Sykes examines chronological trends, focusing on the reconstructed demography of herds, and moves on to consider social variation between rural, urban, and aristocratic sites, clearly linking livestock management and processing with contemporary socio-political structures. Her survey spans the full length of the middle ages-from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries-and presents a coherent integration of zooarchaeological and documentary data. Naomi Sykes introduces the role of animal products in medieval diets with an ambitious synthesis of the management, distribution, and consumption of cattle and sheep in medieval England. Her archaeobotanical synthesis draws attention to the value of integrating different types of data, highlighting various patterns of plant consumption, particularly in urban contexts. Lisa Moffett concludes the survey of plant contributions to medieval English diets with a comprehensive look at plant remains in archaeological contexts, neatly complementing the predominantly documentary-based perspectives of the earlier chapters. Vegetables, grown more intensively in towns than in the countryside, appear to have provided a higher proportion of food for the lowest levels of medieval society. As with Stone’s examination of socially distinct uses of grain, Dyer clearly demonstrates how garden produce varied between rich and poor, and how this pattern changed over time. 33), typically neglected by scholars, outlining the scale of gardening, the diversity and distribution of garden produce, and its relative significance. He explores the dietary contribution of ‘an integral part of the English economy in the later middle ages’ (p. From the overarching role of agriculture in medieval English dietary regimes, Christopher Dyer’s chapter moves the survey towards a consideration of the role of garden produce based on abundant and diverse late-medieval documentary sources, as well as by reference to earthworks and archaeological excavations. An impressive series of estimates of bread and ale production and consumption punctuate a concise analysis of dynamic patterns on either side of the Black Death, demonstrating how changing pressure on agricultural resources prompted shifts in consumption at every level of society. Stone considers its complete lifecycle, from the management of the full range of field crops to the production of pottage, bread, and ale. The survey begins with a paper by David Stone exploring the most important foodstuff in medieval England-grain-which represented the highest contributor to people’s general calorific intake. The content is sub-divided into two sections: part one is a survey of foodstuffs and part two consists of case studies in diet and nutrition. Framed by critical introductory and concluding chapters, seventeen papers draw on written, archaeological, and artistic sources to explore diverse aspects of medieval English food culture with reference to continental examples where appropriate. This book, the culmination of a series of annual meetings held by the Diet Group at Somerville College, Oxford, is a novel and bold ‘reappraisal’ of multiple aspects of food culture across the entire span of the middle ages. The study of medieval food culture is certainly one that is actively pursued across many European institutions, but, as the editors eloquently demonstrate, scholarly syntheses remain limited in both their number and scope. As the editors Christopher Woolgar, Dale Serjeantson, and Tony Waldron underline on the first page of the introduction to this book, ‘food and diet are rightly popular areas of research, central to understanding daily life in the middle ages’.
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