relish in her letters, we encounter her profound interest in the quality and variety of food, the carefully honed individuality of her taste, and her desire to share her knowledge about new vegetables, precious fish, and different ways of cooking them as she pursued her interest in the discovery of gusto. In Moderata Fonte’s presentation of her proudly female characters, the discussion often returns to the gap between personal experience and male-authored authority regarding food and medicine. To a great extent that discussion, as we have seen, sums up the distance between prescriptive male ideals about how, what, and why women should eat and reinforces the conclusion we are led to by all the works analyzed herein: that slowly but surely over the course of the sixteenth century gusto came to triumph – even for women. In his essay ‘The Taste of Knowledge’, Massimo Montanari explains the new sixteenth-century idea of good taste as ‘what pleases is what is good’, as opposed to the medieval concept of ‘what is good (for body and soul) is what pleases’. The new idea of good taste, not relying solely on natural instincts or an ontological given but on experience, on the fact that some people knew more than others, and on the ability to learn, had ‘contradictory consequences’. This, according to Montanari, meant that while taste was assuming a more elitist character, it was simultaneously becoming something anyone could learn – through life experience – and thus something from which no one – not women, not the poor, not the dishonorable – could be excluded.154 Though operating in highly different contexts, Maria Celeste is similar to Isabella d’Este in preferring interesting and even expensive foodstuffs: fruit, cheese, fish, and the meat of precious birds. It does not seem to matter that Galileo’s daughter could obtain these treats only rarely while Isabella could enjoy them easily. For both women, gusto appears to be a developing necessity of eating and life that did not turn merely on ideology, social status, or prescriptive gender roles. Evidently, then, medical, dietetic, prescriptive, and male-authored narrative sources cannot tell the entire story regarding women and food. 154 Montanari, ‘Taste of Knowledge’, pp. 209-210. On this discussion see also Chapter One, n. 86, p. 52.

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Evidence from a wider range of sources155 offers a richer and less-gendered table at which women eat fruit and meat without regard for doctors’ orders or the prohibitions of moralists; at which pleasure in eating does not imply gluttony or sexual excess but rather refined taste and a mannered ability to use a fork; and at which discussing the properties and qualities of food, and eating with knowledge and gusto is increasingly commonplace. The picture that emerges is of a new ideal of eating – and, ultimately, of living – that changes ideas about both and, perhaps, that played a significant role in making us what we label modern.

Works Cited Primary Alberti, Leon Battista. De iciarchia. Book 1. In Opere volgari di Leon Battista Alberti per la più parte inedite e tratte dagli autografi dal dotto Anicio Bonucci. Tomo III. Florence: Tipografia Galileiana, 1845. Androtio [Androzzi], Fulvio. Opere spirituali del R. Fulvio Androtio della compagnia di Giesu, divise in tre parti. Prima parte, della meditazione della vita, e morte del nostro Salvatore Giesù Christo. Seconda Parte. Della frequenza della communione. Terza parte. Dello stato lodevole delle vedove, utili a ogni sorte di persone, che desiderano vivere spiritualmente. Venice: Ziletti, 1580. Antoniano, Silvio. Della educazione Christiana de’ figliuoli. Libri tre scritti da Silvio Antoniano ad instanza di S. Carlo Borromeo. Rome: Barbiellini alla Minerva, 1785. [first edition: Rome, 1584] Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Translated by Arthur Leslie Peck. London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943. [Basso, Carlo Andrea]. La monaca perfetta ritratta dalla Scrittura sacra, auttorità et essempi de Santi Padri da Carlo Andrea Basso. Milan: Pacifico Pontio et Giovan Battista Piccaglia, 1577. [Cabei, Giulio Cesare]. Ornamenti della gentil donna vedova opera del Signor Giulio Cesare Cabei, nella quale ordinatamente si tratta di tutte le cose necessarie allo stato vedovile, onde potra farsi adorno d’ogni habito virtuoso e honorato. All’illustrissima Signora Ginevra Salviati in Baglioni. Venice: Christoforo Zanetti, 1574. 155 Many of these have been explored herein but it is worth mentioning in addition some of the plays and spiritual comedies written by nuns in convents for female audiences. See Weaver, Convent Theater in Early Modern Italy. Other possible sources yet to be explored in this context are convent chronicles written by nuns. See for instance Malvasia, Writings on the Sisters.

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Carroli, Bernardino. Il giovane ben creato. Edited by Elide Casali. Ravenna: Angelo Longo, 2004. [First published Ravenna: Cesare Cavazza, 1583.] Castelvetro, Giacomo. Brieve racconto di tutte le radici, di tutte l’erbe e di tutti i frutti che crudi o cotti in Italia si mangiano. London, 1614. www.liberlibri.it [last accessed date: 15-3-2021]. [Della Verde, Maria Vittoria]. Gola e preghiera nella clausura dell’ultimo ’500: [170 ricette dalla cucina di Suor Maria Vittoria della Verde]. Edited by Giovanna Casagrande. Foligno: Edizioni dell’Arquata, 1988. d’Este, Isabella. Selected Letters. Translated and edited by Deanna Shemek. Toronto and Tempe, AZ: Iter Press and ACMRS, 2017. [Dolce, Lodovico]. Dialogo di M. Lodovico Dolce della institution de le donne, da lui stesso in questa quarta impressione riveduto, e di piu utili cose ampliato & con la tavola delle cose piu degne di memoria. Venice: Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1560. [Durante, Castore]. Il tesoro della sanità, Castor Durante da Gualdo, Medico e Cittadino Romano. Nel quale s’insegna il modo di conservare la sanità e prolongare la vita. Si tratta della natura de’ cibi e dei Rimedij de’ Nocumenti loro. Venice: Domenico Imberti, 1586. Fonte, Moderata. Il merito delle donne. Edited by Adriana Chemello. Venice: Eidos, 1988. Fonte, Moderata. Tredici canti del Floridoro. Edited by Valeria Finucci. Bologna: Mucchi, 1995. [First published Venice, 1581.] [Gallo, Agostino]. Le vinti giornate dell’agricoltura et de’ piaceri della villa di M. Agostino Gallo Nobile Bresciano. Venice: Domenico Imberti, 1615. [First edition 1567.] Galilei, Virginia. Lettere al padre. Edited by Bruno Basile. Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2002. Gratarolo, Guglielmo [Guilielmo]. De vini Natura, Artificio, et Usu. Strassburg: Theodosius Rihelius, 1565. [Grattarola, Marc’Aurelio]. Prattica della vita spirituale per le monache e altre persone desiderose di far progresso nella Christiana perfettione. Composta dal Padre Marc’Aurelio Grattarola oblate di S. Ambrosio. Milan: Pacifico Pontio et Giovan Battista Piccaglia, 1603. [Guazzo, Stefano]. Dialoghi piacevoli del Sig. Stefano Guazzo gentil huomo di Casale di Monferrato, dalla cui famigliare Lettione potranno senza stanchezza e satietà non solo gli Huomini ma ancora le Donne raccogliere diversi frutti morali & spirituali. Piacenza: Pietro Tini, 1587. [Lando, Ortensio]. Commentario delle più notabili & mostruose cose d’Italia & altri luoghi di lingua Aramea in Italiana tradotto. Con un breve Catalogo de gli inventori delle cose che si mangiano & beveno, novamente ritrovato. Edited by Guido e Paola Salvatori. Bologna: Pendragon, 1994. [First published Venice, 1548.]

