Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe

230 Pages·1989·11.516 MB·English

by  Piero Camporesi

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In this remarkable book, cultural historian
Piero Camporesi examines the imaginary world
of poor and ordinary people in preindustrial
Europe, exploring their everyday
preoccupations, fears, and fantasies.
Camporesi develops the startling claim that
many people in early modem Europe lived in a
state of almost permanent hallucination,
drugged by their hunger or by bread adulterated
with hallucinogenic herbs. The use of opiate
products, administered even to infants and
children, was widespread and was linked to a
popular mythology in which herbalists and
exorcists were important cultural figures.
Through a careful reconstruction of the
everyday imaginative lives of peasants, beggars,
and the poor, Camporesi presents a vivid and
disconcerting image of early modern Europe as a
vast laboratory of dreams.
Bread ofDreams is a rich and engaging book
that provides fresh insight into the everyday life
and attitudes of peasants, laborers, paupers, and
vagabonds in preindustrial Europe. Camporesi’s
vision is inspiring and his work is sure to
provoke much discussion.
Piero Camporesi is professor of Italian
literature at the University of Bologna. He
is
the author of numerous works on popular
culture and everyday life in preindustrial
Europe, including La Casa Dell’Eternità and La
Came
Impassabile the latter of which is also
,
published in English translation as
The Incorruptible Flesh.
Jacket illustration: Le Pays de Cocagne, 1657, by Pieter
Brueghel from Arte Pinakothek, Munich (Photograph:
Artothek)
Jacket design by Hybert • Design Type ’^Maidenhead
BOSTON
PUBLIC
LIBRARY
To my
students
Dreams
Bread
of
Food and Fantasy
in Early Modern Europe
Camporesi
Piero
Translated by David Gentilcore
The University of Chicago Press
©
Originally published as II Pane Salvaggio. Copyright Il Mulino 1980.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
Polity Press, Cambridge
©
1989 by Polity Press
All rights reserved. Published 1989
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Camporesi, Piero.
[Pane salvaggio. English]
Bread of dreams: food and fantasy in early modern Europe / Piero
Camporesi; translated by David Gentilcore.
cm.
p.
Translation of: Il pane selvaggio.
ISBN 0-226-09257-7 (alk. paper)
1. Poor—Europe—History. 2. Malnutrition—Europe—History
I. Title
HC240.9.P6C3513 1989 89-4689
5 —
305. '69'094 del9 CIP
Printed in Great Britain
98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
T
ypeset in 10 14 on 1 2 pt Baskerville
by Colset Pte Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by
T.J. Press (Padstow) Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
Preface by Roy Porter
1
Introduction 17
The ‘Disease of Wretchedness’ 26
1
2 Elusive Bread 35
3 Sacred and Profane Cannibalism 40
4 ‘They Set Out into the World of the Vagabond’ 56
Own
5 ‘They Rotted in Their Dung’ 63
6 The World Turned Upside Down 78
7 ‘Famine of Living’ and ‘Times of Suspicion’ 86
8 Night-time 92
9 Ritual Battles and Popular Frenzies 103
10 Medicina Pauperum 108
11 ‘Tightness of Purse’ 115
12 Collective Vertigo 120
13 Hyperbolic Dreams 131
14 Artificial Paradises 137
15 Poppyseed Bread 146
16 The ‘Fickle and Verminous Colony’ 151
17 Putrid Worms and Vile Snails 163
18 A City of Mummies 172
19 The Triumph of Poverty 178
Notes 185
Index 205
Digitized by the Internet Archive
2016
in
https://archive.org/details/breadofdreamsfooOOcamp
Preface
Roy
by Porter
Though extraordinarily prolific as a historian, Piero Camporesi remains
relatively little known to more general British readers, because his works
have, till now, hardly been translated from Italian. Confronting them
may, at first sight, present the Anglo-American reader with certain prob-
lems, because they deal with strange subjects in unusual ways (this is
what makes them so arrestingly important). It may be useful, therefore,
first of all in this Preface, to say a few words about the special nature of
Camporesi’s historical studies, explaining why they can seem so exotic.
Over the last generation, one of the most urgent and insistent calls
amongst historians has been the demand for history to become more
holistic, more ‘total’. Traditional scholarship, it has been complained
over and over again, was preoccupied with the doings of far too narrow a
section of society - those who governed, those who fought, those who
employed. Indeed, even with respect to members of the governing elite,
old-style history was interested in only a fragment of their activities
- their public lives as rulers, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, captains
of industry, priests and thinkers. Orthodox history gave us little of even
these people’s lives as a whole, and told us nothing at all about the great
majority.
In reaction, the study of peoples, societies and cultures has blossomed
over the last generation, most notably thanks to the stimulus given by the
Annales school. There is neither room nor need here to illustrate how
systematic research into parish registers, ecclesiastical records, legal
depositions, court reports, tax assessments and masses of comparable
documents has utterly transformed our knowledge of the lives of the
ordinary people of the past. We now have infinitely more reliable
accounts, from the grass roots, of the peasant family and the artisan
household, of the economy of the cottage and the smallholding, of the
1
PREFACE
traditional community in village or small town in pre-modern society
(‘the world we have lost’), and then of the dynamics of the encroachment
of industrial-capitalist relations over the last two or three centuries.
Demographers have revealed patterns of marriage and childbearing;
historical epidemiologists have studied morbidity, mortality and life
expectations.
And alongside such accounts of population movements, economic
realities, and material culture - the elementary structures of production
and reproduction - the popular mind has been seriously researched,
often for the first time. Replacing old vacuous generalizations, we now
possess fine analyses of popular religion (orthodox or heretical), moral
and sexual attitudes, traditional views on gender, social order and dis-
order, living and dying, and so forth.
All this is pure gain. Yet there are, arguably, dangers latent within
some of the interpretative approaches used to reconstruct the histories of
societies. For one thing, it is easy - especially thanks to the ready avail-
ability of sophisticated computer software - for quantitative history to
become separated from qualitative history and thereby to claim totemic
status as more ‘scientific’ and thus hegemonic. In the study of population
patterns or geo-social mobility, the risk is that we will end up with a
proliferation of histogram blocks or lines on graphs, without under-
standing what these mean in terms of myriad decisions taken by millions
of individual people - to marry or not, to breed or not, to move or not.
Data mean nothing unless they can be related to the attitudes and actions
which make these marks upon history.
How
But study of the mentalité of times past has its problems too. far,
and in what ways, must historians ‘make sense’ of beliefs and prac-
tices - magic perhaps - which do not, primafacie conform to our stand-
,
ards oflogic and normal behaviour? One widely followed approach lies in
the ‘functionalist’ assumption that the most bizarre-looking creeds and
customs have underlying rational purposes (e.g. creating a common
identity, maintaining social solidarity, upholding incest taboos, etc.).
Other schools of historians, by contrast, see the ‘rationality’ of former
belief-systems more in terms of the workings of hegemony. It may not be
rational for believers to believe what they do, but such (‘mystifying’)
belief-systems prove profoundly useful to the ruling groups who encour-
age and maintain them. The history of Christian millennialism, with
its
typical injunction to the faithful obediently to await the coming of
Christ’s Kingdom, may be viewed in this light, as indeed may Christian-
ity as a whole.
Interpretations such as these are useful and indeed necessary, if the
popular world-views of the past are not simply to resemble museums of
2