![]() He changed waffles ( gauffres) to panca (.) 13 Watson altered the meal’s menu to suit his English audience.12 Huntington Library, Gospelles of Dystaves, D1v-D1r.7 Les Évangiles des Quenouilles appeared first in two French manuscript versions.The central event of the ballad is a shared meal: The narrator’s misogynistic mocking of women’s behavior alternates with the women’s celebration of the emotional support provided by their friendship: ![]() ![]() 5 Following satirical conventions that mock and stereotype women’s behavior, the narrator portrays them as wanton, boozy, and outspoken. 4 In the ballad, an anonymous male narrator follows six women sneaking off to eat, drink, socialize, and commiserate with each other. Robbins (.)Ĥ The ballad “Wives at the Tavern” appears in a manuscript of seventy-seven songs probably owned by an Augustinian canon. Attention to changes in eating and drinking habits, what archaeologist call foodways, allow us to see that the concerns about women’s socializing addressed in our texts were responding to the changes transforming late-medieval English women’s material world. While the misogyny of these texts might appear timeless, it is I will argue quite historically specific. 3 However, the material culture of eating, such as food, tableware, and spaces, that is embedded and assumed in our two accounts, allows us to historicize women’s sociability and the anxieties generated around it. 2 As the story of Lucretia, told by Livy demonstrates, women dining together had long been considered problematic. 2 Wright 1847: 91-95 see also Kowaleski 2006: 196-99 Huntington Library, The Gospelles of Dystaves, (.)ģ Two Middle English texts, a late-fifteenth century ballad, “Wives at the Tavern” and an early sixteenth-century English translation of the late-fifteenth-century French text The Gospelles of Dystaves both tell of women leaving their houses and husbands to eat dinner with their friends.Writing about eating, women, and disorder In the process I hope to illuminate some of the conscious and unconscious assumptions that people made about the role of the material world in their lives. While attentive to the changes in quantity and use that archaeologists ascribe to particular classes of objects, this article reads texts against changes in consumption patterns and changes in the use of household objects. This article approaches the question of the impact of changing material culture on household dynamics through textual descriptions. It is thus difficult to situate them within houses or by status, placing limitations on what scholars can say about the impact of material culture on urban behavior. While household items survive in abundance, archaeologists usually excavate them from refuse piles and riverbanks. On the one hand then, increased consumption signaled increasing standards of living, on the other hand, however, it had the capacity to challenge expected household dynamics and gender roles.Ģ The contexts from which archaeologists recover objects from England’s urban past hamper identification of the social impact of new forms of consumption. 1 Because women’s behavior was an important marker and determiner of household respectability, their behavior as wives, daughters, servants, and apprentices, was closely watched, commented upon, and regulated. ![]() Expanded availability of new types of consumer items presented users with new opportunities, choices, and behaviors, which altered household behavior and activities including what archaeologists call women’s maintenance activities: the provisioning and running of the household, including childcare. 1 In the fifteenth century, consumption among England’s bourgeois households – generally citizen merchants and artisans – increased. ![]()
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