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Darrera modificació: 2023-12-23
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Fumo, Jamie C., "All That Glitters: Chaucer's Pardoner, Safrounen, and Culinary Deception", Speculum, 99/1 (2023), 39-73.
- Resum
- This article analyzes an underexamined gastronomic metaphor in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: the Pardoner's boast about “saffron[ing]” his sermons with choice words of Latin (“The Pardoner's Prologue” 6.345). Saffron's pertinence to the Pardoner's rhetorical tactics, I demonstrate, is its fundamental medieval cultural association with appearance, and concomitantly illusion and deception, above flavor. The decorative arts underlying the Pardoner's reference to the golden spice bring new focus to his assault on signification by abusing rituals of sanctity, underscoring the temptation he presents as the very embodiment of false gold. I approach the Pardoner's culinary metaphor as a marked term that strategically invokes the technical medieval vocabulary of cookery. First the article analyzes the material and ideological work performed by saffron in medieval culinary texts and the relevance of its commercial circulation to the Pardoner's literary evolution. Next, it explores how the aurifying properties of saffron cross over to medieval moral discourse concerning spicerie. A nuanced ethic of the comestible informs a creative interface between Chaucer's Parson and Pardoner that rests on opposed figurative and material manifestations of gold. Supporting this interpretation is Chaucer's Boethian lyric “The Former Age,” which interlaces the nostalgic ideal of an age of gold, the materiality of spices, and murderous greed. Lastly, the article considers culinary tricks and spectacles described in medieval cookbooks, including some that profanely emulate the imagery of sacred Christian mystery, as a point of reference for the Pardoner's rhetorical capacity to reconfigure what is “real” by manipulating how it is seen.
- Matèries
- Alimentació
Cuina i confiteria
Religió
- URL
- https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/spc/current
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