Textual tastes: The invention of culinary literature in early modern France

This thesis engages the language and literature of early modern French cuisine. It analyzes a wide range of culinary discourses as they appear in literature as well as in practical manuals (cookbooks, dietetic treatises, natural histories). Given the permeable boundaries between these genres, it determines how culinary literature negotiates emergent tensions between exceptional festive moments and everyday alimentary practices, between the pleasures of the table and the prescriptions of medical doctrine.;Culinary tastes and practices are transformed during the sixteenth century. The changes that lead to this transformation have scarcely been examined. Wedged between a rehabilitated history of medieval cuisine and the classical origins of haute cuisine, the culinary history of sixteenth-century France has been routinely overlooked for reason of the persistent culinary myth that sixteenth-century cookbooks were mere reprints of medieval texts or continuations of medieval style and taste. This thesis demonstrates rather that culinary discourses proliferate and indeed innovate via the printed book in sixteenth century France.;The analysis is framed by Nicolas de La Chesnaye's La Condamnation de Banquet (1507) and Rabelais's Quart livre (1548, 1552). These texts stake out two crucial moments around which other culinary discourses are set in dialogue. Via the allegorical figure of Banquet, La Chesnaye's morality play stages the tension between dietetics and the table, a tension reflected in early modern dietetic treatises and cookbooks. Rabelais mixes satire and culinary encyclopedia in long lists of meals that rival contemporary cookbooks and natural histories.;When read in the context of contemporary culinary literature, these two works demonstrate that the intellectual pleasures of reading food are inseparable from the physical pleasures of ingesting food insofar as it is given to be felt and thought. The thesis thus demonstrates how culinary literature fashions culinary imaginations. Imagined culinary realities in turn actively participate in complex negotiations of taste. The study of culinary literature thus reveals unforeseen patterns in the structure of the sixteenth-century French world. In so doing, it engages a new appreciation for the practical texts that shape, and are shaped by, this world.