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IIn chapter six of Part I of Don Quijote, the priest and the barber conduct a scrutiny of the books in Don Quixote's library in a vain attempt to expurgate the malady of the chivalresque. But not all the books end up on the fire. Among those that are spared is the 1511 Castilian translation of Martorell's Catalan romance Tirant lo blanc. This book is praised both for its style, and for its down-to-earth treatment of the lives of its heroes: 'aquí comen los caballeros, y duermen y mueren en sus camas, y hacen testamento antes de su muerte, con estas cosas de que todos los demás libros deste género carecen' (I.6.83). 1 To find a book praised as 'el mejor libro del mundo' because its characters eat, sleep and die testate in their beds is rather odd when one comes to consider Don Quijote itself. It is true that Quixote also dies in bed, and not before he has made a will. But even a cursory reading of the novel shows that for most of the time Don Quixote sleeps little and eats less. Even before he embarks on his chivalric career, the run-down and neglected character of his estate and household is reflected in the miserable diet he has to endure: 'Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos' (I.1.35-36). Just what these dishes imply about Don Quixote's economic and social status, and just what they tell us about the state of his health, will be discussed later in this essay. But for the present it seems clear that Don Quixote's diet is frugal, monotonous and unappetising, and it is hardly surprising that with such meagre fare Don Quixote is as thin as he is always portrayed. But Quixote's bad habits are not limited to diet. He also neglects his sleep: 'se le pasaban las noches leyendo de claro en claro, y los días de turbio en turbio' (I.1.39). Here we have the classic syndrome of the single male: the fatal combination of late nights and junk food. Most men go through this stage at some point in their lives, and most men grow out of it. But Don Quixote never does, and eventually he makes himself so ill that his brain dries up and he starts to lose his wits: 'se le secó el celebro de manera que vino a perder el juicio' (I.1.39). Cervantes did not need to be a qualified doctor to recognise the symptoms of sleep deprivation and malnutrition, or to know what the combined effect would be on his hero's behaviour in the novel. I am by no means the first reader to notice the frequent, if not always prominent, references to food (and sleep) in the book. 2 But it is worth revisiting the subject now, since in recent years, in France, Italy, Britain and the US, there has been a small explosion in the study of food and of eating from a wide range of perspectives, -anthropological, historical, and cultural. 3 Not the least important aspect of this fascinating and complex field is the dark side, the many ways in which diet implies hunger or starvation, from the psychology of anorexia to the politics of famine. The purpose of this essay, then, is twofold: first, to offer a simple taxonomy of food studies, an outline guide to what is a very wide and complex field of enquiry; and, second, to raise a number of questions which arise from the treatment of food in Don Quijote. In particular, I want to discuss the significance of both malnutrition and hunger in the formation of Don Quixote's character, and then ask what light these aspects of the novel can shed on the wider culinary economy of early-modern Spain. Although I cannot hope to resolve these questions at present, they nevertheless form an important part of research which is being carried out at King's College London on the emergence of food as a significant feature of Spanish literary and artistic culture around 1600. IIOne could hardly claim that recent awareness of the importance of food in human history and culture is revolutionary. Armies have been marching on their stomachs for centuries; generations of women have been taught that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and one does not need to be a biochemist to recognise the truth of Brillat-Savarin's dictum that we are what we eat. 4 In some ways one could hardly think of a less usefully generalised aspect of human behaviour on which to found an academic discipline. However, it is important to try to make some sense of the large number of diverse studies of food and its central role in human development which have recently been published by anthropologists, historians, political scientists, ecologists, nutritionists and students of culture and gender. Maurice Aymard has suggested three main paths through the field: first, what he calls 'une psycho-sociologie de l'alimentation', dealing with the codes, values and rules which society assigns to food; second, 'une approche macroéconomique', focusing on population, consumption and prices; and third, a study of the nutritional value of foodstuffs in history. 5 An alternative approach would be to look at the various usages of the word 'diet' itself, and to use them to provide a structure within which to work. 