Vol. 8 No. 11 · 19 June 1986
pages 7-8 | 2908 words
Lamb’s Tails
Christopher Driver
- All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present by Stephen Mennell
Blackwell, 380 pp, £14.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 631 13244 9
- Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the 14th Century including ‘The Forme of Cury’ edited by Constance Hieatt and Sharon Butler
Oxford, for the Early English Text Society, 224 pp, £6.50, April 1985, ISBN 0 19 722409 1
- The English Cookbook by Victor Gordon
Cape, 304 pp, £12.50, November 1985, ISBN 0 224 02300 4
For a generation now, it has been a commonplace that in Britain food and drink are much discussed. Fewer people seem to notice that this has almost always been so, wherever the capacity to discuss anything is found. Pockets of unawareness are the exception rather than the rule: early redbrick university departments striving to differentiate themselves from Oxford and Cambridge; or the English gentry, who, as Lord Stockton has reminded us, taught their genteel imitators that it was bad form to notice the manna that came to dinner. In other times and places, both hunger and plenty have proved stimulating sauces for food discourse. Miranda Chaytor tells me that the dreams of a 16th-century Northumbrian witch elicited at interrogation centred upon food rather than sex. English diarists – Evelyn as well as Pepys, Thomas Turner as well as Parson Woodforde – confide their meals to paper as readily as their other concerns. One reason why Keats makes better reading than Shelley is that he had a superior gust for eating and drinking, and found a language for it in verse and prose: not just the lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon but the nectarine: ‘good god how fine. It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy – all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry. I shall certainly breed.’
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Letters
Vol. 8 No. 14 · 7 August 1986
From John Burrow
SIR: It was good to see a review of an Early English Text Society book in your pages (LRB, 19 June) and to find your reviewer praising Curye on Inglysch both for the modesty of its price and for the excellence of its editing. But the genial Victorian founder of EETS, Frederick Furnivall, would have grieved to see his society described as a ‘forbidding’ institution which caters only for the ‘delicate [should that be ‘gross’?] appetites of language specialists’. Furnivall himself lectured at the Working Men’s College in London; and his intention when he founded the society, in 1864, was to make the work of English writers before the Renaissance available to more than language specialists. EETS is still not an esoteric body – in intention, at least. Indeed, we are happy that it should be treated as a book club by anyone interested in reading such things as the Mystery plays, The Cloud of Unknowing or the poetry of John Gower in proper editions at little expense. Any of your readers who may wish to join should write to the Assistant Executive Secretary for particulars. Her name and address is: Mrs Rachel Hands, 35 Beechcroft Road, Oxford OX2 7AY.
John Burrow
Director, Early English Text Society
Vol. 8 No. 16 · 18 September 1986
From Bella Millett
SIR: It was good to see a letter from Professor Burrow in your pages (LRB, 7 August) reaffirming Furnivall’s intention of using the Early English Text Society ‘to make the work of English writers before the Renaissance available to more than language specialists’. But I am afraid that the response of the common reader to his invitation to subscribe might well be: ‘Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.’ Even Late Middle English can be pretty hard going for the non-specialist, and earlier stages of English quite impenetrable; and the EETS glossaries, valuable as they are, are not a full solution to the problem. Using a glossary efficiently is a skill which has to be learnt (I spend several weeks every year teaching it to my first-year students), and it is in any case a very laborious way of getting at the sense of a work. In Furnivall’s day, EETS texts were often supplied not only with glossaries but with interleaved translations, or at least running commentaries in the margin which offered a guide to the meaning: but this is no longer EETS policy. I have been told on good authority that the main reason for this change of course was to keep expenses down. If EETS were publishing works for the exclusive use of specialists in Medieval English, this would be fair enough, but offering this kind of edition to the non-specialist is rather like offering a prospective house-buyer a pile of bricks – more moderately priced than the completed building, admittedly, but not really meeting the buyer’s needs.
I believe myself that interleaved translations, at least for the more difficult texts, would make EETS editions not only more accessible to the general reader but far more serviceable to professional Medievalists. I have reason to be grateful to Furnivall, since it was one of his EETS translations which started me on my own research, and it saddens me to see the high-quality scholarship of the EETS editions restricted to a handful of specialists.
Bella Millett
Southampton University
