Kelli C. Rudolph - Taste and the Ancient Senses

Taste and the Ancient Senses

Olives, bread, meat and wine: it is deceptively easy to evoke ancient Greece and Rome through a few items of food and drink. But how were their tastes different from ours? How did they understand the sense of taste itself, in relation to their own bodies and to other modes of sensory experience? This volume, the first of its kind to explore the ancient sense of taste, draws on the literature, philosophy, history and archaeology of Greco-Roman antiquity to provide answers to these central questions.

By surveying and probing the literary and material remains from the Archaic period to late antiquity, contributors investigate the cultural and intellectual development of attitudes towards and theories about taste. These specially commissioned chapters also open a window onto ancient thinking about perception and the body. Importantly, these authors go beyond exploring the functional significance of taste to uncover its value and meaning in the actions, thoughts and words of the Greeks and Romans. Taste and the Ancient Senses presents a full range of interpretative approaches to the gustatory sense, and is an indispensable resource for students and scholars of classical antiquity and sensory studies.

Kelli C. Rudolph is Lecturer in Classics and Philosophy at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She has research interests in ancient perceptual theories and the relationship between Presocratic and Hellenistic philosophy, and is currently working on theoretical approaches to the senses in antiquity.

THE SENSES IN ANTIQUITY

Series editors: Mark Bradley, University of Nottingham, and Shane Butler, Johns Hopkins University

Like us, ancient Greeks and Romans came to know and understand their world through their senses. Yet it has long been recognized that the world the ancients perceived, and the senses through which they channelled this information could operate differently from the patterns and processes of perception in the modern world. This series explores the relationship between perception, knowledge and understanding in the literature, philosophy, history, language and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.

Published

SYNESTHESIA AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Shane Butler and Alex Purves

SMELL AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Mark Bradley

SIGHT AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Michael Squire

Forthcoming

TOUCH AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Alex Purves

SOUND AND THE ANCIENT SENSES

Edited by Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter

Taste and the Ancient Senses

Edited by Kelli C. Rudolph

For Dorothy Howard

Who taught me about good taste

and

For Celandine Isla,

My own sweet one

Contents

Kelli C. Rudolph

Sarah Hitch

Kelli C. Rudolph

Laurence B. Totelin

Mario Tel

Emily Gowers

Meredith J. C. Warren

Laura M. Banducci

Patricia Baker

Michael MacKinnon

Alexandra Livarda

Thibaut Boulay

John Paulas

Batrice Caseau

Patricia Baker is Senior Lecturer in Classical and Archaeological Studies at the University of Kent, UK. Her main interest is in the archaeology of ancient medicine. She is the author of The Archaeology of Medicine in the Greco-Roman World (2013) and has co-edited Medicine and Space: Body, Surroundings and Borders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (2012).

Laura M. Banducci is Assistant Professor of Greek and Roman Studies at Carleton University and a Research Associate in the Archaeology Centre at the University of Toronto, both in Canada. Her research is in the archaeology of pre-Roman and Roman Italy, particularly focusing on artefact analysis.

Thibaut Boulay is Associate Professor in Ancient History at Franois-Rabelais University, France, and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He works on viti- and vinicultural techniques, the economic history of vineyards and sensorial and cultural approaches to wine consumption from antiquity. He is the author of Ars dans la cite: Les poleis et la guerre dans lAsie Mineure hellnistique (2014) and co-author of Chalktr en Carie (2014).

Batrice Caseau is Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France, and director of the research cluster LABEX Religions and Society in the Mediterranean. She is also a member of the Orient & Mditerrane research centre. She has published books on Byzantine food culture (2015), on Eucharistic practices (2009), on family networks (2012) and inheritance (2014). She is working on the history of the senses and on religious perfumes.

Emily Gowers is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge, UK and Fellow of St Johns College. She is author of The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (1993) and Horace: Satires Book I (2012). She is co-editor of Ennius Perennis: The Annals and Beyond (2007). She is working on a book about Maecenas in Latin literature and later Western culture.