'Diet' means a number of things: the lifestyle of a whole society or social group; provisions in daily use; a planned or prescribed selection of food; a restricted allowance for medical, cosmetic or penal purposes; and even a fast. Such usages cover a number of general social, economic and cultural factors as well as particular issues governing the physical and mental well-being of individuals. A third approach would be simpler still, and might begin by establishing two intersecting axes, one concerned with the production of food, and the other concerned with its consumption. This is the approach I propose to take in this essay. If I start with consumption it is simply because food is essential for survival, and nutrition has therefore to be at the centre of any sensible study of the subject. The 'greening' of science that has gathered pace over the past 25 years has led to enormous advances in our understanding of the ways in which the principal nutrients of food -proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals- combine together to ensure the healthy growth and development of the body and to ensure that it can cope with the energy demands placed on it in terms of work. We know that there are some 50 or so substances that are essential to this process. The body can synthesise some of them, but, if essential nutrients which cannot be synthesised are absent from the diet, serious long-term damage will result. Certain of the vitamins, particularly vitamin B-complex and vitamin C, fall into this category. A number of serious diseases have long been known to result from vitamin deficiencies: beriberi (thiamine, vitamin B1), pellagra (niacin, vitamin B3), scurvy (vitamin C), and rickets (vitamin D). It is the centrality of the notion of a balanced diet that leads to my second axis, that of production. Because the plant and animal species that provide the range of essential nutrients are themselves very often soil- and/or climate-specific, no human population can be certain that it will have the ingredients of a balanced diet within easy reach. The pasture which produces the sweet spring roast lamb will not also support the growing of the salad that accompanies it to the table, or the wine (rich in iron, an essential mineral for the production of haemoglobin) with which to wash it down. Variety is just as important to a good diet as nutritional balance, and, given that few people any longer go out and catch their food, variety is provided by the movement of goods through trade. This much is obvious, but the study of food gets more interesting when we come to look at the ways in which the two axes of consumption and production intersect. Take for example the complex relationships between the natural occurrence and migration of plants and the influence of soil and climate; the cultivation and genetic improvement of those plants; the production of derived foodstuffs and their preservation for transport and trade. Take the range of issues concerning culinary traditions, the preparation of food for the table and the circumstances of its consumption, the rituals and ceremonies and the use of food to underpin social organisation and signal social hierarchy; and consider the migration of those culinary traditions along with the associated plants, animals and food products, and you have another way of charting movements of human populations and cultures in history. Hence the interest of work such as Redcliffe Salaman's classic study of the potato first published in 1949; 6 or studies of other commodities such as sugar by Sidney Mintz, 7 peppers by Jean Andrews, 8 and chocolate by Sophie and Michael Coe. 9 This is something the British, like all post-imperial and post-colonial powers, are constantly aware of, as is underlined by James Walvin's recent study of six products which have profoundly influenced British taste - tea, coffee, tobacco, chocolate, sugar and potatoes. 10 The British eat and drink (and for those that do, smoke) the history of their empire on a daily basis, yearly if we include the 'traditional' Christmas lunch, of which hardly any element is indigenous to the British Isles. And more recently the high street of even the smallest country town in England has been testimony to the fact that we live in a global kitchen, with Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Bangladeshi restaurants on every corner, not to mention French and Italian, tapas bars and take-away Mexican, and the all-conquering Big Mac. Other intersections of the two axes bring wider cultural issues into play. Systems of belief have raised certain foodstuffs to the status of cult objects or icons -bread, fish and wine in the Christian tradition, for example, or corn and maguey in Mesoamerica. They have also drawn powerful and long-standing divisions between animals within their economies and cultures; take the way that Judaism and Islam exclude pork in favour of lamb, or the way that the cow is held sacred by Hindus. Many of these food taboos start life as responses to problems of hygiene, but they persist because they are convenient and effective ways of consolidating identity and marking territory. As religious conventions, they also perform the useful function of linking consumption and abstention, which is a theme I will want to mention later. It is not just what we eat that matters; it is what we do not eat, what we abstain from, that makes us members of a religious or ethnic community. One