Learning (to) taste: food, aesthetics, and education in early modern France

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the intersection between taste and education in the early modern period. The first part investigates the close connection between the sense of taste and the sin of gluttony, highlighting taste’s close association with food disorders in the late Middle Ages and early modernity. Silencing taste was by then a key aspect of the education of the body, which needed to be learned from the earliest age, at home as well as at school. The second part charts the rise of a moderate and honest gourmandise from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, accompanied by the invention of the polite bon goût and later the aesthetic taste of beauty, which contributed to a new social valorization of taste, while also complicating contemporary practices of learning (to) taste. Using a wide variety of early modern printed sources, including conduct books, religious and moral treatises, books of emblems, and treatises on the senses and on taste in particular, as well as aesthetic works, this paper sheds light on the multiple ways in which taste – of the body as much as of the mind – was used, learned, and displayed, hence revealing a transformation of the experience and understanding of taste throughout the early modern period, as well as its impact on educational practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Taste
• early modern period
• history of the body
• education
• conduct books
• aesthetics
• sin of gluttony

Acknowledgments

I warmly thank Geert Thyssen for inviting me to join this exciting project on the senses and education, and for his dedicated and enthusiastic editorial work. I am particularly grateful for his and Ian Grosvenor’s helpful advice on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank David Howes, as well as the two anonymous reviewers appointed by the journal, for their insightful observations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On emblems, see the commented database and the sources digitized by the Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures at the University of Glasgow, online at http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/mlc/research/stirlingmaxwellcentre/.

2. “Temperance and Profligacy are therefore concerned with those pleasures which man shares with the lower animals, and which consequently appear slavish and bestial. These are the pleasures of touch and taste. But even taste appears to play but a small part, if any, in Temperance. For taste is concerned with discriminating flavours, as is done by wine-tasters, and cooks preparing savoury dishes; but it is not exactly the flavors that give pleasure, or at all events not to the profligate: it is actually enjoying the object that is pleasant, and this is done solely through the sense of touch, alike in eating and drinking and in what are called the pleasures of sex. This is why a certain gourmand [Philoxenus] wished that his throat might be longer than a crane’s, showing that his pleasure lay in the sensation of contact.” Aristotle 2014, 176–179 [III, 1118a].

3. For more details on the theoretical elaboration of the sin of gluttony, along with the vocabulary of food intemperance in the Middle Ages, see Montanari and Prosperi (2012).

4. Alciato (1549, 117). Trans. Alison Adams.

5. For more details on this series, see Von Hoffmann (2016a, 59–62). On the double sin of the tongue, see Casagrande and Vecchio (1991).

6. Literature on notions of civility and politeness in the early modern period includes Losfeld (2011); Viala (2008); Romagnoli ([1999] 2013); Bierlaire (1998); Bury (1996); Montandon (1995a, 1995b, 1994a, 1994b); France (1992); Marenco (1992); Chartier (1987, 45–86); Revel (1986, 167–208‬); Flandrin (1986); Bonnet (1977).‬‬‬‬‬

7. These rules, such as washing one’s hands, which would now be qualified as hygienic prescriptions, were then considered as gestures of civility towards others. Georges Vigarello (1985) has shown that the medical justifications for matters of propreté (cleanliness) relating to the hands, face, and clothing, would be justified by medical theories long after they had been introduced for reasons of decorum. Vigarello (1985).

8. For a broader discussion of philosophical and aesthetic disputations over taste, see Kivy (2015).

9. Furetière 1690, [fol. T2 v°], s.v. “Gourmandise”.

10. I have explored elsewhere the relationship between the tongue and the eye, vision and taste: Von Hoffmann (2016b).

11. Montandon, “Goût,” in Montandon (1995b, 441). There are numerous works on the figurative sense of taste, such as, for instance, Chantalat (1992) and Dens (1981). See also Howes and Lalonde (1991).

12. I have thoroughly detailed the interconnections between the taste of the body and the taste of the mind in my previous research. See Von Hoffmann (2016a), chapter 4 “From a Material to a Spiritual Taste,” 101–136; Von Hoffmann (2016c).

13. “The most essential point is to acquire a real discernment, and to give oneself a pure light. Nature prepares us to do so, while experience and the company of delicate people complete our training for this” (De Saint-Evremond 1684, 130).

14. These livres bleus (blue books), printed in small format, low-quality books with a blue paper covers, were a type of popular literature published in early-modern France (Chartier 1987, 61–70, Chartier 2002).

15. For a wider discussion of the development of the connoisseur, especially in connection to the development of consumer society, see Vercelloni (2016). Vercelloni notably suggests that modernity transformed former vices into new virtues, the vice of gluttony being subsumed into gastronomy and “the cult of the table, a consolatory rite, a worthy form of pleasure.” (Vercelloni 2016, 23).

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Notes on contributors

Viktoria von Hoffmann

Viktoria von Hoffmann is a Research Associate from the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS), affiliated to the University of Liège. Her research interests cover the social and cultural history of the lower senses (taste and touch) in early modern Europe. She has published widely on the history of taste, including two monographs on taste (Goûter le monde. Une histoire culturelle du goût à l’époque moderne, 2013, and From Gluttony to Enlightenment. The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe, 2016) and one co-edited volume on disgust (Le Dégoût, Histoire, langage, esthétique et politique d’une émotion plurielle, with M. Delville and A. Norris, 2015). She is now engaged in a new project that explores the history of touch through the lens of Italian Renaissance anatomy.

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