ABSTRACT
The pilgrims and partridges in this chapter’s title signify opposites: the pilgrim as a religiously motivated traveller might be expected to be a man or woman with moderate habits, whilst the partridge suggests the kind of plenty ordinarily enjoyed by the nobility. Yet the medieval literary texts here considered – William Langland’s Piers Plowman; the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; and The Book of Margery Kempe – reveal the manner in which such simple, dichotomizing categories slip: the man and woman who proclaim their godliness do not always behave as they ought when it comes to appetite and providing sustenance to others, and whilst the nobleman often demonstrates real hospitality his behaviour too is sometimes less than straightforward. It is not clear exactly when Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or The Canterbury Tales were written but all are late-fourteenth-century poems, and what emerges in these texts and in The Book of Margery Kempe also is a concern with religious authority and social rank, with these related concepts often explored via references to food. Across the texts a number of themes occur: gluttony; hunger; hunting; feasting; the motif of the apple, and even cannibalism. The contextual material that helps us make sense of the religiously inflected food references in these texts are: the Bible, often books from the Old Testament; the Rule of St Benedict, a list of precepts probably written early in the sixth century by Benedict for those living in monastic communities (Benedict 1952); and The Golden Legend, a collection of hagiographies compiled around the year 1260 by Jacobus De Voraigne (2012). Other contextual material includes cookery books, amongst them The Forme of Cury, a collection of fourteenth-century recipes reputedly gathered by the cooks of King Richard II. Rules for ecclesiastics were provided by Benedict and other rules applied to other social groups: the aristocratic hunter was provided with a guide in Gaston De Foix’s Livre de Chasse, translated into English as Master of Game, and rules dictating what it takes to be a good knight were provided by Ramon Lull’s The Book of the Order of Chivalry (Lull 1926). Rules regarding dietary health – specifically what one ought to eat, when one ought to eat it, and why – are the focus of the hugely influential medieval regimen or dietary Regimen sanitatis Salerni (The Salernitan Rule of Health). 1