of the most interesting areas of the subject, and one which requires more space than I have available, unfortunately, is the confluence of eating and sexuality. This is a complex area in which food as the fuel of life, and its influence on health, fertility and reproduction, overlaps with the use of the body's orifices for the purposes of sexual gratification. Freud's identification of orality as an early, immature, phase of sexuality is helpful in understanding why food is so often associated with sex, and particularly why food so often becomes a substitute for sex. The modern world has shown us many examples of the way in which low self-esteem, particularly among women who are intimidated by conventional media representations of female beauty, becomes transformed into the craving to gain control demonstrated by sufferers from bulimia and anorexia nervosa. 11 This cluster of issues reminds us that abstinence and malnutrition are just as important to understanding the central role of food in society and culture as over-consumption and the associated political and moral issues of over-production. IIIOf all the aspects of this field considered so far, the intersection of the physical and the mental is the least well understood and the most fascinating. Physical size and shape often appear to correlate with personality: the fact that Don Quixote, for example, is thin and Sancho Panza is fat is not accidental; it is part of Cervantes's design, because those shapes are among the vocabulary of signifiers which most languages and cultures have in common. But in spite of attempts to divide us all into endomorphs, ectomorphs and mesomorphs, there are still plenty of morose, fat people and plenty of jolly, thin people; and everyone knows at least one fat person who eats very little but cannot lose weight, or at least one person who eats like a horse and looks like a rake. Metabolism and heredity are just as important as what we eat. If anything, the influence of diet on states of mind is even less well understood, though, again, it is obvious that many substances if ingested will induce a radically altered psychic state (alcohol, drugs, and even fizzy drinks), while any parent knows that the best way of dealing with fractious children is to raise their blood sugar by administering rapid doses of sweets and cakes. All of these factors are revelant to our consideration of the relationship between Don Quixote's physical and mental state and his diet. For Quixote is presented to the reader as, above all, a sick man, a man who is physically infirm and mentally unstable, and a man whose infirmity and instability are related to specific aspects of his life-style, principally the excessive reading of books, lack of sleep and a poor diet. In Cervantes's day, the explanation for Don Quixote's psychological profile, the fact that he is 'ingenioso', would have been sought in the classical theory of the humours developed by Galen and Hippocrates, and which was based on a conjunction of the four cosmic elements -air, earth, fire, and water- with the four basic body fluids -blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. According to their relative predominance in the individual, these elements were supposed to produce the four temperaments: sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric. Emotional stability as well as general health depended on an appropriate balance among the four bodily humours; an excess of one produced a particular personality trait, such as Quixote's eccentricity, caused by an excess of hot, dry elements in his body. 12 Although this approach has been largely superseded by more 'scientific' explanations, it is important to note that the theory of the humours is above all a physiological account of mental and emotional states, one in which mental imbalance correlates with physical imbalance, or, put another way: mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind requires a healthy body. 13 Cervantes understood this relationship not only in Don Quijote, but in at least two other accounts of delusions and madness: the bed-ridden and feverish Campuzano who overhears the dogs' colloquy while recovering in hospital from a dose of the pox (El casamiento engañoso y coloquio de los perros ); and the hypersensitive Tomás Rodaja, whose delusions are triggered by the ingestion of a poisoned quince (El licenciado vidriera ). And Cervantes's contemporary Mateo Alemán was clear in his understanding that there was a causal relationship not just between the humours and the personality, but between what people ate and the kind of people they were: 'como en buena filosofía los manjares que se comen vuelven los hombres de aquellas complexiones' (Guzmán de Alfarache II.iii.8). With the benefits of modern biochemistry, we can in some ways offer more sophisticated accounts of the relationship between physical and mental states, but they are not substantially different in kind from what was provided by the classical doctors. In order to illustrate this point, we might take the virtual contents of Don Quixote's virtual stomach and subject them to analysis. We know that his staple diet before the first sally consisted of five elements: 'olla', by which we may assume is meant the classic slow-cooked