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[Matthioli, Pietro]. I Discorsi di M. Pietro Matthioli Sanese, Medico del Serenissimo Principe Ferdinando Archiduca d’Austria. Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisio, 1569. [Messisbugo, Christoforo da]. Libro Novo nel quale s’insegna a far d’ogni sorte di vivanda secondo la diversità de’ tempi così di carne come di pesce. Venice: Giovanni Dalla Chiesa, 1556. [First published Ferrara, 1549.] [Paschetti, Bartolomeo]. Del conservare la sanità e del vivere de’ genovesi di Bartolomeo Paschetti Nobile Veronese, Libri Tre. Genoa: Giuseppe Pavoni, 1602. [Pisanelli, Baldassare]. Trattato della natura de’ cibi, et del bere del Signor Baldassare Pisanelli Medico Bolognese. Carmagnola: Marc’Antonio Bellone, 1589. [First edition published 1586.] Platina [Sacchi, Bartolomeo]. On Right Pleasure and Good Health: A Critical Edition and Translation of De honesta voluptate et valetudine. Edited and translated by Mary Ella Milham. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. Rappi, Francesco. Nuovo thesauro delle tre castità. Bologna: Hieronymo de Benedicti, 1515. [Sister] Riccoboni, Bartolomea. Life and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini, 1395–1436. Edited and translated by Daniel Bornstein. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. [Romoli, Domenico]. La singolare dottrina di M. Domenico Romoli sopranominato Panunto…. Venice: Giovan Battista Bonfadino, 1593. Salvi, Donato, ed. Regola del governo di cura familiare compilata dal beato Giovanni Dominici fiorentino dell’ordine de’ frati predicatori. Florence: Angiolo Garinei, 1860. Savonarola, Michele. Libreto de tute le cosse che se manzano. Un libro di dietetica di Michele Savonarola, medico padovano del sec. xv. Edizione critica basata sul Codice Casanatense 406. Edited by Jane Nystedt. Stockholm: GOTAB, 1982. Tarabotti, Arcangela. Letters Familiar and Formal. Edited by Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series 20. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012 Traffichetti, Bartolomeo da Bertinoro. L’arte di conservare la sanità, tutta intiera trattata in sei libri per Bartolomeo Traffichetti da Bertinoro Medico in Rimino. Pesaro, 1565. Valier, Agostino. Instituzione d’ogni stato lodevole delle donne cristiane and Ricordi di Monsignor Agostino Valier Vescovo di Verona lasciati alle monache nella sua visitazione fatta l’anno del santissimo Giubileo 1575, edited by Francesco Lucioli. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2015. Villingano, Giorgio. Dialogi del eccellente Medico M. Giorgio Pittore Villingano, del modo del conservare la sanità. Nuovamente dalla lingua latina nella volgar Italiana tradotto. Venice: Nella bottega d’Erasmo di Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1550.

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Secondary Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Astarita, Tommaso. The Italian Baroque Table: Cooking and Entertaining from the Golden Age of Naples. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014. Bell, Rudolph M. Holy Anorexia. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Bornstein, Daniel. ‘Giovanni Dominici, the Bianchi, and Venice: Symbolic Action and Interpretive Girls’. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23.2 (1993): 143-171. Bornstein, Daniel. ‘A Small World: The Venetian Convent of Corpus Domini’. In Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni, Life and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus Domini, 1395-1436, edited and translated by Daniel Bornstein, pp. 1-24. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Bourne, Molly. ‘Mail Humor and Male Sociability: Sexual Innuendo in the Epistolary Domain of Francesco II Gonzaga’. In Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, edited by Sara Matthews-Grieco, pp. 199-222. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Callegari, Danielle. ‘Fast, Feast and Feminism: Teaching Food and Gender in Italian Religious Women’s Writings’. Special issue, Gender and Spirituality in the Renaissance: Teaching Women’s Religious Writings, 1300–1650, from Europe and the Americas, edited by Jane Tylus. Religions 9.2 (2018), 56. [DOI.org/10.3390/rel9020056] Campbell, Erin J. ‘Old Age, Women, and the Signs of Suffering’. In Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Domestic Interior, edited by Erin J. Campbell, pp. 143-162. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Capatti, Alberto, and Massimo Montanari. La cucina italiana: storia di una cultura. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2002. Carnevale Schianca, Enrico. La cucina medievale. Lessico, Storia. Preparazioni. Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2011. Counihan, Carole. ‘Gendering Food’. In The Oxford Handbook of Food History, edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher, pp. 99-116. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Cox, Virginia. ‘The Female Voice in Italian Renaissance Dialogue’. Modern Language Notes 128.1 (2013): 53-78. Cox, Virginia, ed. and trans. Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Debby, Nirit Ben-Arieh. ‘The Preacher’s Agenda: A Dominican Versus the Italian Renaissance’. The European legacy 20.5 (2015): 462-476. [DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2015.1041818] Filocamo, Gioia. ‘Hungry Women: Sin and Rebellion through Food and Music in the Early Modern Era’. Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 26 (April 2015): 101-113. [DOI.org/10.30674/scripta.67449]

