Medieval Mapping: The Cannibalistic Peripheries or Alfonso X

Societal axioms often begin with a mouthful. Accounting for variations in time and place, these mouthfuls respond to the important questions: What does one eat? When or how often does one eat? Where does one eat? With whom does one eat? The answers to these questions will vary across cultures, but they will always show that food and its consumption exert an incredible influence over our identities, perceptions of the world, and our place within it.  

If this hypothesis holds, a temporal and spatial shift would allow one to interpret any culture through an analysis of food. In this vein, the current presentation examines the 13th century kingdom of Castile in the Iberian Peninsula and food’s ability to reflect or shape hierarchies of power and define cultural and geographic borders in the writings of a 13th century king, Alfonso X across his contributions to historical, devotional, and legal genres (General Estoria, the Estoria de Espanna, Cantigas de Santa María, and the Siete Partidas). In these texts, descriptions of places tend to an anthropological categorizing of the world and the peoples within it based on gastronomic images. Projecting these images onto the known inhabited world, or ecumene (the Learned King’s term of choice), creates a map an entire imagined world conceived of and constructed by Alfonso X.