[Page numbers of the printed text appear at the right in bold.]

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Notes 1. Research on medieval food has recently become much more widespread. See, for example, Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Melitta Weiss Adamson (New York, 1995). In this collection a particularly relevant article is that by Terence Scully, which is cited below. One aspect of medieval food which no one seems to have considered much is that the dishes served at a feast might have been constructed in ways that fit in with common knowledge about humors, illness, and the properties of food. Despite the detailed descriptions of feasting and food by William Edward Mead, The English Medieval Feast (1931; repr. New York, 1967), Mead's analysis is notable for its condescension toward medieval food and those who consumed it. He repeatedly remarks on the indigestibility of medieval dishes and their overuse of spices, comparing them to what he considers the plainer, healthier, and more digestible foods of his own day. Mead fails to mention that many people consider modern English food as unappetizing as he seems to consider medieval English food, and that the medieval aristocracy probably liked what they ate and did not consider it indigestible. They were in fact at pains to choose digestible foods, as various contemporary medical treatises demonstrate. They simply had different standards than the modern Englishman does.
In Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society (University Park, Penn., 1976), Bridget A. Henisch discusses how fast and feast days were distinguished and why; she also reviews cooking methods, cooks and their kitchens, menus and manners, and the reasons for having subtleties at a medieval feast. She points out that the common assumption that large quantities of spices were invariably used in medieval recipes is unwarranted since the recipes specify quantities only very rarely. Henisch, Fast and Feast, p. 111, mentions that "herbs and flowers were valued for their medicinal properties," but never seriously explores the idea that a cook might have evaluated the medicinal and humoral qualities of all the ingredients of a dish. Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony (New York, 1976), covers some of the same material as Henisch, and she also examines the market laws concerning food and the provisions for water supply in London. In addition she touches briefly on the medieval identification of food with character. This may be the nearest anyone has come to really asking what festival foods implied to the medieval mind, but again the question of medicinal evaluations of food is nonexistent. Peter W. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England (Phoenix Mill, 1993), has some inter-

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esting information on nutrition and considers whether vitamin deficiency would have been prevalent in medieval England, concluding finally that minor lacks were probably inevitable but that major deficiencies leading to scurvy and other deficiency diseases were not common except in times of famine. But neither Hammond nor anyone has taken a serious look at the question of how medieval people themselves perceived ctheir diet or how they thought it related to their health.
2. Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helth (1541; repr. New York, n.d.), preface.
3. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England , p. 127.
4. Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 140-41.
5. Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class , p. 142.
6. Henisch, Fast and Feast , p. 56.
7. Cosman, Fabulous Feasts , p. 39.
8. Henisch, Fast and Feast , p. 67.
9. Hippocrates: with an English Translation by W. H. S. Jones, Loeb Classical Library, Hippocrates, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 49.
10. Galen on the Therapeutic Method: Books I and II, trans. R. J. Hankinson (Oxford, 1991), p. 52.
11. Edward J. Kealey, Medieval Medicus: A Social History of Anglo-Norman Medicine (Baltimore, 1981), pp. 5-6.
12. Frederick James Furnivall, ed., Early English Meals and Manners (1868; repr. Detroit, 1969), p. lxx.
13. Furnivall, Early English Meals and Manners, p. 32.
14. Furnivall, Early English Meals and Manners, p. 7.
15. Terence Scully, "Tempering Medieval Food," in Food in the Middle Ages, ed. Melitta Weiss Adamson (New York, 1995), p. 6.
16. Scully, "Tempering Medieval Food," p. 7.
17. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1987), p. 215 (VII.851-56).
18. This sort of symbolic display of wealth, and the even more precise symbolism provided by the subtleties which usually concluded each course, deserve a much more extended analysis; but that is outside the scope of this paper, which is primarily focused on the more utilitarian purposes to which foods were put. There are several brief mentions of the use of symbolic colors in feasting later in the paper, for example in the discussion of the "colde bakemete" served at the coronation feast of Henry VI, but a fuller treatment of the topic of symbolism in food and feast will have to wait for another time.
19. The Riverside Chaucer, p. 253 (VII.2835-41).
20. See Scully, "Tempering Medieval Food," passim, for a very useful analysis of the Latin verb temperare and its significance in medieval cooking and medicine.
21. Margaret Sinclair Ogden, ed., The "Liber de Diversis Medicinis", EETS o.s. 207 (London, 1938), p. 31.
22. Ogden, The "Liber de Diversis Medicinis", pp. 31-32.

