Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500-1760

What did ordinary people eat and drink five hundred years ago? How much did they talk about food? Did their eating habits change much? Our knowledge is mostly superficial on such commonplace routines, but this book digs deep and finds surprising answers to these questions. We learn that food fads and fashions resembled those of our own day. Commercial, scientific and intellectual movements were closely entwined with changing attitudes and dealings about food. In short, food holds a mirror to a lively world of cultural change stretching from the Renaissance to the industrial Revolution. This book also strongly challenges the assumption that ordinary folk ate dull and monotonous meals.

Joan Thirsk is the UK’s leading historian of agriculture. She is the author of Alternative Agriculture: A History.