📄 'Of Fish and Flesh and Tender Breede / Of Win Both White and Reede:' Eating and Drinking in Middle English Narrative Texts

Summary

Patricia Shaw (University of Oviedo) asks why Middle English narrative writers bring eating and drinking into their stories and what literary work these scenes do. Sleep, sex and excretion already had established literary uses. Food and drink, she argues, tend to appear at the extremes of excess or lack rather than at the moderate middle. The method is close reading across many texts: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Langland's Piers Plowman, Dunbar, Wynnere and Waster, The Land of Cokayne, Dame Siriz, The Fox and the Wolf, Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. She sets these readings against historical evidence such as monastic rules, food prices, recipes and civic ordinances. The result is a list of functions that food scenes serve:

• moral preaching against gluttony
• characterization
• showing off wealth
• satire of estates, especially clergy
• religious custom and its violation
• realism or fantasy
• triggering plot events

Humour and irony often run through all of these. The paper matters because it gives a structured way to read everyday detail as purposeful narrative material.

Key points

• Moralists such as the Pardoner, Gower in Book Six, Chaucer's Parson and Dunbar spend most of their attack on gluttony on drunkenness. They dwell on its revolting bodily effects, which is typical of gluttony satire.
• Wynnere and Waster gives a 24-line account of a twelve-course feast, with each dish shared by two guests and a long list of wild birds.
• Contemporary prices back up the claim that the Monk's roast swan was a luxury. In 1309, 500 capons and hens cost 6 pounds, while 24 swans cost 7.
• The Rule of St. Benedict allowed herbs, bread and about 3/4 pint of wine, and banned meat from four-footed animals. Clerical feasting in Piers Plowman Book XIII and the parody The Land of Cokayne are read against this standard.
• Small food details drive plots:
  • pepper and mustard make the bitch weep in Dame Siriz;
  • the fox's thirst after eating hens lands him in the well;
  • May's pregnancy craving gets her into the pear tree;
  • a banquet in the Historia Regum Britanniae (1136) is where Uther first notices Ygerna.

Interesting ideas

• I1. The paper ends with an explicit catalogue of functions a recurring motif can serve, from moralizing to satire to plot trigger, so one detail can be labelled by its narrative purpose and not only by its content.
• I2. Trivial physical details are traced as causes of major events, such as overeating leading to thirst, then the well, then capture.
• I3. Hypocrisy is shown through contrast: the Summoner's friar calls himself frugal while listing the rich dishes he expects.
• I4. Literary realism is checked against outside records: prices, household accounts, recipes and ordinances on spoiled food.
• I5. Narratives favour extremes of excess or lack over the norm, so deviation from an expected standard (such as a monastic rule) is what makes a detail meaningful.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (frames): A small "narrative function" label set could be attached to frames about routine actions like eating, helping explain why a scene is in the text.
• I2 (world): Event ordering in fables should keep causal links from minor state changes (hunger, thirst, intoxication) to outcomes, so QA can answer "why did the fox fall in?"
• I3 (frames): Irony detection could compare a speaker's self-description with the actions or requests attributed to them, and flag the contradiction as an explainable irony signal.
• I4 (world): Claims in a text could be checked against compiled measures and values in the knowledge graph, marking a description as plausible or exaggerated with the evidence shown.
• I5 (answer): Readers could store default expectations per role, such as what a monk eats, and point to deviations when answering questions about character or moral.