Over the last thirty years, the study of food, eating, and food culture in early modern Italy has become an exciting and significant new item on the scholarly agenda of historians, art historians, and literary critics. A summary of the evolution of this vast and rapidly changing field – which began in the 1960s and 1970s as a fairly traditional history of food and agriculture but is continuously emerging as a much more wide-ranging and inclusive material and cultural history – is beyond the scope of either this book or its brief introduction. What I offer here instead is a brief account of the paths that led me, in the course of a career spent reading Italian Renaissance literature, to write about the Renaissance of taste as it appears in the literary imagination of sixteenth-century Italian authors.

My interest in this topic emerged from an intensive and extensive, if not nearly exhaustive, reading of Italian Renaissance comedies – both the well-known and the virtually unknown – undertaken as research for my first book, Lelia's Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex, and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy. Many of these comedies present a scene in which, around tables set for dinner, parasites, servants, lower-class characters, and old men in love discuss the properties and attractiveness of certain foods or dream of enjoying feasts of impressive abundance.