[Sca-cooks] Diet as Culture. On the Medical Context of Food Consumption in the Medieval Midd

[JIMCHEVAL at aol.com]

For anyone with Wiley access:

Diet as  Culture. On the Medical Context of Food Consumption in the 
Medieval Middle  East
Paulina B. Lewicka*
History Compass
Volume 12, Issue 7, pages  607–617, July 2014, Article first published 
online: 28 JUL 2014
DOI:  10.1111/hic3.12176
Abstract
Greco-Arabic medicine was based on ancient  Greek foundations, or more 
precisely, on the Galenic doctrine of humoral  pathology, which conditioned both 
the preventive and curative proper diet.1 This  doctrine had been imported 
into the Arabic-Islamic world in the course of the  eighth and ninth 
centuries,2 when Nestorian Christians, sponsored by the elites  of early-Abbasid 
Baghdad, translated the ancient Greek legacy into Arabic. With  time, Galenic 
thought spread all over the Islamic world, where it became the  prevailing 
medico-dietetic-philosophical system. As the humoral doctrine was  taken for 
granted by most cultured people, it shaped their thinking on medicine,  
health, illness, diet, food, and drink.
A large number of studies over the  past decades were devoted to both 
Graeco-Arabic medicine and the culinary  culture of the medieval Arabic-Islamic 
world. But although the Galenic doctrine  had an immense influence on dietary 
consciousness and thus on daily food choices  of those who inhabited that 
world, contemporary scholarship rarely recognized  the medico-dietary culture 
as a separate subject. The present paper is a review  of the questions 
involved in its study.

Jim  Chevallier
www.chezjim.com

Sources on early medieval French  food
http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2014/07/sources-on-early-medieval-french-food.h
tml