Culinary Professions in Early Modern Italian Comedy
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Culinary Professions in Early Modern Italian Comedy April Danielle Weintritt A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies. Chapel Hill 2018 Approved by: Ennio Rao Maggie Fritz-Morkin Jessica Wolfe Marisa Escolar Federico Luisetti © 2018 April Danielle Weintritt ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT April D. Weintritt: Culinary Professions in Early Modern Italian Comedy (Under the direction of Ennio Rao) This dissertation explores representations of the cook and the deliveryman – il cuoco e lo zanaiuolo – in Renaissance Italian comedy (1509-1560). The figure of the cook is well established in ancient comedy and in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae (The Learned Banqueters), and centuries later several playwrights, including Ludovico Ariosto, Agnolo Firenzuola, Alessandro Piccolomini, Giovan Battista Gelli, and Giovanni Maria Cecchi, feature cooks and novel food purveyors in their comedies. In a rapidly changing Early Modern society, culinary professionals provide crucial insight into the sustenance of households in urban centers, mediating how communities interact with their foods. As members of the working class, cooks and deliverymen offer a unique perspective on social dynamics of the period, different from that offered by political and religious courts. Comedies that include these professionals rely, in part, on previous canons to characterize the figures, yet they do so in conversation with contemporary settings and everyday realities of Early Modern Italy. As cooks reappear on the stage throughout the sixteenth century, typified roles establish them as a Renaissance version of the classical stock character. The development of the novel deliveryman as a member of the cast, instead, suggests an increasingly diverse number of professions in Italian city centers and a consequential push towards innovative representations of a more inclusive world in Early Modern theater. iii “Alla mia massara e il mio cuochino – siete i doni (δῶρα) della mia vita” iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 1: PARADIGMS OF THE COOK …………………………………………………21 INTRODUCTION ………………..……………………………………………………. 21 THE ANCIENT COOK: MAGEIROS AND COQUUS ……………………...…………23 THE MEDIEVAL COOK: THE DEVIL IN THE KITCHEN…………………………. 30 THE CULINARY SWERVE: HOW THE COOK BECAME MODERN ………...……47 CHAPTER 2: THE COOKS OF ARIOSTO, FIRENZUOLA, AND PICCOLOMINI ………...71 INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………71 AN EARLY EXAMPLE OF THE COOK: DALIO IN ARIOSTO’S I SUPPOSITI……72 “GRATTUGIA, GRATTUGIA SENZA CACIO:” FIRENZUOLA’S COOK IN I LUCIDI …………………………………………………………………………… 88 PICCOLOMINI’S COOK CORNACCHIA: UN AMORE COSTANTE FOR AGNOLETTA ……………………………………………………………………105 CHAPTER 3: FLORENCE’S ZANAIUOLI IN MID-SIXTEENTH CENTURY COMEDY…………………………………………………………………120 INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………..120 ZANAIUOLI = DELIVERYMEN ……………………………………………………..126 THE COMEDIES OF GIOVAN BATTISTA GELLI…………………………130 GIOVAN MARIA CECCHI’S L’AMMALATA………………………………...141 FRANCESCO D’AMBRA’S I BERNARDI AND OTHER MENTIONS OF ZANAIUOLI……………………………………………………………………144 v THE PLACE OF ZANAIUOLI AND OTHER URBAN CULINARY PROFESSIONALS IN COMEDY AND THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT…………………...……………149 CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………………...162 REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………166 vi INTRODUCTION This dissertation explores representations of the cook and the deliveryman – il cuoco e lo zanaiuolo – in Renaissance Italian comedy (1509-1560). The figure of the cook is well established in ancient comedy and in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae (The Learned Banqueters), and centuries later several playwrights, including Ludovico Ariosto, Agnolo Firenzuola, Alessandro Piccolomini, Giovan Battista Gelli, and Giovanni Maria Cecchi, feature cooks and novel food purveyors in their comedies. In a rapidly changing Early Modern society, culinary professionals provide crucial insight into the sustenance of households in urban centers, mediating how communities interact with their foods. As members of the working class, cooks and deliverymen offer a unique perspective on social dynamics of the period, different from that offered by political and religious courts. Comedies that include these professionals rely, in part, on previous canons to characterize the figures, yet they do so in conversation with contemporary settings and everyday realities of Early Modern Italy. As cooks reappear on the stage throughout the sixteenth century, typified roles establish them as a Renaissance version of the classical stock character. The