[Sca-cooks] Diet as Culture. On the Medical Context of Food Consumption in the Medieval Midd
JIMCHEVAL at aol.com
JIMCHEVAL at aol.com
Mon Jul 28 18:13:31 PDT 2014
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
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