The Peacock’s Flesh: Pavoniculture, Culinary Expertise, and Power in Late Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean

A widespread, yet under-analyzed staple of the elite medieval table, the practice of cooking and serving roasted peacocks in their own skins and plumage as if they were alive is but one example of a pervasive aspect of elite medieval food culture known as entremets. Ontologically transgressive and overtly artificial, the reclothed peacock drew on prevailing intellectual discourses of nature, wonder, and princely magnificence in an arena often considered separate—and usually analyzed separately—from medieval intellectuals’ sphere of influence. By examining a fundamentally ephemeral material practice alongside complementary textual and visual representations, the aim of this dissertation is to produce a better understanding of this courtly culinary practice as a physical manifestation of the predominantly textual and disembodied discourses of medieval natural philosophy, history, literature, and theology. This dissertation asks how we can understand the roasted and reclothed peacock and what we can learn from the peacock entremets about medieval culture more broadly, ultimately, I suggest, revealing the active role material has always played in the construction of intellectual culture. Widely observed and remarked upon by medieval and modern historians alike as a characteristic example of elite conspicuous consumption, the practice of reclothing peacocks has attracted fleeting, rather than sustained, scholarly attention. Indeed, the peacock entremets is uniquely suited to be an object of study. Medieval recipe collections suggest that the reclothed bird was the prototypical gastronomic entremets, upon which the entire culinary practice of serving roasted animals reclothed in their own skin was predicated. As a non-native species that was introduced to the Mediterranean and Europe in Late Antiquity, peacocks retained a proto-Orientalist association with “the East” and with paradise in both Christian and Islamic contexts. The putative exoticism of the peacock offers the possibility of considering the bird as involved in, perhaps even emblematic of, changing medieval discourses of race and geography prior to European colonization of the Americas. Studying the reclothed animal via the example of the peacock thus affords a three-fold opportunity for reconstructing medieval attitudes toward nature as represented by rare animals which were both commodities and comestibles. First, it elucidates the role of food in constructions of difference. This allows me to bring insights developed by scholars of post-sixteenth-century global food studies and critical race studies to bear on food practices which predate the Columbian exchange. Second, it illuminates the often-contradictory attitudes medieval people held towards matter and those who had the ability to manipulate it, using the novel example of food and professional cooks. Third, it troubles binaries often taken for granted in scholarly study: material and intellectual, high and low, elite and popular. Placing the peacock at the center of this study allows for hitherto obscured conceptual and material networks across the medieval Mediterranean and Europe to come to the fore, revealing the variable position of exotic animals and their transformation at human hands in the imagined and actual landscapes of the premodern world. Transplanted from its place of origin into new physical spaces and, once dead, transformed into the image of its living self before being served at the table, the medieval reclothed peacock flaunted wealth, power, and culinary skill through the bodies, living and dead, of the animal itself.