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Finucci, Valeria. ‘La scrittura epico-cavalleresca al femminile: Moderata Fonte e Tredici canti del Floridoro’. In ‘The Italian Epic and Its International Context’. Special issue, Annali d’Italianistica 12 (1994): 203-231. Freedman, Paul. Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2009. Gentilcore, David. Food and Health in Early Modern Europe: Diet, Medicine and Society, 1450-1800. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Giannetti, Laura. ‘The Satyr in the Kitchen Pantry’. In Cuckoldry, Impotence, and Adultery in Europe (15th-17th Century), edited by Sarah Matthews-Grieco, pp. 103124. Farnham, England, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Hiller, Diana. Gendered Perception of Florentine Last Supper Frescoes, c. 1350-1490. Farnham, England, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Krohn, Deborah L. ‘Wafering Iron’. In Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, edited by Andrea Bayer, pp. 116-117. New York and New Haven, CT: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2008. Laven, Mary. Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent. London, New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Lenzi, Maria Ludovica. Donne e madonne: l’educazione femminile nel primo Rinascimento italiano. Turin: Loescher, 1982. Malacarne, Giancarlo. Sulla mensa del principe, alimentazione e banchetti alla corte dei Gonzaga. Modena: Il Bulino, 2000. Malvasia, Diodata. Writings on the Sisters of San Luca and their Miraculous Madonna. Edited and translated by Danielle Callegari and Shannon McHugh. Toronto and Tempe, AZ: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015. Maraf ioti, Martin. ‘The Prescriptive Potency of Food in Michele Savonarola’s De regime pregnantium’. In Table Talk: Perspectives of Food in Medieval Italian Literature, edited by Christiana Purdy Moudarres, pp. 19-36. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Mazzoni, Cristina. The Women in God’s Kitchen: Cooking, Eating, and Spiritual Writing. New York: Continuum, 2005. McIver, Katherine A. Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy from Kitchen to Table. Lanham, England: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Montanari, Massimo. Cheese, Pears, and History. Translated by Beth Archer Brombert. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Montanari, Massimo. Il cibo come cultura. Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2006.

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Sobel, Dava, trans. Letters to Father: Sister Maria Celeste to Galileo, 1623-1633. London: HarperCollins, 2001. Sperling, Jutta Gisela. Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Strocchia, T. Sharon. Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Strocchia, T. Sharon. ‘The Nun Apothecaries of Renaissance Florence: Marketing Medicines in the Convent’. Renaissance Studies 25.5 (2011): 627-647. Von Hoffmann, Viktoria. From Gluttony to Enlightenment: The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Walker Bynum, Caroline. Holy Feast and Holy Fast. The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Weaver Elissa B. Convent Theater in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Zarri Gabriella ed. Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana dal xv al xvii secolo. Studi e testi a stampa. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1996. Zarri, Gabriella. ‘La perfetta claustrale. Manuali sei-settecenteschi per l’istruzione delle monache’. In Conduct Literature for and about Women in Italy, 1470-1900: Prescribing and Describing Life, edited by Helena Sanson and Francesco Lucioli, pp. 81-102. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2016.

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Index abundance 12–13, 17, 19–21, 50–51, 77, 119, 129, 227; see also gluttony; greed Accademia della Virtù, the see Vignaiuoli, the Aldrovandi, Ulisse 66, 221 Albala, Ken 16, 64, 70 n. 154, 94, 109, 128 ancient world, the 17, 117, 159, 161, 177, 182 Greece 14, 135, 190 Rome 14, 42, 47, 135, 174, 184, 190 aphrodisiacs 126, 136, 158 n. 25, 161–62, 220 vegetables as 77, 162 n. 34, 182, 188, 202 n. 1 Apicius 182, 187 Apollo 30–31, 173 appetite 38, 44, 94–97, 106, 115, 126, 134 foods for stimulating 18 n. 19, 75, 91, 218, 238–39 as a negative 15 n. 12, 95, 207, 226, 236 sexual 134, 158 n. 25, 161, 165–66, 186, 226 and women 207, 217–19, 222, 225, 236, 238–39, 243 apples 96, 156, 161, 164, 172, 175, 182 as sexual metaphor 162–63, 167–72, 176, 191 Arab culture 42, 116, 213 Arcangela, Suor 235, 239–40, 242 Aretino, Pietro 12, 18, 51–52, 74–77, 106–07, 191 Ragionamento della Nanna e dell’ Antonia 71–72, 181 Il sogno del Parnaso 29–31, 32, 73 Arienti, Sabadino degli 31–32, 34, 36, 156 Ariosto, Ludovico 123–24 Aristotle 43, 67; see also Great Chain of Being, the Aristotelian elements 31 n. 5, 32–33, 53, 93, 158 n. 25 Aristotelian physiology 133, 203–04 Bacchus 173–74, 210–11 Bakhtin, Mikhail 15 n. 12 banquets 14, 50, 55–62, 64, 126, 222, 227 n. 96, 243 in comedies 36, 59–60, 99 and sex 181, 184 and the Vignaiuoli 153, 159, 169 and women 202, 210 Beolco, Angelo see Ruzante Bernardino da Siena, saint 56, 158 n. 25, 205 Berni, Francesco 117, 124, 151, 155, 159–68, 191–92; see also literature: Bernesque and Annibal Caro 173 ‘Capitolo in lode delle pèsche’ 162–67 and Giovanfrancesco Bini 153, 159 and Pietro Aretino 29–30, 72–74, 77 Bini, Giovanfrancesco 153, 155, 159, 185–87 Biow, Douglas 12 n. 4, 30 n. 3, 111 n. 89

birds 56–59, 71, 74, 76, 91, 122, 131, 138, 158 n. 25; see also capons; partridges; pheasants doves 57, 232 n. 111 ducks 36, 53, 238 fowl 32–34, 37, 57, 60, 61 n. 118, 122, 231 fowl, roasted 21, 24, 51, 53–59, 62, 87, 97, 134, 204 geese 32, 53–54 as lower-class food 35 as metaphor 158, 166 ortolans 165–66 peacocks 58, 60, 122 phoenixes 29–32 quails 54, 60, 74, 122, 231, 232 n. 111 songbirds 53, 137–38, 165 thrushes 60, 232 n. 111, 238 as upper-class food 34, 37, 53–54, 231, 238, 245 warblers 60, 166 Boccaccio 155, 156, 166 n. 51, 177, 184 botany 64, 66, 69, 70–71, 77, 113, 176, 188 Bourdieu, Pierre 38–39, 40, 41 Bourne, Molly 221 n. 78, 226 n. 94 bread 91–92, 138, 161, 188, 236 as lower-class food 34, 60, 99, 115, 237 as sexual metaphor 133–34, 136–38 as upper-class food 58, 60 Bronzino, Agnolo 90, 120, 184 Burchiello 138 n. 188, 156, 185 cabbages 30, 63, 126, 217, 231 as peasant food 35, 48 Cabei, Giulio Cesare 207, 210 Callegari, Danielle 56 n. 97, 243 n. 152 Capatti, Alberto 16, 36, 42, 56, 64 capons 30, 35–36, 53–54, 61 n. 118, 131, 135 and literary parasites 59, 99 and servants 59–60 and young men 56, 158 n. 25 Caravaggio 74 n. 166, 120 Carnival 15 n. 12, 76, 97, 137, 154, 242; see also Lent and literature 41, 125, 129–31 and pigs 125, 232 n. 111 Caro, Annibal 72, 155, 160, 173, 176 n. 89 Carroll, Linda 103 carrots 216 as aphrodisiacs 162 as sexual metaphor 22, 139, 152, 160–62, 181, 185, 187–91 Castelvetro, Giacomo 68–70, 71, 76, 223 Castiglione, Baldassare 14, 154 castiglionesca sprezzatura 71 categorization of foods see foods, categorization of

