Abstract
Plutarch’s essay advising ‘How a yoong man ought to heare poets’ compares an appetite for books with an appetite for food, and suggests that young men should learn to exercise habitual restraint over both:
Youthes ought not onely to keepe their bodies sober and temperate in the pleasures of meate and drinke, but also much more to accustome their minds to a moderate delight in those things which they heare and read, using the same temperately as a pleasant and delectable sauce to give a better and more savorie taste to that which is healthfull, holsome and profitable therein.
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Notes
Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 11. Schoenfeldt discusses Spenser’s Castle of Alma as an illustration of ‘the ethical and physiological importance of digestion’ on pp. 40–73.
Juliet Fleming, ‘The Ladies’ Man and the Age of Elizabeth’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 158–81; Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 12.
Michail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968), p. 281. For an exploration of ‘carnival’s complicit place in dominant culture’, see Mary Russo, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’, in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 318–36 and p. 320.
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© 2007 Katharine A. Craik
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Craik, K.A. (2007). Eating His Words: Thomas Coryat and the Art of Indigestion. In: Reading Sensations in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206083_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206083_6
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