Join us to celebrate the launch of 'Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy: The Renaissance of Taste'. This online launch is for anyone interested in early modern Italian food culture and its literary representations.
Friday, 29 April 2022
Valeria Finucci, Professor Emerita of Romance Studies, Duke University. She works on the early modern period and writes on Renaissance theater, epic, romance, and treatise; women writers, medical and literary understandings of the body, Venetian culture, Renaissance fashion, medicine in early modern Italy, New World's pharmacy, and psychoanalysis. She has published widely on these subjects.
Laura Giannetti, University of Miami Emerita, Independent Scholar. Author of Food Culture and Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy: The Renaissance of Taste (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). She co-translated and edited with Guido Ruggiero Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (Johns Hopkins University Press) in 2003. In 2009 her monograph, Lelia’s Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy was published by Toronto University Press.
Allen J. Grieco, Senior Research Associate Emeritus at Villa i Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies). Series Editor of the Amsterdam University Press series Food Culture, Food History before 1900.
Erika Gaffney, Senior Commissioning Editor Early Modern History and Art History, Amsterdam University Press. Founder of Art Herstory.net.
Alessandro Arcangeli, Associate Professor, University of Verona. Former Chair of the International Society for Cultural History (2013-2017), he is the author of one of the main reference books on the methodology and historiography of cultural history.
As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/ taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.
Registration (free) is required for this event: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZItc-6tqT4vH9C1Iih8MQzKpt_fYSdbpO9N. After registering, participants will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Attendees can take advantage of a 40% discount on the book with the code AUPEMS, valid until 31 May 2022. For details, visit: https://www.aup.nl/en/promotion/save-on-early-modern-studies-at-aup.