development of the novel deliveryman as a member of the cast, instead, suggests an increasingly diverse number of professions in Italian city centers and a consequential push towards innovative representations of a more inclusive world in Early Modern theater. In this study I will adopt different approaches. Any study of the theatrical representations of culinary professionals must consider the state of material and metaphorical food studies, of Italian Renaissance theater studies, and how these two relate to notions of the comic. Current 1 trends in food studies interact with literary and artistic fields to address how – and what – food communicates about people and places; food is used both to create social and political distinctions and to bring people and discourses together. Italian Renaissance theater studies have always been in a tough spot: on the one hand, exalting the masters of commedia erudita and, on the other, denouncing a lack of originality among all other “average” playwrights. Attempts have been made over the years since the 1970s to pinpoint the innovation of Renaissance playwrights, most of these highlighting only the most radical levels of innovation that usually serve future studies in the genre very little. The most difficult realm in which cooks and food purveyors must be studied is the comic, which intersects both with the playful use of food and a playwright’s understanding of the genre. The comic, particularly non-satiric laughter, is not a fixed point now, nor was it in Early Modern Italy. Theater scholars’, and in particular Douglas Radcliff- Umstead’s and Richard Andrews’, appreciation of the divergence between theory and practice in comedy helps us understand how deliverymen can create laughter without being exclusively laughed at. While it may seem trite, this is important. It is, in my opinion, properly the flexible social position of the culinary professional that releases him from the carnival-comedy role of the servant and warrants such a study. To close the introduction, I will outline the three chapters that compose this study. Food is an essential unifier of peoples and places, highlighting our needs for survival and nutrition, community, pleasure, yet also the omen of starvation and plight. Foods and their diverse meanings are the subject of many recent literary and cultural studies. Massimo Montanari tells us that food is always a cultural fact, in production, preparation, and consumption. Indeed, in At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern 2 Europe, Timothy Tomasik and Juliann Vitullo introduce food as a ‘total social fact’ drawing on the terminology of Marcel Mauss. As an integral part of culture, foodways represent a privileged site of cultural communication. Food communicates both materially and metaphorically: it – and culinary professionals – are the subject of real, historical social data and of the symbolic codification of meanings. The material and metaphorical cultures of food intersect to reveal how preparation and consumption nourish and feed social, cultural, and spiritual realities. And it is near impossible to dissociate on a superficial level metaphorical from material uses of food in the arts. Yet this fact demonstrates the richness and complexity of food’s place in human culture (Tomasik and Vitullo xi-ii). Indeed, some scholars have worried that the material culture of food and literary genres, such as satire, parody, and fiction more broadly, will clash in a struggle between truth and fantasy. This is a true challenge, to which many have responded. Food scholars Massimo Montanari, Alberto Capatti, and Jean-Louis Flandrin are careful to provide historical/anthropological perspectives on gastronomic culture. Piero Camporesi, Allen Grieco, and Ken Albala, very different scholars amongst themselves, have nevertheless spent their individual careers carving out a space in which we can talk of food as materiality and hyperbole, as everyday ritual and carnival. Thus, alimentary-focused discourse can be analyzed within literary tradition and for its linguistic invention. Here, I always include the cook and other culinary professionals in my idea of alimentary-focused discourse. In my view, we simply cannot dissociate how we study food from how we approach those who prepare it. In Early Modern studies, we have already mentioned Timothy Tomasik and Juliann Vitullo’s edited volume At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2007). Michel Jeanneret also completed a massive, wonderful study of Rabelais and other humanist and Renaissance banquets with his Des mets et des mots: 3 banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance - 1991). He sought to illustrate how banquet and convivial discourse unifies high art and low culture at