Eating the Enlightenment
Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760
368 pages
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20 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2012
Eating the Enlightenment offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners—from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights—E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, Spary devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the draughts-playing café owner Charles Manoury, the “Turkish envoy” Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d’Agoty. Equally entertaining and enlightening, Eating the Enlightenment will be an original contribution to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.
Fabio Parasecoli | Huffington Post
“[Eating the Enlightenment] rewards those who might decide to engage with its fascinating content. Focusing on the Parisian who’s who, Spary explores debates and cultural dynamics that eerily remind us of the way many contemporary consumers in post-industrial societies decide what and how to eat. . . . Spary’s book not only provides us with great information to understand the development of a cuisine that is still among the most prestigious worldwide, but also elicits reflections to our present-day attitudes about food, dietary choices, and their connections to much larger social issues.”
William Doyle | Times Literary Supplement
“The relationship of food to science and Enlightenment is . . . E. C. Spary’s subject in Eating the Enlightenment, but she is less concerned with who cooked it than who wrote and talked about it. A cultural historian of science, Spary explores the impact of new foodstuffs on French habits of consumption and ways of thinking about nutrition.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“Spary’s materials offer new possibilities for seeing the Enlightenment as a contest over practical virtue, over the texture of quotidian life.”
Carla Nappi | New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
“Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. . . . It urges us to reconsider the way we write commodity histories, and is well worth reading.”
Biancamaria Fontana, University of Lausanne, Switzerland | Times Higher Education
“On the whole, Eating the Enlightenment provides a well-researched, original, and occasionally fascinating approach to an interesting dimension of eighteenth-century culture.”
J. W. McCormack, University of Notre Dame | Choice
“A timely book, amply demonstrating that the present cacophony of often-conflicting scientific advice regarding diet and nutrition is no recent development. . . . This significant contribution to the historiography of the Enlightenment should interest a wide variety of scholars of the eighteenth century. Recommended.”
Reviews in History
“Spary has charted a powerful methodology for reexamining the history of food and foodways that will have long lasting consequences throughout the field.”
Stuart Walton | World of Fine Wine
“This is a potently inspiring study, one that bears all the evidence of its having gestated, as Spary indicates in a prefatory note, over a long period. Its multifocused nature requires a correspondingly complex exercise of orientation on the reader’s part, but its impressive precision and niceness of judgment across a broad disciplinary spread are as nourishing as the congenial ghosts of its contending authorities might have hoped.”
Rebecca L. Spang, author of The Invention of the Restaurant
“Creatively crossing disciplinary boundaries and interweaving a wide variety of subjects and source materials to show how social, epistemological, and even political authority was constituted in debates about delicacies and digestion, E. C. Spary’s Eating the Enlightenment is sure to be of interest to historians, literature scholars, and historians of science alike.”
Antoine Lilti, École des hautes études en sciences sociales Paris
“E. C. Spary successfully demonstrates that food is a serious matter of history, involving learned controversies, commercial networks, medical expertise, and even political stakes. This tasty and nourishing book offers us a fresh and unexpected view on Enlightenment culture and Parisian society and raises this important question: why, after all, do people eat what they eat?”
Anne Vila, University of Wisconsin–Madison
“With this remarkable book, E. C. Spary captures both the science and the sensuality that drove the culture of eating during the French Enlightenment. This is a richly textured history of the transformations that occurred in food science and gustatory practices from 1670 to 1760: it reveals the complex web of relations that bound knowledge about food with knowledge tout court in eighteenth-century Paris, a city that was both a metropolis of exotic consumption and a highly public arena for the display and contestation of claims to learned authority about food. Yet Spary gives us far more than just a new history of eating, taste, and gastronomic connoisseurship: she also provides a groundbreaking account of the Enlightenment, understood not as a neatly packaged ideological movement but as a highly localized process whose aspirants ranged well beyond such famous figures as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. With its wealth of insights into the history of the body as well as French culture, Eating the Enlightenment offers abundant food for thought for scholars and students in a wide range of fields.”
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
One Intestinal Struggles
Two From Curiosi to Consumers
Three The Place of Coffee
Four Distilling Learning
Five The Philosophical Palate
Six Rules of Regimen
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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