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23. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 20v; Pedanius Dioscorides, The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, trans. John Goodyer, ed. Robert T. Gunther (New York, 1959), p. 645.
24. Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, pp. 127, 104; Pliny the Elder, Natural History: in Ten Volumes, Volume VI, Libri XX-XXIII, with an English Translation by W. H. S. Jones, Loeb Classical Library, Pliny, vol. 6 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 87.
25. A Chronicle of London, from 1089 to 1483 (London, 1827), p. 162.
26. C. R. Cheney, Handbook of Dates for Students of English History (London, 1961).
27. Cosman, Fabulous Feasts, p. 40.
28. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England, p. 74.
29. A Chronicle of London, p. 164.
30. Furnivall, Early English Meals and Manners, pp. 24, 94, 163.
31. Saint Albertus Magnus, Man and the Beasts: De Animalibus (Books 22-26), trans. James J. Scanlan, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 47 (Binghamton, 1987), pp. 325, 330.
32. Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books, ed. Thomas Austin (London, 1888), p. 89. Cited hereafter as TFCCB.
33. Hippocrates, p. 329; Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 27v, 30v.
34. Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, p. 645.
35. Hippocrates, pp. 307, 311.
36. Pliny, Natural History, p. 451.
37. Mead, The English Medieval Feast, p. 58.
38. Furnivall, Early English Meals and Manners, pp. 33, 36; TFCCB, p. 77.
39. TFCCB, pp. 9-10.
40. Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 27, 36, 28.
41. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 27; Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, p. 125; Pliny, Natural History, p. 125.
42. A Chronicle of London, p. 164.
43. Hippocrates, p. 321.
44. Albertus, Man and the Beasts, p. 369; TFCCB, p. 106.
45. Cosman, Fabulous Feasts, p. 50; Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 25v-26; Pliny, Natural History, p. 451.
46. A Chronicle of London, p. 118.
47. Hippocrates, p. 279.
48. A Chronicle of London, pp. 168-9.
49. TFCCB, p. 70.
50. Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 19v-20, 33v.
51. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 23v.
52. Hippocrates, p. 311; Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 30v, 36; Pliny, Natural History, p. 261.
53. A Chronicle of London, p. 168; TFCCB, p. 81.
54. Albertus, Man and the Beasts, p. 190; Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 20.
55. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 30v.

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56. A Chronicle of London, p. 169.
57. TFCCB, p. 55.
58. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 19; Albertus, Man and the Beasts, p. 74.
59. Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 20, 31.
60. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 22.
61. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 68; Faye Marie Getz, ed., Healing and Society in Medieval England: A Middle English Translation of the Pharmaceutical Writings of Gilbertus Anglicus, Wisconsin Publications in the History of Science and Medicine 8 (Madison, 1991), p. xl.
63 Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 36, 74.
64. Thomas Woodcock and John Martin Robinson, The Oxford Guide to Heraldry (Oxford, 1988), pp. 187-88.
65. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 29v.
66. The Coronation of Richard III: The Extant Documents, ed. Anne F. Sutton and P. W. Hammond (Gloucester, 1983), p. 294.
67. The Coronation of Richard III, ed. Sutton and Hammond, p. 294.
68. TFCCB, p. 116.
69. Albertus, Man and the Beasts, p. 190.
70. Hippocrates, p. 321.
71. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 21.
72. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 30v; Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, pp. 200, 645; Pliny, Natural History, pp. 139, 451; Hippocrates, p. 331.
73. Sutton and Hammond, The Coronation of Richard III, p. 294.
74. TFCCB, p. 109.
75. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 21.
76. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 27v.
77. Hippocrates, p. 329; Pliny, Natural History, p. 27.
78. Pliny, Natural History, p. 35; Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 29.
79. Pliny, Natural History, p. 451; Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, p. 645.
80. Sutton and Hammond, The Coronation of Richard III, p. 295.
81. TFCCB, p. 51.
82. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 26.
83. Pliny, Natural History, p. 483; Hippocrates, p. 335.
84. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 30v.
85. Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, p. 125; Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 36-36v.
86. Sutton and Hammond, The Coronation of Richard III, p. 294.
87. Cosman, Fabulous Feasts, p. 74.
88. TFCCB, p. 22.
89. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 32v.
90. Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, p. 15-16; Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 30v-31.
91. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 30v; Pliny, Natural History, p. 261.
92. Pliny, Natural History, p. 511; Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, p. 48.
93. Pliny, Natural History, p. 513; Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 27, 74.
94. Elyot, Castel of Helth, pp. 34v, 20-20v.

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95. Furnivall, Early English Meals and Manners, pp. 9-12.
96. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 32v.
97. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 30v; Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, pp. 15-16.
99. Elyot, Castel of Helth, p. 36; Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, p. 125.
99. Dioscorides, Greek Herbal, p. 8.
100. Pliny, Natural History, p. 333.