The Power of Peasant Consumers from Part I - Material Culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 November 2025
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the specificities of ‘peasant manners’, defining how peasants ate and drank and the objects involved with doing so. Once food was cooked it was ready to be served, and this required the usage of table service items. Most of these are not conceptually different from modern ones: medieval society needed plates, glasses, cutlery, and jugs, and peasants were not different in that sense. Yet the abundance of these various objects and how they were used was particular to that epoch. These practices for serving food must be established to fully understand how changes in consumption took place within a culturally defined, specific system of customs. This chapter argues that eating and drinking practices generated a set of utensils not only concerned with subsistence, but often with comfort and decorum.
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