Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760

Eating the Enlightenment offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners—from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights—E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, Spary devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the draughts-playing café owner Charles Manoury, the “Turkish envoy” Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d’Agoty. Equally entertaining and enlightening, Eating the Enlightenment will be an original contribution to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.

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• The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Harvard Historical Studies)
• The Scientific Revolution (science.culture)
• The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680-1715 (New York Review Books Classics)
• American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)
• The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire
• Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America
• Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World
• The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
• A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy