9780224061384

Feast

Format: Hardcover

ISBN13: 9780224061384

Hardcover|9780224061384


Overview

Toenails cut while dining, meals served to wax effigies of the dead, napkins concealing singing birds - these are just a few of the more exotic aspects of everyman at the table. From the stupendous banquets of the Ancient Babylonians, Feast covers five millennia of formal eating. Sharing a meal, in particular a grand one, has always been a complex social mechanism for uniting and dividing people. Such an event could signal peace, a marriage, a victory, a coronation or a funeral, to name but a few. The feast was a vehicle for display and ostentation, for flattering and influencing people as well as providing a theatre in which to exercise the art of conversation and the display of manners. Feast offers a fascinating and, at times, a highly unusual mirror of society as it evolves. It gathers together for the first time all the threads which contributed to the phenomenon of the celebratory meal: the people, the clothes, the food, the setting, the action and its surrounding circumstances, for in the consumption of food can be found the origins of every kind of theatre. Taking the reader from the elegancies of the Roman villa to the austerities of the monastic refectory, from the splend

ISBN-13

9780224061384

ISBN-10

0224061380

List Price

$25.91

Format

Hardcover

Pages

400 pages

Publisher

Jonathan Cape

Published On

2002-10-31



View All Offers

Sort by:

Condition
Seller
Seller Comments
Price

Bookstores.com relies on cookies to improve your experience.