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Food and Literature in Early Modern England (EAS3246)

Module aims

This module covers the English Renaissance, Civil Wars, and Interregnum (1580-1660) and aims to familiarise you with a range of texts, paintings, maps, and images that represented social, political, and cultural attitudes to food, and imagined remedies for food-related anxieties. Interdisciplinary developments in Food Studies – from anthropological, environmental, historical, and literary perspectives – have demonstrated creative ways of interpreting the pervasive presence of food in literature, which you will be encouraged to explore in an early modern context. You will develop research skills through work on conventional essays as well as distinctive group assignments and blog posts.

ILO: Module-specific skills

• 1. demonstrate an informed appreciation of the relevance of food in specific authors and works of the period 1580-1660
• 2. demonstrate an informed appreciation of the literary and cultural approaches to understanding food-related issues in the early modern period, and their current relevance
• 3. demonstrate an informed appreciation of the literary and cultural approaches to understanding food-related issues in the early modern period, and their current relevance

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

• 4. demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse the literature of an earlier era and to relate its concerns and its modes of expression to its historical context;
• 5. demonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history
• 6. demonstrate an advanced ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary texts

ILO: Personal and key skills

• 7. through seminar work and presentations, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups;
• 8. through essay-writing, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose
• 9. through research for seminars, essays, and presentations, demonstrate advanced proficiency in the analysis of complex material and communication of ideas

Syllabus plan

Topics to be covered may include:

Section 1: Production and Distribution

Growing Food: Agricultural Discourses

Core Texts: Edmund Spenser, Shepherd’s Calendar, “December Eclogue”; Andrew Marvell, “Mower” poems.

Extracts and images: Thomas Tusser’s Husbandry; Hugh Platt’s Garden of Eden

Knowing Food: Scientific Discourses

Core Texts: John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV

Extracts and images: Medical and alchemical works (Moffet to Brooke)

Mapping Food: Geographical Discourses

CoreTexts: Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, Book 1, Song 1 (Devon and Cornwall); Peter Mundy, Travels (England, Wales, India)

Maps, illustrations, digital media: Speed, Drayton, Harriot, Mundy

Buying and Selling Food: Commercial Discourses

Core Text: Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair

Extracts: historical documents on food import and markets

Section 2: Politics of Consumption

Feasts

CoreTexts: Ben Jonson, Love’s Welcome (masque); Eleanor Davies, “Belshazzar’s Feast”

Paintings and images: Breughel, Battle of Carnival and Lent; from Bartolomeo Scappi, Opera

Focus on Assessment

Group presentations

Crimes and Riots

Core Text: William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

Extracts: Robert Greene (conny catching), John Reynolds, Robert Wilkins (Midlands Rising)

Communality

Core Texts: Gerrard Winstanley et al, True Levellers Standard Advanced; Abiezer Coppe, First Fiery Flying Roll

Illustrations: From radical pamphlets and anti-ranter pamphlets

Section 3: Imagining Remedies

Households

Core Texts: Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst”; Robert Herrick, selected poetry

Food recipes: Hugh Platt, Delights for Ladies

Moderation

Core Texts: William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1; Merry Wives of Windsor

Images: Picturing Falstaff - performance images

Waste and Recycling

CoreText: John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book 2 (Satan’s banquet)

Extract: from Thomas Nashe, Lenten Stuffe

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Basic reading:

Primary texts

Students must buy the following core texts in the editions mentioned below:

Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Suzanne Gossett, Revels Student Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)

John Milton, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: OUP, 2008)

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Peter Holland, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (Arden, 2013)

William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (Arden, 2002)

William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (Arden, 1999)

The following core texts are in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9^th edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al (W.W. Norton and Company, 2012):

Robert Herrick, selected poetry

Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst”

 Andrew Marvell, “Mower” poems 

The following core texts and all additional extracts and images are provided on ELE:

Abiezer Coppe, First Fiery Flying Roll  

Eleanor Davies, “Belshazzar’s Feast”  

Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, Book 1, Song 1  

Robert Greene, selected conny catching pamphlet

Ben Jonson, Love’s Welcome (masque)

Edmund Spenser, Shepherd’s Calendar, “December Eclogue”  

Peter Mundy, Travels (England, Wales, India)

Satires by Joseph Hall, Ben Jonson

Gerrard Winstanley et al, True Levellers Standard Advanced  

Module has an active ELE page?

Yes

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

Web based and electronic resources:

Early English Books Online: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home

Jonson’s Works (Cambridge Edition): http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/

Spenser’s Works (Luminarium): http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/shepheard.html

Milton’s Works (resource page): https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/postprint/CCM2Biblio.html#335

Oxford Scholarship Online: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/

JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/

Early Modern Literary Studies: https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls

Indicative learning resources - Other resources

Selected critical reading

Appelbaum, Robert. Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Goldstein, David B. Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Laroque, Francois. Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

McRae, Andrew. God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Mukherjee, Ayesha. Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

Thirsk, Joan. Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500-1760. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006.

Available as distance learning?

No

Origin date

09/02/2017

Last revision date

12/02/2018

Key words search

Food and literature, Renaissance, Civil War, England, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton

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