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cheese 110, 131, 138, 214–17, 242, 245 and fruit 51, 61, 91, 138 as gifts 74, 219, 223, 242 and pasta 13, 214–15 parmesan 179, 214 Cockaigne see Cuccagna comedy 12–14, 41, 53, 97–100, 111, 123, 155–56, 176 and feasts 12, 58–61 and pears 50–51 and pork 129 Como, Martino da see Rossi, Maestro Martino de convents 20, 128, 181, 202, 209, 227, 234–44; see also nuns Counter-Reformation, the 103, 129, 230, 234–36 cookbooks 15, 33, 51 n. 82, 64, 89, 95 n. 29, 212, 214, 216, 234 Banchetti, composizioni di vivande et apparecchio generale 45, 126 and greens 65, 67, 88 De honesta voluptate et valetudine 21 n. 26, 37, 43–44, 63, 109, 162 n. 34, 182 Liber de coquina 36, 62–63 Libro de arte coquinaria 37, 63, 165 n. 45, 182 n. 113 and sexual metaphor 135, 170 cooks 13 n. 7, 18, 29, 89, 128, 214, 215, 235; see also Panunto, Il professional 35, 61, 201, 214, 217, 223–27 scalchi 121, 211, 220 n. 74, 222 Cornaro, Alvise, cardinal 101, 102–07, 110, 112, 241 Coryate, Thomas 114 courts 13, 36, 63, 122, 131, 138 ecclesiastical 37, 64 European 16 n. 14, 38 Ferrarese 31–32, 45, 57, 122, 126, 219–24 French 13 n. 7, 61 n. 119, 108 Italian 14, 19, 40–41, 60, 74, 116, 189, 201–02, 227 Mantuan 122, 216, 219, 221–24, 226 Croce, Giulio Cesare 13, 40, 65 n. 132 Cuccagna 13, 41, 101, 129, 152 Dall’Orto, Giovanni 134 n. 172, 138 n. 188, 166 n. 49, 171 n. 71 Dante 19 n. 20, 55, 74, 135, 155, 177 n. 90 Datini, Francesco di Marco 17 n. 15, 56 delicacies 75, 120, 209, 219, 237 fruits 46, 50, 71, 87 vegetables 21, 36, 62, 66 n. 136 Della Casa, Giovanni 14, 155, 160 diet 70 n. 154, 91, 111–14 ecclesiastical 64, 235–45 healthy 21, 33, 88, 95, 102–06 Lenten 95, 159, 223, 237, 240 vegetarian 66 n. 136, 159 and women 203, 225, 227, 229–31, 233–34

dietary literature 15, 22, 33, 88, 92–96, 117–18, 139, 150 and melons 108, 110–11, 113, 118 and peaches 163, 167, 172 and pork 124, 139 and social position 32–33, 35, 39, 41, 46, 54, 57 and vegetables 65, 70 n. 154, 88 dietetics 16–17, 20–21, 32, 35, 89, 112–13 and pork 122, 124–27, 129, 139 digestion 16, 94, 131, 161 n. 33, 182, 188, 221–22 and birds 231, 232 n. 111 and melons 108–09, 122, 164 n. 44 and physical labor 33, 122, 124–25, 182 and pork 122, 124–25, 131 dinners 30–31, 50–51, 76 n. 169, 90, 106, 116, 227 and comedies 12, 59, 130 and sexual metaphor 133, 164 and the Vignaiuoli 154, 159, 192 Dionysus see Bacchus discipline 21, 94–97, 204, 210, 222 doctrine of signatures 124, 162 Dolce, Lodovico 136–37, 208, 211, 212 Fabritia 59, 97 Dominici, Giovanni 205–06 Durante, Castore 88, 95, 97 eating, pleasure in see gusto; pleasure in eating elements, Aristotelian 31 n. 5, 32–33, 53, 93, 158 n. 25; see also Great Chain of Being, the Elias, Norbert 14, 97 England 68–69, 111–12, 114 eroticism see sexual metaphors Este, Borso d’ 57, 109 Este, Isabella d’, marchesa 23, 45, 113 n. 95, 122, 216–27, 235–36, 245 fasting 91, 94–95, 100–01, 114, 226, 244; see also hunger and women 205, 207–08, 226, 235–37, 239–40, 243 Felici, Costanzo 51 n. 81, 66–68, 69, 76, 107 n. 76 fertility 119, 150, 159 human 175, 183, 191, 202 n. 1 Ficino, Marsilio 15 n. 12, 43, 66 n. 136, 125–26 figs 45–47, 72, 92, 96, 111, 113, 116, 132, 182, 206, 232, 236 dried 223, 235 n. 126 fresh 38, 46, 164 n. 44 fig wood 174–75, 176, 188 as sexual metaphor 119, 132, 139, 159–62, 166, 168, 170, 172–78, 190–91 Finucci, Valeria 228 n. 100 Firenzuola, Agnolo 131–34, 155

