ABSTRACT

This conclusion present some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. Hospitality, food, and eating have always played a part in the exercise of power through royal and princely courts, at least since courts assumed their familiar form as centers of leisure, luxury, and refinement. Courts in this sense gradually emerged out of the households of territorial warrior rulers. A. F. Pollard remarked that the English royal household was the "constitutional protoplasm" out of which many of the institutions of the modern state developed. The book greatly advances just such a project, because the courts studied by the authors vary considerably in their position in the broader social figuration of their respective countries. It focuses on "food consumption, status, and power", advance the task of understanding more precisely the development of courts and the changing part they have played in the functioning of society more generally.