Accessibility statement

Feast & Famine: Food, Power & Inequality in Medieval England - HIS00114M

« Back to module search

  • Department: History
  • Module co-ordinator: Dr. Tom Johnson
  • Credit value: 20 credits
  • Credit level: M
  • Academic year of delivery: 2023-24

Module summary

In medieval England, you were what you ate, because what you ate was closely related to your socio-economic status: if you were poor, you ate bread, pottage, and drank weak ale, while if you were rich, you ate meat, used spices, and consumed wine. This module explores this fundamental relationship between food and inequality in the Middle Ages as a way of exploring the ‘biopower’ of medieval governance – the way in which power was exerted through control over the very means of life itself.

Food expressed and channelled inequalities of power in many ways. It was not only a daily necessity for the sustenance of the agricultural population, but also a fashionable commodity to be conspicuously presented and consumed by the powerful, a prominent way of bringing people together into communality and community, and abstinence from it a marker of intense spirituality. Food was thus quite literally a matter of life and death, and as such, tracing its production, movement, consumption, and ideological meanings opens up some fascinating ways of understanding power and governance in the Middle Ages.

The module will explore these themes through a range of evidence made available in translation (or in Middle English), such as court rolls regulating food production, literary treatises about hunting, the orders for guild feasts and pageants, and medieval recipe books. Using these sources, students will be encouraged to engage with a range of medieval food historiographies, from those concerned with diet and standards of living to cultural and political histories of consumption, as well as modern critical theory on food justice and biopolitics.

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Semester 2 2023-24

Module aims

The aims of this module are to:

  • Develop skills of source analysis and interpretation
  • Assess a range of source material and relevant secondary works; and
  • Develop students’ powers of evidence-based historical argument, both orally and in writing.

Module learning outcomes

Students who complete this module successfully will:

  • Demonstrate a knowledge of a specialist historiographical literature;
  • Present findings in an analytical framework derived from a specialist field;
  • Solve a well-defined historiographical problem using insights drawn from secondary and, where appropriate, primary sources.
  • Set out written findings using a professional scholarly apparatus.

Module content

Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.

Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:

  1. Consumption and inequality
  2. Grain and governance
  3. Animal bodies: hunting, butchery, and carnality
  4. Feasting and commensality
  5. Holy hunger: abstinence and fasting
  6. Starvation and charity
  7. Recipes for living: regimens and medicine
  8. The art of nourishment

Assessment

Task Length % of module mark
Essay/coursework
Long Essay		 N/A 100

Special assessment rules

None

Additional assessment information

Students submit a 2,000-word formative essay in week 9.
A 4,000-word summative essay will be due in the assessment period.

Reassessment

Task Length % of module mark
Essay/coursework
Long Essay		 N/A 100

Module feedback

Students will typically receive written feedback on their formative essay within 10 working days of submission.

Work will be returned to students in their seminars and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative essay during their tutor’s student hours—especially during week 11, before, that is, they finalise their plans for the Summative Essay.

For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.

For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.

Indicative reading

For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:

  • Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (Oxford, Oxford University Press,1996)
  • Christopher Dyer, Standards of living in the later Middle Ages: Social change in England, c.1200-1520 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989)
  • C. M. Woolgar, The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press 2016)


The information on this page is indicative of the module that is currently on offer. The University is constantly exploring ways to enhance and improve its degree programmes and therefore reserves the right to make variations to the content and method of delivery of modules, and to discontinue modules, if such action is reasonably considered to be necessary by the University. Where appropriate, the University will notify and consult with affected students in advance about any changes that are required in line with the University's policy on the Approval of Modifications to Existing Taught Programmes of Study.