ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how early modern European cultures understood the seasonality of food and, more specifically, how literary works produced in England between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries contribute to those understandings. It also explores the tension between conceptualizing the seasons as natural cycles that necessarily regulate food production and envisioning seasonal food as a mutable category, subject not just to environmental forces but also technological and social innovations. The chapter provides two foundational European narratives of the seasons' origins: the depiction of Eden in the biblical Book of Genesis and the Proserpina story in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It discusses Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, in conjunction with household manuals, to explore how the temporal scheme of the seasons informs the progression of the dramatic plot. The chapter considers a variety of literary records: religious and secular myths, culinary and medicinal receipt books, garden manuals and herbals, and Shakespearean theater.