stew made with beans and sausages known as 'olla podrida', eaten as the main midday meal; 14 'salpicón' or cold meat sliced thinly with onions and vinegar for supper; 15 'lantejas' or lentils on Fridays; 16 'duelos y quebrantos', probably some form of omelette, on Saturdays; 17 and the occasional pigeon on Sundays. We may assume also that, in real life, Alonso Quijano would have supplemented this diet with bread and wine, and he may possibly, but not necessarily, have also eaten some fruit and vegetables; 18 the conventions of literary analysis, however, do not allow us to take into account what is not in the text. Figure 1 gives a summary analysis of the likely nutritional value of this fictional diet, together with some of the principal nutrients expressed as a percentage of the recommended daily allowance (RDA). Figure 1 - Analysis of Don Quixote's Diet
Several things about this analysis require comment. Firstly, such a diet would have left Don Quixote seriously deficient in energy; his calory intake is only about a quarter of that required by a 50-year-old male with even a sedentary lifestyle. 19 The consequences of long-term malnourishment of this order would be wasting of the flesh and loss of muscle tone. Secondly, he is below the recommended daily amount of all nutrients, but is especially deficient in Calcium (8%), Vitamin C (6%) and Vitamin E (10%). The calcium deficiency is extremely serious and would lead to osteoporosis (loss of bone mass), and inhibit blood-clotting. It would also account for the poor state of his teeth, frequently commented on in the novel. Vitamin C also helps wounds to heal and keeps bones and teeth strong. His low dietary intake of vitamin C probably meant that he was suffering from scurvy, a disease that causes weakness, slow healing of wounds, and extreme soreness of the gums and joints. The very low intake of vitamin E would also result in weakened red blood cells and neurological dysfunction, causing loss of muscle coordination, and vision problems. Vision problems, from which it might be said Don Quixote suffers throughout at least the first part of the novel, are also caused by deficiency of vitamin A, which at 23% of recommended daily amount is also among the lowest percentages in the analysis. However, there are other reasons for concern about Don Quixote's diet, which go beyond basic concerns about malnutrition, and they have to do with the 'duelos y quebrantos' he had every Saturday. As Rodríguez Marín points out, the earliest authorities define this dish as an omelette made with brains, brains being one of the parts of an animal permitted to be eaten on days of semi-abstinence. 20 However, there is contemporary evidence that the consumption of brains was regarded as a danger to mental health. In his Libro de cocina of 1525, 21 Roberto de Nola gives an infamous recipe for roast cat: 'Gato asado como se quiere comer'. In preparing the cat for cooking, Nola is at pains to stress that the head should be cut off and thrown away because 'se dice que comiendo los sesos podría perder el seso y juicio el que la comiese.' This is an interesting observation in the context of any study of the physiological origins of mental states, and could provide a further explanation for Don Quixote's unstable mental condition: the regular consumption of offal, and more particularly brains, on days of semi-abstinence. Recent experience in Britain, and the development of public policy on the production and consumption of meat products offers a thought-provoking parallel with sixteenth-century Spain. Cats do suffer from a form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and Spaniards in the sixteenth century clearly thought, quite rightly, that human beings could go mad from eating the brains of animals. 22 Now, I am not seriously proposing that biochemistry can be used for character analysis in literary texts. But what I am suggesting is that Cervantes has constructed a credible continuum between Don Quixote's social and economic status, his lifestyle, diet, physical health and mental condition, and that all these factors combine to produce patterns of behaviour which are convincing and consistent. What is more, Cervantes must sustain this continuum if Don Quixote is to retain his essential character once he leaves behind his sedentary habits and hits the road as a knight errant. IVDon Quixote might have expected his diet to improve once he embarked on his new career. All those banquets he read about in novels of chivalry would have been as powerful an incentive for a knight-errant as the opportunity to right wrongs and do good. In fact things get much, much worse. Indeed, Cervantes appears to do his best to ensure that Don Quixote eats as little as possible. On his first evening he arrives at the inn which he mistakes for a castle, and the innkeeper brings him 'una porción del mal remojado y peor cocido bacallao y un pan tan negro y mugriento como sus armas' (I.2.53). But he cannot eat it because he cannot take off his helmet: 'como tenía puesta la celada y alzada la visera, no podía poner nada en la boca con sus manos si otro no se lo daba y ponía' (53-54). And the same goes for drinking, which he can only manage when the landlord finds him a straw. Not surprisingly, this failure to eat a decent supper is immediately followed by one of the early exhibitions of Don Quixote's chivalric eccentricity, as he proceeds to sit up all night keeping vigil over his armour, prior to his investiture as a knight. In this episode Cervantes shows that he intends to keep Don Quixote tired and hungry for as long as possible, a strategy which is assisted in the second sally by the convenient theft of Sancho's ass, along with the saddlebags containing their supplies for the journey. The resulting loss of both food and drink ensure constant hunger, which induces the lightheadedness and hallucinations characteristic of Quixote's response to the world. 