Feast: A History of Grand Eating

by Sir Roy Strong (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $4.76

  Toenails cut while dining out, meals served to wax effigies of the dead, napkins concealing singing birds, dishes descending from the ceiling - these are just a few of the more exotic aspects of everyman at table. From the stupendous banquets of the Ancient Babylonians, Fest covers five millennia of formal eating. Sharing a meal, in particular a grand one, has always been a complex social mechanism for uniting and dividing people. Such an event could signal peace, a marriage, a victory, an alliance, a coming-of-age, a coronation or a funeral. The feast was a vehicle for display and ostentation, for the parade of rank and hierachy, for flattering and influencing people as well as providing a theatre in which to excercise the art of conversation and the display of manners. Feast offers a fascinating and, at times, a highly unusual mirror of society. It gathers together for the first time all the ingredients which contributed to the phenomenon of the celebratory meal- the people, the clothes, the food, the setting, the action and its circumstances. In an age which has virtually abolished the shared meal as a central feature of daily living, Feast presents a revelatory picture