Introduction: Distinction through food: Eating to be (Hispanic Middle Ages and Golden Age)

Abstract

Giving new impetus to the historical study of eating behaviour and to the anthropology of food, Jean Louis Flandrin makes "distinction by taste" a major key to interpreting past practices, revealing the political dimension of the arts of gastronomy. This allows us to go beyond simplistic visions of a boorish Middle Ages, with coarse manners, essentially consuming roasted meats and using spices without finesse. This gastronomy is in fact an elaborate and ritualised rhetoric and these food aspects of ostentation are indeed signs of superiority, in the sense of what J.P. Daloz (2010) calls material symbols or 'prestigious goods', a spectacularisation of domination through a sensory expression but also a source of codified physical pleasure in a courtier environment: the table is indeed a political space.

Not without reason, King Alfonso X, in Title VII of the Siete partidas, dedicated to education, gives prominence to laws governing behaviour at the table, a place of pleasure, meeting and discussion. Food is at the heart of human relations and, in particular at court and in the spheres of power, games of representation are played around the table, structuring the social hierarchy and establishing the legitimacy of the powerful.