A Feast of Words

Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance

Translated by Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes

Cloth $91.00 ISBN: 9780226395753 Published October 1991 For sale only in the United States, its dependencies, the Philippines, and Canada

Paper $30.00 ISBN: 9780226395760 Published October 1991 For sale only in the United States, its dependencies, the Philippines, and Canada

The banquet gives rise to a special moment when thought and the senses—words and food—enhance each other. Throughout history, the ideal of the symposium has reconciled the angel and the beast in the human, renewing the interdependence between the mouth that speaks and the mouth that eats. Michel Jeanneret's lively book explores the paradigm of the banquet as a guide to significant tendencies in Renaissance Humanist culture and shows how this culture in turn illuminates the tensions between physical and mental pleasures. Ranging widely over French, Italian, German, and Latin texts, Jeanneret not only investigates the meal as a narrative artefact but enquires as well into aspects of sixteenth-century anthropology and aesthetics.