255

Index

fish 63, 64, 91, 114, 135, 188, 214–15, 218, 232–33, 245 and Isabella d’Este 217–19, 245 and Lent 95 as ‘light’ food 32, 34, 37, 54 shellfish 58, 161, 162 n. 34, 214, 219–20 as unhealthy food 103, 241 Flandrin, Jean-Louis 16, 20, 42, 52, 89, 127 Folengo, Teofilo 13, 14, 65 n. 134, 123, 156 Fonte, Moderata 204 n. 9, 235, 245 Il merito delle donne 23, 228–34 food as medicine 16–17, 45 n. 59, 88–89, 202, 209, 227, 232 and wine 211, 240–41 food, classification of 41, 67, 108 and the Great Chain of Being 32–34, 37, 39, 57, 64, 93, 203 social 20, 29, 34, 41, 58, 62 food preferences 18, 41, 42, 54, 70, 134, 209, 213, 236 foods see also birds; bread; cheese; fish; fruits; meats; nuts; oil; salads; seafood; spices; vegetables; vinegar confetti 45, 61, 136, 138, 240 eggs 63, 91, 95 n. 29, 131, 156, 161, 235 fat 135–36, 137, 184 flowers 63, 70, 75, 76, 179–80 frittatas 92, 242 jams 61, 97, 237 marzipan 61, 137, 162 n. 34 pasta 13, 215, 216 pies 63, 103, 162 n. 34, 235 salty 42, 110, 114 stews 59, 235 foods, luxury 20, 39–41, 49–51, 54, 61, 97, 131, 138, 202 n. 1 birds 53–56, 62, 87, 97, 137, 204 fresh fruit 38, 44–46, 50, 53 fruits 62, 87, 97, 118, 150, 165, 171 spices 55, 126, 237 foods, stigmatized 22, 59, 68–69, 129, 182–83, 211, 214 melons 21, 103, 107, 113, 121 pork 123, 129–30, 132 vegetables 62–63, 68–69, 186, 221–22 France 13 n. 7, 16 n. 14, 61 n. 119, 112, 152–53 and the concept of taste 18, 42, 52, 153, 227 and the liberation of the gourmet 20, 89 Franzesi, Mattio 131, 137–38, 155, 188–90 Freedman, Paul 120 fresh fruits 32–33, 37–38, 44–51, 97, 171, 214, 219, 233 as dangerous food 96, 108, 112–14 fruits see also apples; figs; fresh fruits; melons; peaches; pears apricots 45–46, 52, 232, 236 cherries 45, 75, 164, 209, 215, 236 citrons 97, 237

lemons 97, 236, 237 oranges 60, 61, 135, 236 plums 52, 118, 164, 232 pomegranates 45, 46, 150 seeds of 45, 109, 113 strawberries 45, 71, 75, 113 fruit trees 44, 222, 229; see also orchards Galen 45 n. 59, 116, 118, 231; see also Great Chain of Being, the De alimentorum facultatibus 88 n. 3, 127 and general medical thought 16, 77, 88–89, 125, 157, 229 and humoral theory 32, 48, 90–91, 93, 109, 161, 169 and the six non-naturals 88, 93, 94 and wine 211, 213 Galilei, Livia, nun see Arcangela, Suor Galilei, Galileo 235, 237–38, 242 Galilei, Virginia, nun see Maria Celeste, Suor gardens 44, 67, 90, 150, 168, 175, 185, 192, 237 Ferrarese 113, 218–19, 222–23 fictional 34, 38, 46, 72, 159–61, 229 and Priapus 76 n. 169, 159–60 gastronomy 15–16, 51, 67, 76, 125, 132, 192, 227 and Agnolo Firenzuola 133–34 and Anton Francesco Grazzini, 135–36, 170 and Apicius 182 and Costanzo Felici 68 and Francesco Maria Molza 174–75, 178–79, 181 and Giacomo Castelvetro 69 and Giovanfrancesco Bini 186 and Mattio Franzesi 137–39, 188 and Michele Savonarola 57, 109 and Ortensio Lando 51 n. 82, 214, 216 and Platina 64, 109, 130–31 and pleasure in eating 17 n. 15, 22, 92, 126–27, 218 and social station 34, 40, 115, 131 and vegetables 74 genders 14, 16, 22, 94, 122, 172 n. 72, 174–75 and femininity 176, 202–46 neutrality of 228–34 relations among 190, 203–04, 210–11, 229 and masculinity 139, 171 n. 72, 174–75, 192, 210, 213, 225–26, 233 roles for 23, 97 n. 42, 244–45 stereotypes of 23, 172, 203–04, 215, 227, 230–33, 239 Giunti, Filippo 155, 177 n. 90, 188 gluttony 13, 17, 19, 42–43, 68, 152, 158 and Alvise Cornaro 102, 104–06 and Boccaccio 65 n. 134 and digestion 94 and literary parasites 12, 243 and lust 132, 139, 152, 158, 159 n. 25, 192 and melons 116, 120 and Pietro Aretino 30

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and pigs 124–25, 139 and Platina 21 n. 26 and Ruzante 102, 104–06 and sausage 132, 137, 139 and status 35, 38, 54–56 and women 23, 204–07, 238–39, 245–46 Gonzaga, Francesco, marquess 219, 221, 222 gourmets 20, 29, 51, 89 Grazzini, Anton Francesco 50, 121, 127–28, 131, 138, 155, 170–71 ‘Canzone in lode della salsiccia’ 134–36 Great Chain of Being, the 17, 20, 31–33, 39, 43, 77, 93 and meat 32, 37, 53–54, 122 and social station 17, 32, 37, 44, 46, 77 and vegetables 31–32, 48, 108, 162 greed 17, 19, 21 n. 26, 54–56, 215, 227; see also gluttony and women 184, 206, 209–10 Greenblatt, Stephen 21, 29 n. 1 greens 37, 65, 74–75, 77, 87–88, 188 raw 51, 65, 67–68, 72, 74, 77, 103 and salads 65 n. 134, 67, 70 n. 154, 71, 75, 113, 217 and sexual metaphor 177, 180 Grieco, Allen 16, 20 n. 24, 32 nn. 6–7, 39 n. 37, 56, 64, 108, 158 n. 25 gusto 17–19, 44, 52, 88, 244–46 as appreciation of food 99, 188, 190, 207, 212, 222, 226, 243 gusto del mangiare 19, 23, 237–38, 243; see also pleasure in eating as personal preference 41, 89, 176, 191–92, 229 and pleasure 21–22, 42, 77, 89, 99, 111, 181, 192, 221, 227, 233, 236, 238 and taste or flavor 68, 75, 111, 181, 218, 231 health 23, 44, 76, 94, 114–15, 164, 202, 228, 241 bad 91, 170, 186, 239–40 and diet in general 16, 17 n. 15, 21, 88–96, 211–12, 239, 244–45 and food preferences 41, 89, 99, 102–04, 110 good 32, 39–40, 213, 239 and melons 108–11, 116, 118, 163 and peaches 163, 165 and pork 90, 124–25, 127, 130, 136 n. 181 and sausage 135, 136 n. 181 and vegetables 69–70 and women 96, 203–04, 226, 229, 231, 234 herbs 30, 63, 75–76, 131–32, 138, 181, 182 n. 113, 214–16, 229 as medicine 136, 231, 235 n. 126 and salads 63 n. 124, 66–68, 70, 75–76 Hippocrates 116, 118, 169, 184 humors, the 32–34, 39, 70, 89–94, 214, 221, 229 and fava beans 184, 186

