ABSTRACT
Two quotations from different authors represent the rock and the hard place between which the student of the material culture of food might locate herself. In her novel The Robber Bride (1993), Margaret Atwood has Tony, a female scholar of military history, muse upon what her male colleagues in her department believe to be a more appropriate realm of study for the female historical academic: ‘they thought she should be doing social history, who ate what when’ (p. 22). In the real historical world few historians of either sex have considered the history of food to be a sufficiently serious object of study, except where food commodities or their absence intersect with economic and social histories of dearth and supply. Paul Shackel, the American historical archaeologist, provides the hard place in his observation that ‘studies that explore the symbolic and active nature in material culture, and those studies which integrate archaeology, history and theory are even rarer’ (Shackel 1993: 18). Such pessimism needs to be confounded, and the research from which the following observations are drawn is predicated on the belief that we can know more about food practices, and particularly non-elite food practices in the early modern period, than existing historical studies currently tell us, and that the material environment cannot be ignored in the re-evaluation of such practices (Pennell 1997).
