Food and Drink in Early Modern Ireland
- Open Access
Food and Drink in Early Modern Ireland
- Open Access
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Description
This open access book is the first major history of food in early modern Ireland, a country deeply affected by the traumas and transformations that swept Europe and the wider world in the 16th and 17th centuries. It draws on a diversity of literature and documentary evidence as well as the findings of cutting-edge archaeological research to challenge centuries-old stereotypes and long-held assumptions about diet, consumption and its meaning.
Food and Drink in Early Modern Ireland reveals that the basic question of what to eat and drink mattered more than ever in a country swept by war, colonization, and religious upheaval; the diet of Ireland's people took on a more profound and complex significance as a consequence. By analysing the way they baked their bread, reared animals for meat, swilled beer, smoked with friends, adhered to arduous fasts and gathered for indulgent feasts, Susan Flavin and Charlie Taverner show these routines and rituals became powerful markers of identity and difference, between rich and poor, civilized and barbaric, Protestant and Catholic, native and newcomer.
Flavin and Taverner reflect on how Ireland consumed the latest trends, fashions, and intellectual currents of the time, bound up in quickening networks of global trade. They convincingly contend that, far from being an isolated backwater on the fringe of Europe, Ireland experienced intensely the transformations that shook the Atlantic world in the 16th and 17th centuries. This history not only provides a new chapter in the story of food and drink, but also helps us understand what made this period so distinctive while breaking new ground in how we study consumption in the past.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Food histories of the early modern world
Writing Ireland's food history
Food, culture and identity
Chapter 1. Bread
Oatcakes and incivility
Wheaten bread: status and commensality
The ubiquity of bread?
Chapter 2. Vegetables and fruit
Lowly vegetables and unruly appetites
Beans, potatoes and the politics of provision
Mushrooms, herbs and moral tastes
Garden rarities and the aesthetics of eating
Chapter 3: Meat
Meat, civility, and the colonial imagination
Pork and poverty, beef and belonging
Carnivorous Ireland
Chapter 4: Dairy
Gastro-politics and the Irish dairy
Practice, provision, and social context
Dairy's changing world: fashionable farming and emerging trade
Chapter 5: Fish, Fowl and Game
Fish, abstinence and the religious calendar
Banquets, birds and social distinction
Gifting and game: ritual, honour and exchange
Chapter 6: Ale and Beer
Brewers, malt and regional difference
Liquid bread: beer, health, and sustenance
Drinking rites, sociability and conflict
Thresholds of excess
Chapter 7: Tobacco
Tobacco, trade, and habituation
Caricatures of tobacco culture
The social life of smoke
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 26 Nov 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 9781350510661 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 28 bw illus |
| Dimensions | 234 x 156 mm |
| Series | Cultures of Early Modern Europe |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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