23 Unlike Sancho, however, Don Quixote rarely complains about hunger; indeed, for the most part he seems completely oblivious to it and, as we shall see, on occasions seems rather pleased with his ability to do without food. Only during the episode of the Cave of Montesinos does Quixote seem at all aware of the relationship between the physical and mental strain he has been under, and he asks for something to eat, 'que traía grandísima hambre' (II.22.817). Cervantes subjects Sancho to the same regime, although Sancho is much more prone to complain. He suffers almost systematic starvation during his governorship of the island, perhaps the episode in the novel in which the squire comes closest to emulating the wayward brilliance of his master. Soon after the beginning of his tenure of office Sancho is shown into a palatial dining room and invited to sit at a table laden with many sumptuous dishes. But they are each promptly whisked away from him by a doctor who decries the ill effects of all types of food, especially partridges: 'Omnis saturatio mala, perdicis autem pessima' (II.47.1005). This is one of the reasons Sancho gives for resigning the governorship after the enemy invasion: 'más quiero hartarme de gazpachos que estar sujeto a la miseria de un médico impertinente que me mate de hambre' (II.53.1065). That Cervantes understood the relationship between hunger and hallucination is clear from the cases where the contrary is shown to be true. Don Quixote does have his moments of lucidity, and not surprisingly they follow the rare opportunities he has to eat. The two discourses, on the Golden Age and Arms and Letters, for example, are both after-dinner speeches. In the first case, in chapter 11, Quixote and Sancho join a group of goatherds who offer to share their evening stew around the fire. Quixote tops this off with a handful of acorns, which are rich in protein as well as nostalgic potential. In the second example, in chapter 37, the innkeeper puts on a good supper on don Fernando's instructions, before Quixote goes on to give one of his best and most memorable speeches of Book I. 24 Part II begins, as does Part I, with an immediate mention of the state of Don Quixote's diet. If his meagre rations in chapter 1 of Part I had brought him to the verge of insanity, in the opening chapter of Part II, he has been nursed back almost to the brink of sanity. The priest and the barber had left instructions to his household to feed him 'cosas confortativas y apropiadas para el corazón y el celebro, de donde procedía, según buen discurso, toda su mala ventura' (II.1.625). 25 The regime appears to have brought some benefits 'porque echaban de ver que su señor por momentos iba dando muestras de estar en su entero juicio'. But he hardly looks the picture of health, sitting up in bed in a green vest and red knitted cap, 'tan seco y amojamado, que no parecía sino hecho de carne momia' (626). His fragile grip on the real world is soon broken when the priest decides to test his sanity to destruction by leading him on to the subject of chivalry, and the barber's ensuing tale about the madman of Seville underlines the lesson that 'todas nuestras locuras proceden de tener los estómagos vacíos y los celebros llenos de aire' (II.1.631). Although Don Quixote enjoys considerable celebrity in Part II, he conspicuously fails to benefit from the hospitality he might have expected. It is true that he spends a lot more time as the guest of the well-heeled, especially with the Duke and Duchess, but there are still many occasions when opportunities to eat are passed over. In fact, Camacho's wedding feast is one of the rare occasions when Sancho's inability to turn down a free meal causes him to take sides against his master. Don Quixote is captivated by Quiteria's and Basilio's romantic escape from an arranged marriage, but Sancho finds more to appreciate in the jilted Camacho's catering arrangements. When Don Quixote decides to leave before the guests start to tuck into the buffet, Sancho is left bewailing one of many lost opportunities to satisfy his gluttony while having to make do with a spoonful of broth: 'así se dejó atrás la ollas de Egipto, aunque las llevaba en el alma, cuya ya casi consumida y acabada espuma, que en el caldero llevaba, le representaba la gloria y la abundancia del bien que perdía' (II.21.808). VIn the discussion so far, one of the main themes has been hunger, or denial of food, rather than the satisfaction of hunger. Sometimes the food is there, but Don Quixote is prevented from getting at it; at other times, the food is simply not