Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 1 (2021), p. 161

Food, religion and communities in early modern Europe traces some of the many cultural resonances of food though the varied, and often tumultuous, landscape of early modern religion. Christopher Kissane encourages his readers to think ‘through’ food, rather than ‘about’ food, arguing that by using food as a ‘prism’ of study it is possible to illuminate wider historical processes. The book is structured around three such historical processes and the role that food played in their development: Inquisition, Reformation, and witch-hunting. The book takes the reader on a journey from late medieval Castile, where religious tension was rife, to sixteenth-century Reformation Switzerland, where food became part-and-parcel of religious debates, concluding in early modern Shetland, where food was considered key to the practice of witchcraft.

Part 1 of the book focuses on the role of food in late medieval Inquisition trials in Castile. Kissane demonstrates that dietary habits and food choices were used time and again as evidence of religious non-conformity. As Kissane puts it, whilst Inquisitors and accusers were unable to look into their neighbour’s souls, they could instead focus on differences that might point towards ‘crypto-Judaism’ or insincere conversion to Christianity. Dietary habits were one such easily noticed difference. Abstaining from certain foods, most notably pork, cooking with ingredients associated with ‘deviant’ religious cultures, such as olive oil and aubergines, preparing foods in certain ways, such as baking unleavened bread, and organizing kitchens around non-Christian principles, for example by separating certain ingredients, were all deployed by accusers as evidence of potential heresy. Eating and preparing food could therefore be a perilous business, communicating religious identity and revealing to onlookers what an individual believed and potentially what their true faith and religious convictions were.

Part 2 of the book moves the analysis away from accusatory neighbours and ‘heretical’ women, to focus on the significance of food in debates over religious reformation in sixteenth-century Switzerland. Homing in on the hotly contested issue of fast-breaking, Kissane argues that the Reformation was not solely a theological movement, but also a process that incorporated lived religious experience. In many ways, it was food that united the everyday experience of the Reformation with the theological debates that underpinned it. As Kissane demonstrates, the system of fasting, alongside contemporary representations of the foods associated with it such as meat and dairy, was a microcosm of how the Catholic Church functioned and a distillation of reformers’ arguments against it: fasting had no basis in Scripture, it oppressed the poor and needy by forcing them to change their eating habits, and it emphasized the fact that the Church was run by greedy clerics who did not follow their own rules. The issue of fast-breaking, then, demonstrates clearly the role played by food in debates surrounding religious reformation.

The final section of the book examines the ways in which food was seen to be integral to the operation of witchcraft in early modern Shetland. As Kissane argues, witchcraft was believed to be at work in the production, preparation, and consumption of food. The theft of milk, the destruction of crops, and the consumption of inappropriate foods were all hallmarks of the witch’s craft. Those accused of witchcraft became scapegoats for a range of problems associated with food, whether that be the constant threat of harvest failure, the very real experience of dearth and hunger, or the unpredictable nature of food production techniques such as dairying. As well as elucidating legitimate concerns surrounding food supply, the connection between witchcraft and food also reflected commonly held beliefs about what constituted nourishing and religiously appropriate foods. Whilst Christian feasts were centred on purifying and religiously significant foods such as bread, ‘sabbath’ meals left the eater unsatiated and encouraged them to consume foods that were foul and often highly unappetising. These beliefs speak to the kinds of fears that propelled witchcraft accusations, demonstrating that they were embedded in the environmental difficulties of the period and in wider cultural assumptions about what constituted an appropriate diet.

Kissane’s book is richly researched, forcefully argued, and provides ample ‘food for thought’. There are, however, a few issues I would have been curious to read more about. At several points in the book Kissane describes late medieval and early modern religious identities as ‘embodied’. I would have been interested in reading more about the embodied aspects of religious identities and how these beliefs may have conditioned how people of various religious persuasions engaged with certain foods. Was there a fear, for example, that eating foods associated with other religions had the potential to irrevocably alter a person’s bodily physiology and in turn undermine their piety? May this partly explain why suspected Jews and Muslims may have run the risk of continuing to eat religiously significant foods despite the dangers involved? Connected to this, I was also intrigued by an assortment of examples where health concerns were given as the reason for either abstaining from certain suspect foods, or partaking in them. Was Luis Hurtado successful in convincing the Inquisition that he had only committed the sin of eating meat during Lent because he had been sick with syphilis? Likewise, would Pedro de Villareal’s claim that he only abstained from bacon as it exacerbated his gout have fallen on deaf ears? These questions are not meant to detract from the strength of Kissane’s analysis, but to offer suggestions of how this rich and complex topic can be explored further, particularly in relation to how medical understandings of food interacted with, and perhaps challenged, religious perceptions of diet.

The book is beautifully written and represents a welcome, and highly accessible, addition to the field of early modern food studies. The central message I am left with from Kissane’s book is that food and its various cultural meanings, in times past (and perhaps present?), is both unifying and divisive. Food was used to define ‘deviant’ and ‘normative’ behaviour, and employed as a tool to construct theories of the ‘self’ and of the ‘other’. The study of food, then, as Kissane shows, is critical to understanding human behaviour, relationships, and connections to the material world.