Early Modern English Foodways A Critical Sourcebook

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART I Hospitality and Commensality

1          Anon., The Book of Carving (1513)

2          Thomas More, Utopia (1516; trans. Ralph Robinson, 1551)

3          Josias Bodley, Visit to Lecale (1602–3)

4          William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, Timon of Athens (c. 1605–06)

5          Ben Jonson, “Inviting a Friend to Supper” and “To Penshurst” (1616)

6          Mary Wroth, Urania (1621)

7          John Finet, Notebooks (1628–41)

8          Caleb Dalechamp, Christian Hospitality (1632)

9          John Taylor, Selected Works (1632–39)

10        Robert Herrick, Selected poems (1648)

11        Ann, Lady Fanshawe, Book of Receipts (c. 1665) 

12        Ann Palthorpe’s Posset Pot (1696)

 PART II Religion and Spirituality

13        John Jewel & Thomas Harding, Eucharist Debates (1562–65)

14        Thomas Nashe, Lenten Stuff (1599)

15        Margaret, Lady Hoby, Diary (1599–1605)

16        Thomas Middleton, The Witch (c. 1616)

17        Lewis Bayly, The Practice of Piety (1616)

18        George Herbert, The Temple (1633)

19        Nehemiah Wallington, Notes and meditations (1641–54)

20        Richard Standfast, Clero-Laicum Condimentum (1644)

21        The Diggers, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced (1649)

22        Roger Crab, The English Hermit (1655)

23        Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies (1664)

24        John Milton, Paradise Lost (1674)

25        Anon., The Kentish Miracle (c. 1684)

 PART III Medicine and the Body

26        Thomas Cogan, The Haven of Health (1584)

27        Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1596)

28        Simon Forman & Richard Napier, Casebooks (1596–1634)

29        William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1 (c. 1597)

30        Hugh Plat, Delights for Ladies (1600)

31        Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia (1615)

32        Elizabeth Clinton, The Countess of Lincoln’s Nursery (1622)

33        Ben Jonson, Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624)

34        Thomas Moffett, Health’s Improvement (1655)

35        Henry Stubbe, The Indian Nectar (1662)

36        John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1671, 1689)

37        Thomas Tryon, Wisdom’s Dictates (1691)

 PART IV Social Status and Stratification

38        George Gascoigne, The Noble Art of Venery (1575)

39        Richard Stonley, Diaries (1581–1598)

40        William Harrison, Description of England (1587)

41        Sir Anthony Browne, A Book of Orders and Rules (1595)

42        Lettice Kinnersley, Letter from Lettice Kinnersley to her brother Walter Bagot (c. 1608)

43        Gervase Markham, The English Housewife (1615)

44        Jonas Melcher, Elizabeth Norden’s wedding fork and knife, 1622

45        Women’s Grain Riot in Maldon, Essex (1629)

46        Grace & Sarah Saunderson’s Receipt Book (1660s–1700s)

47        W. Turner, The Common Cries of London Town (1662)      

48        Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1660/1678)

49        Hannah Woolley, Selected household advice and recipes (1662–1675)

PART V Agriculture and Ecology

50        Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry United to as many of Good Housewifery (1573)

51        Hugh Plat, Sundry New and Artificial Remedies Against Famine (1596)

52        John Gerard, The Herbal, or General History of Plants (1597)

53        William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (c. 1611)

54        Nathaniel Bacon, Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruits (c. 1620–25)

55        Ralph Austen, A Treatise of Fruit-Trees (1653)

56        William Coles, The Art of Simpling (1656)

57        John Evelyn, The French Gardener (1658) & Acetaria: A Discourse of Salads (1699)

58        Susanna Packe, “To Boil a Sturgeon” (1674)

59        John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690)

PART VI Empire and Exchange

60        Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, The Decades of the New World (1516; trans. Richard Eden, 1555)

61        André Thevet, The New Found World, or Antarctike (1558; trans. Thomas Hacket, 1568)

62        Thomas Harriot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590)

63        William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595)

64        Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Cannibals,” (c. 1580 trans. John Florio, 1603)

65        Council of Virginia, A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony in Virginia (1610)

66        Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities (1611)

67        Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India (1615–19)

68        Richard Whitbourne, A Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland (1620)

69        Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (1624)

70        Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657)

Biography

David B. Goldstein serves as Professor of English and Creative Writing at York University in Toronto. His first monograph, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, shared the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award in 2013. A former restaurant critic and food magazine editor, he has also published three co-edited essay collections on topics related to Shakespeare, food, and early modern hospitality; two books of poetry; and a range of essays on literature, food studies, Emmanuel Levinas, ecology, and contemporary poetics. For four years he co-directed the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Mellon-funded research collaboration, Before “Farm to Table”: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures.

Victoria Yeoman is Professor of English and Liberal Studies at Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto. She has published on early modern foodways, drama, religion, identity, material culture, and pedagogy in the journals Renaissance Studies, Discourse and Writing, and West 86th: The Journal of Decorative Art, Design History, and Material Culture, and in the edited collections Shakespeare and the Stuff of Life (2016) and Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World (2024). She held the Rhinehart Postdoctoral Fellowship in British History at Appalachian State University (2016–2018) and was a residential fellow (2019–2020) at the Linda Hall Library.