Bread of Dreams
Sunday, March 19th, 2006 @ 17:25
Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe
by Piero Camporesi (1989)
Divided into 19 chapters, Bread of Dreams is an account on how (as summarized by the jacket) “many people in early modern Europe lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their hunger or by bread adulterated with hallucinogenic herbs.” (Related popular readings that would be of interest: Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (mentioned in the book too) and Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.)
Like his topics, Camporesi’s works are sporadic and difficult to summarize because they do not offer arguments so much as phantasmagoric images from (very) generous quotations of past literature. From these numerous texts, Camporesi dug traces of customs, their interprations and symbolic importance.
For example, the uses of human bodily parts (and excrements) for medical purposes (”cranial powder”, “dirt to be found around the neck of a man’s penis” (to be spread on a scorpion sting), etc.), cannibalism (both sacred and profane), obscene class differences (and calorie intakes), related political strategies allied to medical culture, and (of course) poppyseed bread. There is a lot of ground to cover in just a few two-hundred pages or so. No doubt some readers would pigeon-hole them as vestiges of ‘primitive’, ‘unenlightened’ mentality: ‘folklore’, ‘myths’, ’superstitions’.
But even if we try not to fall into Whiggish mentality (truthfully, those ‘bizarre’ practices are really not that unfamiliar), it is still difficult to dispel some nagging doubts on Camporesi’s sources and inferences. How much is a text (sermon, diary, poetry, etc.) relevant to the real practice? Unfortunately he does not adequately discuss this, and like I mentioned before, it reads more like arrays of images*, hallucinatory due more to its ‘marginal’ status in ’scholarly’ discussion, but it offers a very rich wealth of materials we can’t afford to neglect.
* Umberto Eco, in his introduction for The Juice of Life, wrote, “Camporesi’s books must be sipped slowly, bit by bit, to escape the obsession with the body triumphant, with all its miseries and glories. Reading them all at once would be like eating nothing but cream cakes for an entire week, or swimming for a week in one’s own excrement (which amounts to much the same).”
