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

Camporesi, Piero

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0745618367 ISBN 13: 9780745618364

Casa editrice: Polity, 1996

Riassunto

Piero Camporesi is one of the most original and exciting cultural historians in Europe today. In this remarkable book he examines the imaginative world of poor and ordinary people in pre-industrial Europe, exploring their everyday preoccupations, fears and fantasies.
Camporesi develops the startling 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 careful reconstruction of the everyday imaginative life of peasants, beggars and the poor, Camporesi presents a vivid and disconcerting image of early modern Europe as a vast laboratory of dreams.
Bread of Dreams is a rich and engaging book which provides a fresh insight into the everyday life and attitudes of people in pre-industrial Europe. Camporesi's vision is breathtaking and his work will be much discussed among social and cultural historians. This edition includes a Preface by Roy Porter, Professor of the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

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

"Stimulating and fun to read." The Historian

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

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

"In Camporesi′s breathtaking vision, covering several centuriesof early modern peasant society, and focusing chiefly but notexclusively on Italy, real social history and l′histoire desmentalites fuse." Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for theHistory of Medicine

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Polity
• Data di pubblicazione: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0745618367
• ISBN 13: 9780745618364
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 218