1 - Dante’s Gluttony

Summary

Abstract

This chapter defines gluttony in the medieval European context, reviewing the many spheres that influenced its interpretation: cultural, medical, social, and theological. It establishes that gluttony in Dante is an interaction with food that undermines the social contract and breaks down community. In this way, gluttony becomes a kind of anti-poetry for Dante: in contrast to the stil novo or “new style” that sought to inspire, unite, and create understanding at human and divine levels, gluttony is consumption that takes from others, stunts growth, and makes expression more difficult. Dante's gluttons thus become an interpretive key, unlocking a reading of his poetry that has not yet been appreciated by modern critics.

Keywords: abstinence, diet, digestion, gluttony, self-regulation

“City is gluttony.” —Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones

While the persistence of the human relationship with food may transcend boundaries of time and place, the terms of this relationship are dictated by many factors: geography, climate, faith, politics, and technology. Food continues to enjoy the same universal recognizability and presence in everyday life, and it continues to exercise the same intimacy with the individual while acting as a tool for binding individuals into groups, both spiritual and secular. The terms of our interaction with food are connected to technologies and mores, however. In medieval Italy, people spent more time and labor to access and consume food. The ways in which food punctuated the day were more decisive and specific, and the expectation that the governing body was a literal provider of food was more deeply rooted. For Dante, so thoroughly a product of his culture, gluttony was nuanced by these parameters, and in dialogue with the chief preoccupations of the late Middle Ages. If in the modern, developed world a fat body is the first and most evocative marker of the glutton, the premodern world was significantly less focused on the changes in physique that resulted from gluttony than on its causes and far-reaching consequences. Dante and his contemporaries understood gluttony as a complex equation of many qualitative decisions. Reading Dante's gluttons thus presents an opportunity to become better readers of Dante's poetry, to see what Dante took from and gave to food. By discussing food and eating practices, the poet infused them with meaning, and demonstrated the efficacy in expressing meaning through these figures.