and lust 161–62, 184, 186, 188, 215 and melons 108, 111, 119, 122 and pork 90, 124 and women 203, 211, 215–16, 227, 231–32 hunger 13, 19–20, 100–02, 105, 123, 204, 243; see also fasting in literature 30, 97, 99, 127, 129 hunting 54, 58, 100, 102, 221 ideology 16, 32, 40, 49, 53, 58, 68 of class 50, 71, 165, 245 and the Great Chain of Being 39, 44 versus practice 36, 64–65, 153, 218 imagination 66, 167 embodied 14, 22, 151–53, 176, 192 imaginaries 42, 162 of food 15, 22, 151 literary 12, 17, 19–20, 22, 40, 60, 97, 101, 131, 151, 243 intellectuals 19, 30–31, 33, 92, 103, 113, 154–56, 159, 234 Jews 127–9 Jonson, Ben 111, 112 kitchens 24, 30, 61, 113, 188, 201 and Isabella d’Este 217, 223–24 and women 201 n. 1, 208, 244 Kodera, Sergius 12 n. 4 knights 13, 14, 31, 40, 58, 60–61 Land of Plenty see Cuccagna Lando, Ortensio 51, 213–16, 217 Latin 161, 174–77 classical 99, 154–56, 159 contemporary 36, 38, 123, 173, 176 Laudan, Rachel 16 n. 14 laurel 73–74, 132, 173–74, 176, 183 laws 69, 101–03, 105, 164 regarding fruit 44, 47, 62 sumptuary 54, 58 leeks 33, 34, 202 n. 1 as sexual metaphor 159, 161–62, 186 Lent 15 n. 12, 76, 95 n. 29, 158 n. 25, 245; see also Carnival and fasting 95, 130, 159, 223, 237, 239–40 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 16, 68 Lindemann, Mary 33 n. 9 literature see also cookbooks; comedy; dietary literature; prescriptive literature Bernesque 30, 72–74, 77, 117–19, 129–39, 151–92 health manuals 16, 88, 92–94, 107–9, 191, 203–04 household books 17, 111, 205, 209, 227 moral 54, 88, 158, 202–03, 207, 227, 244 Lori, Andrea 167–69, 172–73 lust 21, 159 n. 25, 161–62, 183, 205, 207–09 and gluttony 158, 192

Index

manners 71, 76, 94, 111, 227 bad 35–36, 52, 71, 124 good 14, 35–36, 58, 62, 71, 75–77, 87, 180 Marchi, Monica 35 n. 19 Marcolini, Francesco 51, 74–75 Maria Celeste, Suor 23, 234–43, 245 Martines, Lauro 164 n. 43 Martino de Rossi, Maestro 37, 95 n. 29, 130, 164 n. 45, 182 n. 113 Libro de arte coquinaria 37, 63, 164 n. 45 material culture 16, 22, 152 Matthews-Grieco, Sara F. 130 Mauro D’Arcano, Giovanni 29, 74, 155, 182–86, 187 Mazzei, Ser Lapo 17 n. 15, 56 meals 16–17, 89–93, 111, 126, 208, 211; see also banquets; dinners cloistered 234, 236, 239–42 feasts 12, 14, 34, 76, 99, 169 literary 59–61, 65, 71, 109 lower-class 13 n. 8, 14, 41, 57–58 and sexual metaphor 133, 135–38, 164–65, 169, 183, 186, 220 upper-class 37, 57–58, 63, 116 meat 20, 32, 37, 53–56, 60, 63, 91–92, 96, 151, 188; see also birds; Carnival; fasting; fish; Lent; pork; sausage avoidance, limiting, and replacement of 42, 58, 64, 95, 114, 214, 231 beef 123, 238 boar 122, 136–37, 158 broth 37, 60, 162 n. 34, 165 n. 45, 182 n. 113, 238 deer 61 n. 118, 122, 165 n. 45 game 32, 54, 55, 61 n. 118, 131, 239 goat 56–57, 60, 61 n. 118, 91, 164 n. 45 hare 57, 61 n. 118, 91, 122, 165 n. 45 lamb 56, 91, 92, 236 liver 35, 91, 130, 174–75 mutton 53–54, 123, 239 prosciutto 60, 128, 138 roasted 30–31, 51, 59, 61, 134 salami 122, 126 and sex 21, 131, 133, 135, 139, 158, 161 veal 53–54, 56, 122–23, 132 and women 231–33, 239–40, 246 medical culture 14–15, 21–22, 44, 57, 69, 102, 132, 151, 158, 214; see also food as medicine; Galen and apples 169, 172 and carrots 187–88, 190 and emotions 94 and fava beans 182–84, 187 and figs 174 and meat in general 54, 56, 238 and melons 103, 109–21, 172 and peaches 163–67, 172 and pork 124–27, 129, 131, 136–37 and pork sausage 130, 135–36

257 and radishes 186–87 and salad 66–67, 76–77 and sexual potency 139, 161 and women 23, 203–04, 209–11, 215, 227, 229–33, 245 Medici, Cosimo de’ 49, 120 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 49, 156, 164 n. 45, 185 melons 45, 52, 91, 96–97, 206, 209 as dangerous food 103, 107–22, 113, 121, 163–64, 232–33, 241 as sexual metaphor 119–20, 122, 139, 150, 162–63, 171–73, 177–78 menus 41, 58, 62, 88 Messisbugo, Christoforo da 45, 121, 126, 201 n. 1, 224 Michelangelo 18, 92 misogyny 130, 204, 209 moderation 14, 66 n. 136, 88–89, 99, 101, 116 and long life 21, 95, 103–05, 241 and morality 21 n. 26, 43, 95, 97, 158 and women 96, 206, 208, 211–12, 226, 230, 233 Molza, Francesco Maria 72–73, 155, 160, 173–81, 188 Montaigne, Michel de 114–15, 118, 227 Montanari, Massimo 16, 51–52, 56, 58, 245 Il cibo come cultura 20, 227 La cucina italiana: Storia di una cultura 36, 42, 64, 95 n. 29 Il formaggio con le pere. La storia in un proverbio 17 n. 15, 51 morality 21–22, 36, 42, 44, 89, 121, 135 and gluttony 54, 94–95, 124, 239 and the lower classes 34, 36, 49–50, 53, 129 and moderation 88, 95, 107, 112, 139, 158, 213 and nuns 209, 236, 238–39, 243–46 and sodomy 163, 192 and women 23, 202–03, 206–07, 209–12, 215–16, 225, 227–29, 244–46 More, Thomas 103, 214 Morlini, Girolamo 38 Muir, Edward 89 Muses, the 13–14, 21, 30, 72, 160 Muzzarelli, Maria Giuseppina 202 n. 2 nature 16, 116, 171, 189, 228, 229 New World, the 42, 77 nuns 20, 181, 202, 206, 234–43, 244; see also convents nutrition 22, 45 n. 59, 56, 95, 152, 202 n. 1, 225, 237 and vegetables 48, 73, 162, 180, 220 nuts 63, 215, 232 almonds 75, 95 n. 29, 182 n. 113 chestnuts 132, 209 pine nuts 161, 162 n. 34 walnuts 232, 235 n. 126

