“When cheifest Rebell feede”: food, fosterage and fear in early modern Ireland

ABSTRACT

As English forces struggled to bring Ireland under Crown control during the early modern period, all aspects of Irish culture and identity were seen as potentially subversive. Irish culture posed a threat to both the regime, and to the very identity and sanctity of English bodies in a foreign and hostile land. This paper will examine the role that food played in the political discourse of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland. It will investigate how aspects of food, from infant feeding, to diet, dairying and cookery became a cause of concern for English colonial commentators. It will show how descriptions of foodways were used to cast the Irish as “savages,” but importantly, how they were also used to illustrate the “degeneration” of the Old English. Through the discussion of food commentators warned newcomers not to follow the fate of their predecessors; their bodies were not impenetrable, and through culinary contact, they too could be “undone.”

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• foodways
• early modern Ireland
• colonization
• fosterage

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Australian Research Council [Associate Investigator].