Bread of dreams : food and fantasy in early modern Europe
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Bread of dreams : food and fantasy in early modern Europe
University of Chicago Press, 1996
paperback ed
- Other Title
-
Pane selvaggio
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Translation of: Il pane selvaggio
Includes bibliographical references
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This study examines the imaginative world of poor and ordinary people in pre-industrial Europe, exploring their everyday preoccupations, fears and fantasies. Camporesi develops the claim that many people in early-modern Europe lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their hunger or by bread adulterated with hallucinogenic herbs. The use of opiate products, administered even to children and infants, was widespread and was linked to a popular mythology in which herbalists and exorcists were important cultural figures. Through a reconstruction of the everyday imaginative life of peasants, beggars and the poor, Camporesi presents a disconcerting image of early-modern Europe as a vast laboratory of dreams. This book provides an insight into the everyday life and attitudes of people in pre-industrial Europe.
Table of Contents
- The "miserable disease"
- the elusive bread
- sacred and profane cannibalism
- "...they set out into the world of the vagabond"
- "they rotted in their own manure"
- the world turned upside down
- the "famine of living" and the "time of suspicion"
- night-time
- ritual battles and popular frenzies
- medicina pauperum
- "tightness of purse"
- collective dizziness
- hyperbolic dreams
- artificial paradises
- poppyseed bread
- the "fickle and verminous colony"
- putrid worms and vile snails
- a city of mummies
- the triumph of poverty.
by "Nielsen BookData"