ABSTRACT
Food-based public commentary—such as Jean-François Copé's 2012 quip pitting Muslims against French pastries during Ramadan—uniquely captures the ongoing tension between Islam and Christianity as religious, social, and political ideologies in present-day France. Such discourses find their echo in Honorat Bovet's 1398 L’Apparicion maistre Jean de Meun (Apparition of Master Jean de Meun) in which a Saracen, a travelling outlaw, mocks French eating habits in order to comment on the erosion of Christianity in the late fourteenth century. Linking the Great Schism of the Western Church, the Hundred Year's War, and ongoing French losses during the Crusades with France's relationship to food and excess, the Saracen blurs bodily, spiritual, and communal bounds, rhetorically setting forth both problem and solution to France's social ills. This article explores the Saracen's role as both enemy and persuasive agent in this little studied manuscript, displaying that the strongest “call to arms” may come when an outsider calls culture into question.