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oil 67–69, 71, 95, 182 n. 113 and vinegar 63, 65 n. 134, 69, 178, 217 ontology 14, 42, 53, 245 Opere burlesche 155, 167, 173, 177 n. 90, 188 orchards 46–48, 52, 62, 72, 106–07, 183 and Priapus 119, 159–60, 174, 188–89 Palma, Pina 13 n. 9, 15 n. 12, 22 n. 26, 30 n. 3 Panunto, Il 121, 127, 163 n. 34, 211 Parabosco, Girolamo 60, 98–99 parasites, literary 12, 58–61, 97–99, 243 Parnassus 21, 62, 72, 159–61 partridges 54, 58–60, 99, 122, 135, 162 n. 34 grey 56, 59, 238 roasted 30, 60 and young men 56, 159 n. 25 and women 231, 232 n. 111, 238 peaches 22, 45, 46, 52, 109, 116, 118, 152, 160, 206 as dangerous food 96, 109–10, 163, 165, 172, 232 as sexual metaphor 119, 139, 150, 161–67, 168, 171–72, 176, 191 theft of 34, 47–48 pears 45, 49–52, 118, 138, 164, 206, 232, 237 bergamotte 223 as dangerous food 96, 106–07 moscatella 49–50, 52, 97 peasants 13, 31–36, 51, 53, 57, 62, 118, 158 and fava beans 36, 182 poor 21, 40, 44–46, 48, 100–02, 105 and pork 54, 122–24, 125, 138 rich 36, 49–50 women 130, 204 Petrarch 73–74, 151, 155, 156, 170, 191 and Laura 135–36, 176 pheasants 51, 54, 58–60, 99 as noble food 33, 35–36, 58, 131 roasted 30, 60 Pilcher, Jeffrey 41, 151–52 Pilliod, Elisabeth 93 Pisanelli, Baldassare 33, 88, 95, 97, 210 Platina 57, 67, 92, 98 De honesta voluptate et valetudine 21 n. 6, 37, 43, 63–64, 109, 130–31, 162 n. 34, 182, 220 Plato 98, 191 neo-Platonism 66 n. 136, 125 pleasure 22 n. 26, 46, 75, 103, 230, 244 heterosexual 130, 134, 139, 169 n. 61, 178–81 homosexual 122, 134–39, 163–72, 189–92 of the senses 14, 71, 95, 100–05, 120, 207–08, 210 sexual 21, 120, 150, 152, 156, 159, 191–92 pleasure in eating 16–17, 20–23, 53, 59–60, 87–89, 191–92, 212, 229; see also gusto del mangiare and Carnival 97–98 and fruit 38, 46, 87, 110, 112, 115, 120–21, 233

and gluttony 23, 43, 104–07, 158 and Isabella d’Este 218, 222, 225, 227 and Jacopo Pontormo 94, 127 and nuns 236–41, 244–45 and peasants 20, 59, 62, 102 and Pietro Aretino 51, 74–75 and Platina 57, 92, 109 and sausage 131, 134, 137–38 and vegetables 74, 180–81 Pliny the Elder 165, 187, 230 Pocopanno, Gianfrancesco 18 n. 19, 52, 106 politics 35–36, 53, 56, 64, 111, 156, 216–17 Pontormo, Jacopo 90–94, 126–27 popular knowledge 21, 88, 93–94, 128, 162, 191 and melons 108, 110, 112, 114 pork 90, 127–28, 184, 238 as dangerous food 103, 107, 122, 124–25, 127, 130–31, 136 n. 181 as lowly food 21, 53–54, 121–29, 138, 232 n. 111, 241 as sausage 21, 54, 91, 122, 129–32, 135–39 Priapus 76 n. 169, 119, 159–60, 174, 175–76, 188–89 prescriptive literature 15, 17, 43, 93, 213, 216 and fruits 108, 112, 222 and gusto 222, 227 and social station 20, 32–34, 39, 41, 102 and vegetables 62, 65 and vice 59, 158 and women 22–23, 202–04, 208–11, 228 n. 101, 229, 243–44 pride 54, 55–56 Pseudo-Sermini 35–36, 65 Pulci, Luigi 13, 14, 15 n. 12, 156 Quellier, Florent 16 Re, Lucia 202 n. 2 recipes 33, 62–65, 178, 212, 218–19, 223–24, 226, 234–35; see also cookbooks fruit 45, 119, 165, 170 meat 60, 64, 126, 130–31, 215, 235 vegetable 36–37, 63–64, 182, 186–88, 217 Romoli, Domenico see Panunto, Il Rossi, Maestro Martino de 37, 63, 95 n. 29, 130, 164 n. 45, 182 n. 113, 215 Ruggiero, Guido 163 n. 41, 164 n. 42, 167 n. 53, 171 n. 72 Ruzante 13, 21, 99–107 Sacchetti, Franco 46, 48 Sacchi, Bartolomeo see Platina salads 60, 63 n. 124, 65, 215, 216, 241 as fashionable 51, 63, 66–77, 217 as sexual metaphor 72, 138–39, 161, 172–73, 177–81, 188 and the Vignaiuoli 30–31, 72–74, 113 salt 126, 135, 178, 206, 235 n. 126 and salads 63, 65 n. 134, 67, 69, 177–78

