"You Like Pepper" : Spices To Western Europe In The 14th - 16th Century Social Life

The spice trade is a traditional topic of the European medieval history in the international academia. There also occurred in recent years some monographs and articles on the spice consumption during this period. But no one has yet studied the relationship between the spice and social life of medieval Western Europe at home. Therefore, this dissertation intends to explore this relationship from the14th to the16th century by studying the way of Western Europeans obtaining spices—the spice trade, the application of spices in their society, the spice concept and many other aspects. We will comprehend issues about the Western European spice in the extensive context of Eurasia, and learn from and use the research methods of historical anthropology and the theories of cross-cultural imagologie.The full text includes introduction, body, conclusion, etc.In the introduction we will describe the reason for selection of and the significance of the research subject in the present dissertation, review the previous studies on this issue of academia, define the related nomenclatures and the scope of study, and show our research ideas and methods.The body part is divided into four chapters. Chapter1deals with the obtainment of spices, mainly by spice trade, in Western Europe from the14th to the15th century. We first review briefly the Eurasian spice trades before the14th century, and then focus our study on the Western European spice trade in the14-15th century, including trade routes, trade scale, trade profits and so on. The Muslim and Venice traders stood out among the main participants in the spice trade. We finally discuss the spice retail and its price, less involved in previous studies.Chapter2, where we study spice concepts of Western European society before the16th century, is divided into five sub-topics:the spice symbolized wealth and status, sacred significance of the spice, the spice and European oriental imagination, the appetitive and erotic association with the spice, and moral disputes caused by the spice consumption. In Section1we elucidate the very notion that "the spice is a symbol of the noble", and discuss the vicissitudes of the spice under the popular trend of spice consumption in the15th century. In Section2we discuss the close connection between spice and the Christian faith:both the God and saints carried fragrance, the imagined paradise was full of fragrance, and earthly spices also came from the Garden of Eden. Section3centers the discussion on two important characteristics of the Western European conception of the Orient, that is, the Orient is a piece of land where weirdness and fertileness coexisted. As described in Section4, the spice was one of the indispensable delicacies in the gourmand’s "Cockayne" and it was tinged with eroticism from the ancient times. The end of this chapter deals with the controversy triggered in both religious and secular circles.Chapter3discusses the application of spices in the Western European social life in the14-16th century. The first three sections discuss the application of spices in a narrow sense, namely, functions determined by the physical characteristics of spices:used as condiments, health products, medicines, incenses in religious ceremonies and preservatives for corpses. Finally, we study the role of spices in the economic activity and social life, to wit used as money and precious gifts and taking an important part in the upper-class banquets. The function of spices was closely related with the spice concepts of Western Europeans. The applications of spices were both the soil out of which the spice concepts grew and the concrete practices of spice concepts in real life.In Chapter4we investigate the opening up of new sea routes and the ending of Western European spice era. There is a dialectical relationship between the spice and the opening up of new sea routes:the spice promoted the opening up of new sea routes, caused transmutation of the way that Western Europeans got spices, but resulted ultimately in the decline of the spice trade and the devaluation of the spice in people’s conception and even the Orientalization, and led to the end of an era of the spice. The three sections in this chapter discuss successively the promotional function that the spice performed in the opening up of new routes, the Western European spice trades in the16th century and the ending of the spice era.The concluding part epitomizes the whole dissertation, reviews and summarizes the effect of the spice input on the social life and ideas of Western Europeans, and on this basis we comment on the impact of the spice on the history of Western Europe and of the world.In short, the relationship between the spice and Western European social life is an interaction. The spice input had made a far-reaching influence on the social life in Western Europe; moreover, it was the demand of Western Europe for spices that boosted the opening up of new sea routes and the European overseas expansion, which in turn accelerated the end of the spice era.