This chapter revisits Carl Schmitt’s argument about constitutional identity. By excavating Schmitt’s material conception of constitutional law, I chart the path of affective constitutionalism in the interwar period of the twentieth century. To facilitate the task of relating mind to matter, I bring to bear insights from Raymond Williams, the literary theorist, and develop an argument about constitutions as ’structures of feeling’. By making this approach to materiality usable for thinking about the affective life of constitutions, I hope to bring phenomenology – the philosophy of experience – to the study of constitutional law.

This chapter surveys food and food practices in a variety of medieval texts, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Havelok, and the mystic visions of Julian of Norwich, as well as recent scholarship in the field of medieval food studies. It argues that literary depictions of medieval eating, feasting, and mealtime decorum offer us crucial, if often overlooked, commentaries on political power and social pretensions as well as religious practice and hypocrisy, while also revealing key aspects of medieval food culture otherwise glossed over or omitted in culinary texts from the time, including the centrality of meat carving and the multi-sensory scale of medieval banquets.