Finding a place at the table: Food and class in early modern England

This dissertation draws attention to the previously understudied relationship between food and class---consciousness, identity, social relations---in early modern English literature. Because of the ways in which food is material object and means for performative display, reward for work and instrument for advancement, bodily necessity as well as expression of taste and aesthetics, icon of both the domestic sphere and the marketplace it is also a key element for engaging an early modern discourse about class identity. Class identities are negotiated and class relations established through the culinary. Class anxieties and aspirations are often expressed in alimentary terms. Class conflict is a matter of comestibles, and resolution, or at least acceptance and compliance, is achieved at the table.;With no section of society is this truer than with the ambiguous "middle" between aristocrats, nobles, and titled persons on the one end and "the poor" on the other. My goals are to make clear the ubiquity and centrality of food in genres most associated with the contested "middling sort," to better understand the complexity of this pervasive and difficult-to-define middle, and to uncover the interdependency between the transformation, change, and disorder in the world of food and that of class. Reading the countless instances of hospitality, dining rituals, public entertainments, food riots, banquets, dinners, and feasts we learn that so much of the middling identity was devoted to finding a place at the early modern table.