Buckwheat Porridge, Three Miles Thick
Paul Strohm, 21 June 2001
Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life
by Herman Pleij, translated by Diane Webb.
Columbia, 544 pp., £23.50, June 2001,0 231 11702 7 Show More
by Herman Pleij, translated by Diane Webb.
Columbia, 544 pp., £23.50, June 2001,
“... Little exaggeration is required to describe this as a bulimic society, one bent on extremes of self-abnegation and indulgence, which allowed scant opportunity for a dispassionate attitude towards food. Medieval people don’t seem to have behaved as rationally as Parzifal did and the absence of any judicious decision-making about food consumption raises a ... ”