Great read | Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination

book: Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination | Paul Freedman

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	• Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination Paul Freedman Yale University Press, 2008 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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New Perspectives

Professor Freedman examines Medieval Europe and its metamorphosis into Modern Europe from the perspective of spices...as condiments, as medicine, as perfumes, and as stimulants to world exploration. This fascinating book provides some novel historical perspectives - Genghis Khan as a facilitator of European travel to East Asia, for example. Its description of medieval cuisine will surprise most readers by how very unfamiliar medieval taste would be to contemporary Europeans. This is a very enjoyable read. I recommend it highly.

Great read

This is a learned book, and a pleasure to read. Freedman succeeds admirably in describing and explaining Medieval Europe's passion for spices. But the most interesting part of the book is his analysis of Europe's voyages all over the world to obtain spices for domestic consumption. It's an ambitious project, and he pulls it off in a style that is lucid and also fun.

I also very much enjoyed another book on food that Freedman recently edited, "Food: The History of Taste" (University of California Press, 2007). The essays in the book are consistently insightful and entertaining. Here's to more academic work on the history of food!

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The demand for spices in medieval Europe was extravagant and was reflected in the pursuit of fashion, the formation of taste, and the growth of luxury trade. It inspired geographical and commercial exploration ,as traders pursued such common spices as pepper and cinnamon and rarer aromatic products, including ambergris and musk. Ultimately, the spice quest led to imperial missions that were to change world history.

This engaging book explores the demand for spices: why were they so popular, and why so expensive? Paul Freedman surveys the history, geography, economics, and culinary tastes of the Middle Ages to uncover the surprisingly varied ways that spices were put to use--in elaborate medieval cuisine, in the treatment of disease, for the promotion of well-being, and to perfume important ceremonies of the Church. Spices became symbols of beauty, affluence, taste, and grace, Freedman shows, and their expense and fragrance drove the engines of commerce and conquest at the dawn of the modern era.

(20080301)

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