Food in Shakespeare's Time

About the lecture

In this module, we explore popular cultural and scientific understandings about health during the Early Modern period in England, focusing on: (i) the similarities and differences between our beliefs about food today and those held in Early Modern England, (ii) popular ‘dietaries’ on food, such as Thomas Elyot’s Castle of Health (1534), (iii) the importance of the religious notion of gluttony as sin in informing attitudes about food consumption, (iv) how Shakespeare’s plays point to a belief in the health of meat, (v) milk’s association with weakness, and (vi) mummy as a medicine.

About the lecturer

Dr Joan Fitzpatrick is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on early modern literature and the intersection of literature and culinary studies. She published the first monograph on this intersection as seen in Shakespeare’s works, titled Shakespeare and Food (2007). She has recently published two more books on the subject, Three Sixteenth-Century Dietaries (2017) and A History of Food in Literature (2017).