As is often the case with books whose title means "Eating and Drinking in the Middle Ages" (no less than three of them were published in German within the last two decades), the actual subject of L. Pychlau-Ezli's work lies in the subtitle: "The Food Code in Middle High German Epics." Food and meals are indeed important topics and motifs in the corpus here under scrutiny, that is in epic literature written in the vernacular between the mid-twelfth and the mid-thirteenth century. In other words, this is a study of the literary treatment and the social significance of knightly meals and feasts in a selection of high medieval German verse narratives whose subject and audience are "courtly" (höfisch) and "chivalric" (ritterlich): mostly adaptations of French romances, Arthurian or other, along with a few other epics such as Nibelungenlied. It should be noted that reading this book requires some degree of familiarity with the language and context of the corpus: the quotations in Latin and Old French are always translated, but not those from the Middle High German works, and there is no particular presentation of the poems.
The book begins with a long introductory chapter, which asks the main questions and aims to situate the study within a wider perspective, particularly within the social sciences: Pychlau-Ezli's perspective appears to be mostly anthropological and sociological, as she concentrates on the "food code," implementing a semiological (even, sometimes, structuralist) approach in order to decipher what Gerd Althoff has called "the rules of the game" (Spielregeln) or to clarify what constituted "the actualization of the courtly habitus at the table" (86). Then the three core chapters address three main social situations for the observation of food practices: when one person is eating alone; when two people are eating together; when many eaters are concerned. A short conclusion rounds up the topic and opens on the prospective treatment of a few later works, in which the same themes appear.
The core chapter entitled "Allein essen. Codierung höfischer Identität" (Eating alone. Encoding courtly identity) considers first how characters such as Parzival and Rennewart (in two works by Wolfram von Eschenbach,Parzival and Willehalm) become integrated to a court society through learning and progressively incorporating courtly food manners. In a second section, Wolfram's Parzival and two other Arthurian poems, Hartmann von Aue's Erec and Iwein, provide examples of what the author calls "disintegration" and "reintegration": the process of leaving the court, travelling into the wild (particularly the forest, with its hermits), and then reentering the court, may be signified through food tropes.
The title of the next core chapter is "Zu zweit essen. Codierung höfischer Intimität" (When two are eating. Encoding courtly intimacy). A first section explains how food and meals may be studied as "acts of intimacy," a second one shows that they are also "metaphors of intimacy": in fact, sharing food often (but not always) leads to sharing a bed. Hartmann's Arthurian epics are studied again (Erec for its vision of marriage, Iwein for its presentation of friendship between the hero and his companion, the lion), along with Wolfram's Willehalm (in a quite innovative consideration of how fasting can be construed as an act of intimacy). The corpus then widens to include Gottfried von Straßburg's Tristan (where food appears to be a metaphor of love), Heinrich von Veldeke'sEneasroman (with an analysis of hunting and venison as proxies of the erotic relation between Aeneas and Dido), and Konrad von Würzburg's Herzmaere (a version of the tale of the "Eaten Heart").
The last of the core chapters is called "Mit vielen essen. Codierung höfischer Sozialität" (When many are eating. Encoding courtly sociability). Its two sections consider on the one hand banquets and feasts, on the other hand meals set in contexts of hospitality. Of course, the study of feasting concentrates on how the banquets of the Round Table are treated in Arthurian works (they can be seen as displays of courtly magnificence, but also as rites of passage, e.g. in the context of weddings, coronations or the dubbing of knights), but here other poems enter the corpus, particularly the Nibelungenlied (which provides interesting cases of "anti-feasts"). As for hospitality, it is a way to initiate or express homosocial bonds or mutual commitments (such as a vassal's fealty), the table being a place where social links are embodied.
Surely, medievalists who read this book will be both interested and surprised. To put it shortly, it is often difficult to see where this book is situated: all too often, its scope appears to be either too narrow or too wide. The analyses are generally precise and the readings of literary texts seem convincing, and they are often placed alongside much wider considerations from the social sciences; what is missing is a better medievalcontextualisation. Indeed, the introduction situates the book within two main perspectives: that of sociology, anthropology and philosophy (quoting and using works by Georg Simmel, Arnold van Gennep, Norbert Elias, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu and others), and that of medieval German literary studies.
Unfortunately, too little is considered between those two extremities. The book's bibliography, overwhelmingly in German, overlooks most of the historical literature produced over the last four decades in English, French or Italian, on food, meals, and table manners in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: works by Constance Hieatt, Caroline Bynum, Bruno Laurioux, Christopher Dyer, and more recently Fiona Whelan, are completely ignored, and Massimo Montanari only gets one mention for a chapter published in a German book. The main comparison with a "historical-realist" feast is drawn with a court banquet given at Mainz in 1184 by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, which was described by several contemporary chroniclers; but even this potentially useful parallel, mentioned in the introduction, is almost never used in the analysis of the poems. Perhaps even more critically, the author also overlooks most of the books and papers concerned with the topic of food in medieval literature, which happen not to have been written in German: works by Karin Becker, Wendy Pfeffer or Nelly Labère, to quote only a few of them. Even Stephen Jaeger's seminal book on The Origins of Courtliness (1985), which includes many interesting pages on food and meals, does not appear in the bibliography (another of his books, albeit less relevant, gets a few mentions); for an understanding of what constitutes "courtliness," the author relies mostly on Joachim Bumke's excellent and, by many aspects, parallel book on Höfische Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter (1986, transl. Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages, 1991).
All this brings Pychlau-Ezli to claim that the subject of food has not been considered enough by students of medieval literature (15): that may be true in the narrower field of Middle High German epics, and her book is indeed a welcome addition; yet it would have profited greatly from a better consideration of existing secondary literature, both historical and literary. Let me give four examples of that.
1. The section on the "integration," "disintegration" and "reintegration" which take place when knights learn, forget or re-learn table manners is conducted through a comparison with French source texts (mostly Chrétien de Troyes's romances). Yet almost no study of the place of food in this vast corpus is quoted: a single paper by Jacques Le Goff gets used (probably because it was translated in German), but Anita Guerreau-Jalabert's influential article on "Aliments symboliques et symbolique de la table dans les romans arthuriens (XIIe-XIIIe siècle)" (Symbolic foods and table symbolism in Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, published in Annales, 1992/3, pp. 561-94) is overlooked. A result of this is that the author seems to be discovering what had been known for decades...
2. Pychlau-Ezli shows very clearly how "eating in pairs" can take different meanings in diverse knightly and chivalric contexts. Considering works by Jaeger and others would have made it possible to situate these meanings in a longer continuum; even if it had to be limited to German literary corpuses, some kind of comparison with the eleventh-century Latin epic Ruodlieb would have been welcome.
3. The motif of the "Eaten Heart" is considered through only two secondary references, both in German. Yet, there is a vast bibliography on this subject alone, proving that the story appears in many other works, medieval or later, in many languages. There is no way for someone who reads these few pages (212-6) to assess whether Konrad von Veldeke treated this motif in an ordinary way or not.
4. Similarly, the narrative motif of the "anti-feast" has been much studied in secondary literary studies, fromBeowulf to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus through many other works of both prose and poetry. Is its treatment in the Nibelungenlied original or commonplace? We will not learn this from reading the relevant section of this book.
These last comments may sound a bit harsh, so let me finish on a more positive note. This book is derived from a PhD dissertation, which explains why many of the threads are left untied. It tries, sometimes with success, to place its analyses within wider anthropological and sociological questions. But most importantly, it does represent a welcome addition to the (already vast) bibliography on the treatment of food and meals in medieval literature, concentrating on a vernacular corpus which definitely deserved to be explored.