Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early-Modern Europe - Softcover

Camporesi, Piero

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226092585 ISBN 13: 9780226092584

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996

Synopsis

This study examines the imaginative world of poor and ordinary people in pre-industrial Europe, exploring their everyday preoccupations, fears and fantasies. Camporesi develops the claim that many people in early-modern Europe lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their hunger or by bread adulterated with hallucinogenic herbs. The use of opiate products, administered even to children and infants, was widespread and was linked to a popular mythology in which herbalists and exorcists were important cultural figures. Through a reconstruction of the everyday imaginative life of peasants, beggars and the poor, Camporesi presents a disconcerting image of early-modern Europe as a vast laboratory of dreams. This book provides an insight into the everyday life and attitudes of people in pre-industrial Europe.

About this title

Product Description:

Bread of Dreams This study examines the imaginative world of poor and ordinary people in pre-industrial Europe. It develops the claim that many people in early-modern Europe lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their hunger or by bread adulterated with hallucinogenic herbs. Full description

Review:

"A remarkable and exciting recovery of an earlier cosmology elaborated around bread and body.′ Nature

"Stimulating and fun to read." The Historian

"This is a serious book which makes the body in early modern Europe at the same time more comprehensible and still more strange." Social History of Medicine

"Piero Camporesi confronts us here with a baroque panorama of jarring variations, lurid juxtapositions, and vertiginous shifts in setting and scale ... Camporesi insists on being the dramaturge and devil′s advocate of an alternative history." Speculum

"In Camporesi′s breathtaking vision, covering several centuries of early modern peasant society, and focusing chiefly but not exclusively on Italy, real social history and l′histoire des mentalites fuse." Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0226092585
• ISBN 13: 9780226092584
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224