"Rode Loathsome Gluttony"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 352, 22 March 1946, Page 12

"Rode Loathsome Gluttony"

"Poop in Mediaeval and Tudor England" was the title of a recent A.C.E. talk from 3YA. I did not hear all of this talk, but have to assume that it dealt chiefly with general differences of diet and cookery-peacocks and por--poises and boars" heads and the like. A curious point, not touched on, in the history of food, is the intense moral condemnation pronounced by mediaeval ethics of the vice of gluttony. It was

one of the Seven, Deadly Sins; Dante allotted a special corner of the Inferno to its practitioners; Spenser has a parade of the Vices in which Gluttony is depicted with especial vigour ("His belly was outblown with luxury and eke with fatness swollen were his eyne, and like a crane his neck was long and fine"); and a usually detached fifteenth-century historian says of an immoral potentate, "never was any prince more bloody, wicked, ignorant, lascivious or gluttonous than he," and he is not listing the vices in descending order. And we hear of feats of gluttony correspondingly stupendous; the Emperor Charles V may be said to have gorged himself to death, over a period of years. The Renaissance and Henry VIII’s Reformation saw the last stage in the history of aristocratic ventripotence in the great entertainments of the Elizabethan nobles. After that came Puritanism and a commercial England which ate vastly but with less ostentation, and we hear of fewer cases in which food, became literally an obsession. In the eighteenth century, denunciation of gluttony is almost unknown; yet it was an age of heavy feeders and for some perhaps dietary reason, one of greater average fatness-to judge from contemporary art. The probable explanation is that mediaeval official morals were dominated by a definite religion rather than generally accepted conventions, and in that religion asceticism had a definite place.