From the outset, food and the essay have shared a kinship, given that one of the original senses of the word ‘essai’ meant the ritual of tasting the French king’s food and drink. From metaphor to content, food has permeated the essay form; in turn, the essay became the vehicle for the emerging field of gastronomy. This chapter constellates several important moments of interaction between literal and literary taste, consumption and appetite, cultural criticism and culinary knowledge in essays by Michel Montaigne, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, William Kitchiner, Launcelot Sturgeon, Charles Lamb, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell. As cosmopolitan practices of discretionary dining became more widespread, these gastronomic essayistic writers often satirised the burgeoning bourgeoisie and their cultural milieu. Given its flexibility, the essay remains paramount to food writing, in its many forms and genres.

Sociopragmatics typically refers to sociocultural parameters of the communicative use of language (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983). This concept has long been taken up in the area of applied linguistics (Kaspar & Rose 2002) and historical pragmatics (Jucker 2006; Culpeper 2009). Context per se is difficult to pin down and, therefore, its association with language in a principled manner is a challenging task. In view of the above, and within a Construction Grammar framework (Fried and Östman 2004), this chapter aims to show that the object of sociopragmatic analysis can in fact be viewed as the domain of socioculturally defined genres that are often associated with particular (genre) constructions reflecting a speaker’s knowledge of the language (Nikiforidou 2016). The question to be addressed in this view is to what extent speakers’ understanding of context is systematic, conventional, and, hence, an inherent part of grammar and the description of language. The data to be discussed include recipes, labels, couple talk, stage directions, and TV talk. It will be argued that sociopragmatic context, typically encoded at the meso-level of genre, can be accounted for as a set of specifications that are routinely incorporated in the description of a language’s grammatical constructions.

This chapter introduces the contents of this volume and provides a critical overview of medieval pharmacology with a focus on the Mediterranean from the ninth/tenth century to the fifteenth. It emphasises the importance of drawing evidence from various cultures (Byzantine, Islamicate, Jewish, Latin) and disciplines (history, art history, manuscript studies, and archaeology) in order to discuss topics of broader significance for the global Middle Ages, such as the transfer of medical and pharmacological knowledge. It also shows how our understanding of medieval pharmacology can be significantly expanded by the study of evidence from other areas, such as alchemy, cooking, diplomacy, magic, religion, and philosophy.

Starting with the early Middle Ages and offering a broad survey through to the start of the early modern period, this essay examines a range of charms, incantations, prayers, talismans, amulets, recipes, and remedies. Many of these were certainly used for women and sometimes by women, such as charms on birthing scrolls or girdles. The analysis reveals the unexpectedly wide range of areas of expertise ascribed to medieval women, as is illustrated by Christine de Pizanߣs writings on warcraft and chivalry, and the guide to hunting, hawking and heraldry attributed to Dame Juliana Berners (The Book of St Albans). Finally, the essay looks at the extremely varied and encyclopaedic advice available to women found in the compendium known as The Kalender of Shepherds (c. 1490), an important source of folk belief, demonstrating the diversity of medieval womenߣs lore.

The potato has nourished ordinary people in the Americas for millennia. Villagers along the Andes grew a great variety of potatoes, which were used in diverse ways to provide year-round nourishment. The Europeans who reached South America’s Pacific coast in the 1530s introduced potatoes to Europe, thereby initiating its global spread. Once in Europe, the potato attracted little attention from representatives of the state. Uninterested as they were in the everyday eating habits of European labourers, few learned writers assessed the novel plant’s potential as a foodstuff for Europeans. Those who did complained that the potato was excessively nourishing and so facilitated laziness. Ordinary people, in contrast, embraced the potato, which possessed a number of advantages over existing foodstuffs. Potatoes can produce a prolific harvest even in poor soil, and make a sustaining meal. Moreover, precisely because states were not interested in the everyday eating habits of poorer folk, it took many decades for the potato to attract the attention of tax-collectors. Potatoes thus allowed peasants and labourers to evade some of the less welcome aspects of state control. It is they who are responsible for the potato’s entry into the European diet.