Fears do not simply reflect the reality of the underlying dangers. Fear is itself created by society’s debates about what count as risks and how these should be managed. Beck has argued that modernity’s uncertainties have arisen from technological developments themselves, in that these have generated self-destructive threats that they are incapable of controlling. This chapter argues that Rome’s social structure generated its own specific set of anxieties. Just as technology has today created anxieties about the downside of that innovation, in Rome, empire generated a set of fears concerning its perceived negative side-effects. These were focused on moral issues, and their anxieties were expressed in areas where they had their own expertise, in particular the law and rhetoric. Their fears were also often constructed in a backward-looking way, seeking to reduce future risk by returning to the traditions of the past.

What we eat is our business, or so we generally believe. We also acknowledge that our individual failures to eat properly have a broader social impact, even if we’re not sure what to do about it. These tensions between individual choice, public well-being, and the wealth and strength of the nation were born in the Enlightenment. While states have always worried about the political implications of famine, only in the eighteenth century did the particularities of what ordinary people ate attract the attention of political theorists: it was in the eighteenth century that everyday eating habits became a matter of state concern. New theories about how to build economically successful states led to new ideas about the relationship between individual diets and national resilience—what we might call food security. Concerned to build healthy populations, eighteenth-century political and economic writers increasingly recommended potatoes as an ideal foodstuff. Potatoes had reached Europe in the sixteenth century, when Spanish colonists introduced this Andean tuber. In the Americas the potato has nourished ordinary people for millennia, and it was ordinary people in Europe and elsewhere who were largely responsible for transforming the potato into the global status that it has today.

Ineffective 1363 English sumptuary laws inform comprehension of Geoffrey Chaucer’s costume rhetoric employed throughout his works. These laws, in effect for less than a year, proposed and set standards for socially and economically suitable garments for each social group.Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale portrays a miller’s family, social climbers, who exploit these standards; his General Prologue’s Physician sartorially advertises his prosperous practice; and a stylish Merchant, ‘Flaundryssh’-hatted, proclaims his apparent affluence. Chaucer’s rhetorical expression of contemporary social and moral attitudes and practices illuminate his texts. Items VIII-XIV of these laws list society’s levels and prescribe suitable fabrics, embellishments, and prices for each. Chaucer’s Alison of his Miller’s Tale dresses transgressively when judged by these standards, while Chaucer’s nobles, generally, do not. He realistically portrays his religious figures and the poor. Finally, Chaucer summarises contemporary sartorial sins in his Parson’s Tale.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.