there, or is so poor, so frugal or so inedible that virtual starvation is the result. This is not surprising since Don Quijote shares at least some of the features of the picaresque, a genre pioneered in Spain and dominated by the theme of hunger and its destructive effect on the moral fibre of societies and individuals alike. Lazarillo's battle of wits with the bread chest, Pablos's eternal meal at Cabra's academy, eternal because it is 'sin principio ni fin', are exceptional only for the memorably grotesque humour with which they illustrate the desperation which hunger can cause. In all other ways they are entirely characteristic of a society defined in terms of lack. And they prompt the thought that if people are what they eat, and there is nothing for them to eat, how can they be expected to make anything of their lives? But putting Don Quijote in the context of the picaresque prompts the further question: is Don Quixote's malnutrition peculiar to him or is it systemic? The difficulty here is the danger of reading literary texts as historical documents and of assuming that they necessarily mean what they say. But it is well to remember that Don Quijote is a novel which takes place in history; anachronism is one of its central themes, so a strong sense of the contemporary landscape is vital to the way it makes its impact. I have argued elsewhere that we should take, for example, the frequent use of pastoral in Don Quijote very seriously, and that contemporary tensions between agriculture and livestock farming form an important part of the countryside through which Quijote and Sancho wander. 26 And in Part II there is an incident which, albeit humorously, does indeed suggest that Quixote's and Sancho's search for a chivalric banquet takes place against a background of serious undersupply. In chapter 59 of Part II, Don Quixote and Sancho fetch up at an inn in search of supper. The landlord invites them to order anything they wish 'que de las pajaricas del aire, de las aves de la tierra y de los pescados del mar estaba proveída aquella venta' (II.59.1109). This turns out to be an unjustified boast. Not wishing to appear greedy, 'porque mi señor es delicado y come poco', Sancho takes him at his word and orders up a couple of roast chickens. What follows quickly descends into a preview of the Monty Python sketch about the cheese shop which has no cheese. Sancho runs through a whole range of dishes -chicken, veal, kid, bacon, eggs- but all of them are off. Either the chickens have been eaten by predators, or the pullets have been sent to market, or they are fresh out of veal (but there'll be plenty next week), and of course there aren't any eggs because there aren't any hens. In the end, Sancho has to settle for cowheel. Either this is part of a systematic attempt to blacken the reputation of Spanish hoteliers, or Cervantes is telling us something about the level, the quality or the reliability of the food production and supply system of early 17th-century Spain. 27 How much do we really know about these issues, about food production, farming, product distribution and supply in early-modern Spain? Is the picture of serious underprovision we glimpse both in the picaresque novels and in Don Quijote anything like the true picture, as has often been supposed, or is it selective, got up by novelists in support of some other agenda? 28 What is more, how would we handle this information if we had it? These are some of the questions which should inform future work on the social and economic history of this period. In order to fill out the picture, we might also take into account the fact that at precisely the time when novels such as Guzmán de Alfarache and Don Quijote were being written and published, food was acquiring a prominent iconographic role in Spain through the emergence of the still-life genre. Why was it that, at the very time when the writers were bemoaning widespread underprovision of food, artists such as Juan Sánchez Cotán, and later Velázquez, were celebrating food in paint? Is this a contradiction, or is it a case of artists raising humble vegetables to near sanctified status in some kind of ironic commentary on their rarity? These issues are discussed in Bob Goodwin's doctoral thesis mentioned earlier (note 24). I do not want to trespass on his work or to attribute conclusions to him with which he would not necessarily agree, but he has been attempting to address the spiritual context of Sánchez Cotán's work in terms of the period of preparation which he was undergoing to enter the Carthusian order. Paintings such as Sánchez Cotán's celebrated Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber are striking because they share with Velázquez and other painters of the Spanish school, and I would argue, with Cervantes, the ability to give humble, everyday objects an aura of profound spirituality. Now there might be a temptation to say that Sánchez Cotán's cabbages are the painterly equivalent of Lazarillo's bread -regarded as holy because so rare and so eagerly sought after. I would not be inclined to take such a view, but would prefer to see these paintings as expressions of a common intention at this period to illuminate the spiritual dimension of the most lowly person or object. 