Food, Drink and the Maintenance of Health

How did people in the past decide what to eat and what not to? What factors shaped their decisions? How did they obtain the information necessary to shape these decisions? And how did this information evolve over the course of the ‘early modern’ period (1500-1800)?

In this talk Professor David Gentilcore explores the changing nature of the genre of medicinal food advice. as well as some of the key factors which were meant to shape people’s individual relationship with food and drink – taste, gender, locale, occupation, social rank – before attempting to gauge how far early modern Europeans engaged with this advice.