259

Index

salted pork 54, 122–23 salty foods 42, 110, 114 Sassoli, Lorenzo 17 n. 15, 56 sausages 21, 23, 54, 74, 126–27, 156 as sexual metaphor 122, 129–39, 149, 156 Savonarola, Michele 45 n. 59, 107 n. 77 Libreto de tute le cosse che se manzano 57, 109, 128, 164 n. 44, 220 senses, the 16, 87, 97, 115–16, 157, 206 five 17, 43–44, 168, 216 perceptions of 22–23, 43, 74–75, 104, 106, 152, 166, 244 and pleasure 14, 100–03, 105, 120, 130, 139, 158, 205, 207, 209 Sercambi, Giovanni 130, 156 Sermini, Gentile see Pseudo-Sermini servants 51, 58–59, 74, 97–99, 128, 164, 215, 223 and hunger 13, 129, 243 and low status 12, 31–32, 34, 46–47, 50, 61 mythical 72, 160 sexual metaphors 133–34, 168, 171 and apples 162–63, 167–72, 176, 191 and birds 158, 166 and carrots 22, 139, 152, 160–62, 181, 185, 187–91 and cookbooks 135, 170 and dinners 133, 164 and figs 119, 132, 139, 159–62, 166, 168, 170, 172–78, 190–91 and greens 177, 180 and leeks 159, 161–62, 186 and meals 133, 135–38, 164–65, 169, 183, 186, 220 and melons 119–20, 122, 139, 150, 162–63, 171–73, 177–78 and parsnips 181, 185, 187–88, 191 and peaches 119, 139, 150, 161–67, 168, 171–72, 176, 191 and salads 72, 138–39, 161, 172–73, 177–81, 188 and sausages 122, 129–39, 149, 156 and root vegetables 162, 187 sexuality 14, 16, 22, 76, 120, 139, 152–53, 172 sex 22, 23, 73, 94, 120, 129–33, 150, 157, 159; see also lust; sexual metaphors; sodomy chastity 158–59, 176 Shapin, Steven 42 shellfish 214, 219–20 oysters 58, 161, 162 n. 34 Shemek, Deanna 216 n. 58, 217 n. 59 sins see gluttony; lust; pride sodomy 156, 164 n. 42, 167 n. 53, 171 n. 72, 174, 176, 178–79, 189–92 and apples 167–72 and gluttony 159 n. 25 and melons 119–20, 122, 163, 171–72, 177–78 and peaches 119, 139, 163–72, 176, 191 and sausage 134–39 Speroni degli Alvarotti, Sperone 96–97, 102, 105

spices 63, 89, 138, 182 n. 113, 189, 213, 235 n. 126, 237; see also salt cinnamon 126, 135, 216 cloves 55, 59, 126, 135 expensive 36, 64, 215, 235 pepper 37, 131, 135, 138 saffron 17 n. 15, 37 sugar 42, 45, 136 n. 181, 138, 182 n. 118, 216, 235, 237 still lifes 77, 113, 119–20 Tasso, Torquato 111, 112 temptation 21, 47, 55, 69, 110, 176, 205, 207, 233 terza rima 22, 72, 155, 173, 177, 188 turnips 34, 36–37, 40–41, 63 as an aphrodisiac 77, 161–62 Udine, Giovanni da 120, 150 Vasari, Giorgio 18, 92, 120 vegetables 21–22, 62–65, 68–70, 87–88, 180, 214, 217–19, 233, 245; see also cabbages; carrots; greens; herbs; leeks; turnips artichokes 161, 162 n. 34, 218–19 arugula 161, 162 n. 34 asparagus 161, 162, 202 n. 1 beans 33, 40–41, 118, 159, 160, 161, 201 n. 1 beans, fava 36, 91, 181–87, 182 n. 113 bulbs 37, 48, 63 capers 76, 161 chickpeas 63, 161, 162 coriander 45, 126 cucumbers 75, 108, 117, 150, 161, 179 fennel 63, 135, 138, 156, 169, 218 garlic 32, 34–36, 48, 76, 131, 206, 215 gourds 107, 109, 119–20, 150 grains 39–40, 58, 118 legumes 32, 37, 63, 162, 183–84 lentils 33, 184 lettuce 63, 73–74, 76 n. 169, 77, 91 as ‘low’ food 21, 30–31, 32 n. 6, 37, 48, 62–64, 68–69, 87, 150 mushrooms 63, 219, 221–22 onions 33, 34, 40, 63, 162 n. 34, 182 n. 113 parsley 63, 161, 215, 235 parsnips 161, 181, 185, 187–88, 191 peas 160, 182 n. 113, 184 pumpkins 97, 108, 117 purslane 63 n. 126, 215 radicchio 73, 76 radishes 181, 184–87 and social hierarchy 32, 77, 87, 108 truffles 138, 161–62, 219–21 vegetables, root 32, 37, 39–40, 159 as sexual metaphor 162, 187 vegetarianism 66 n. 136, 159 vernacular language 15, 16, 53, 175, 177 and literature 66, 153, 154, 156, 186, 192 Vignaiuoli, the 117, 132, 139, 153–61, 165, 185, 191

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and Pietro Aretino 30–31, 72–74, 76 vinegar 67, 178–79, 189, 215, 218, 235, 237 and oil 63, 65 n. 134, 69, 178, 217 Virtuosi, the see Vignaiuoli, the Von Hoffmann, Viktoria 18 n. 16, 152 n. 7, 153 n. 8, 192 n. 151, 227 n. 96, 228 n. 97 wine 59, 60–61, 91, 96, 138, 192, 239–40, 244 cold 103, 110, 115, 203 and gluttony 204, 210 as medicine 161, 169, 211, 235 n. 126, 240–41 and melon 110, 113 n. 95, 119 as recipe ingredient 126, 215, 238 and women 210–14, 229–30, 233, 235–37, 239–41 women 23, 215–16, 234, 244–46; see also nuns and carrots 189–90, 191 and conduct 206, 208–09 and fasting 204, 207–08, 226, 228–33

and fava beans 183, 186–87 and fertility 150, 202 n. 1 and figs 119, 132, 139, 159–62, 166, 168, 170, 172–78, 190–91 and intemperance 17, 203, 204–07, 209–13, 244–45 and manners 71, 227 and misogyny 130, 204, 209 as objects of desire 59, 72, 138 n. 188, 161, 172–78, 192 and radishes 185–87, 191 and salads 139, 177–79, 180 and sausage 130, 132, 135, 138–39 and sodomy 168–69, 172, 179, 183 and temperance 202, 205–06, 208, 210–12, 227, 229, 244 as widows 207–08, 210, 244 world upside down, the 12, 17, 53, 61, 152, 156, 212