29 The fact that Sánchez Cotán uses vegetables, almost to the exclusion of other foodstuffs, except, significantly, partridges and other game birds, may be explained by the Carthusian commitment to vegetarianism in the life of their order. Bob Goodwin's readings in the history and iconography of Carthusianism, and particularly Juan de Madariaga's Vida del seráfico padre San Bruno, patriarca de la Cartuja, published in 1596, reveal a range of fascinating justifications for the order having formally prohibited eating meat, except in extremely rare cases where the only food available is meat, and to refuse to eat it would result in starvation. A number of these justifications, interestingly, are based on dietary rather than moral considerations, and are backed up with references to medical textbooks: meat is not essential for health, fish and vegetables provide adequate sustenance, and meat will do positive harm, as is borne out by lay men who become ill after returning to eating meat after Lent. Madariaga goes on to give numerous examples of miraculous interventions to prevent the eating of meat, including the miracle of Saint Hugo (of which Zurbarán painted a version for the Charterhouse at Seville), and two stories of miracles in which Carthusian monks on the verge of eating partridges are saved from doing so when the roasted birds are either miraculously restored to life or turned into fish. What I am suggesting is that we may have here an example of a culture collaborating to convert a negative concept into a positive one. The Carthusian agenda, as expressed pictorially by Sánchez Cotán, is effectively an exercise in redefinition. A society which finds it difficult to feed its population can use a number of expedients: it can import more food, or it can export the hungry, or it can attempt to make people feel more satisfied with what little they have, it can try to turn lack into a positive value. Instead of associating underprovision with 'hunger', 'starvation', or 'malnourishment', all concepts with a negative value, that society might try to replace these concepts with more positive ones, such as 'abstinence' and the whole range of spiritual, religious and cultural values associated with abstinence: flight from the world, evasion of the carnal, pursuit of a higher form of reality or a world of the spirit. Sánchez Cotán may have little in his larder but a cardoon or a slice of melon, but he can turn them into a feast for the eye and a spiritual banquet in which the world of the flesh is cast off and left behind. It is an artistic counterpart to the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. Something of the same could be said of Don Quixote and his value systems; he is not hungry, he is merely 'delicado'. Beaten, starved and deprived of sleep, he enters a world of the imagination, a world of ingeniosidad, in which physical impediments become less and less important. As a result, he is able to draw strength from abstinence. When Sancho can find nothing better than bread, cheese and an onion in his saddlebag, Don Quixote reassures him that 'es honra de los caballeros andantes no comer en un mes, y, ya que coman, sea de aquello que hallaren más a mano' (I.10.117). Later, as he is about to embark on his penitence in the sierra, Sancho asks him what he is going to do for food. 'No te dé pena ese cuidado...porque aunque tuviera, no comiera otra cosa que las yerbas y frutos que este prado y estos árboles me dieren, que la fineza de mi negocio está en no comer y en hacer otras asperezas equivalentes' (I.25.289). As Arthur Terry comments, 'the vocation of knight errant is essentially an ascetic calling and, in its context, privation is a virtue.'30 30 VIIn summary, then, I would suggest that our focus on food in some texts and some paintings from the Spanish Golden Age has shown that we are in fact looking at a complex set of cultural responses to a fundamentally negative economic reality; an attempt, so to speak, to make virtues out of necessity. To take this approach is not to read Don Quijote, or the picaresque novels, or the paintings of Sánchez Cotán as historical documents in the conventional sense, but to see them as texts and objects that were created in a context which has become historical with the passage of time, and to see them as standing in some relationship with that context, a relationship which itself has become more complex with the passage of time. In trying to understand that context and that relationship we are responding to a marked shift in the late 20th century away from a view of cultural objects as self-contained and eternal, things which dropped to earth like meteorites. We are even moving beyond postmodernism to a new kind of historicism, broader still than the so-called New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose. We are trying to bring together a range of cultural and historical disciplines -anthropology, history, economics, art history and literary criticism- in order to illuminate the many complexities of that most fascinating and intriguing period of intellectual and artistic endeavour which is early-modern Spain.
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Resp: CCH | Last updated: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 | Terms of use