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
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.
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