Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, 1550-1650

ended

FOODCULT is the first project to establish both the fundamentals of everyday diet, and the cultural ‘meaning’ of food and drink, in early modern Ireland. Exploring the period 1550-1650, one of major economic development, unprecedented intercultural contact, but also of conquest, colonisation and war, it focusses on Ireland as a case-study for understanding the role of food in the demonstration and negotiation of authority and power, and as a site for the development of emergent ‘national’ food cultures. Moving well beyond the colonial narrative of Irish social and economic development, however, it enlarges the study of food to examine neglected themes in Irish historiography, including gender, class, kinship and religious identities, as expressed through the consumption and exchange of food and drink. Taking advantage of recent archaeological discoveries and the unprecedented accessibility of the archaeological evidence, the project develops a ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach, merging micro-historical analytical techniques with science and experimental archaeology, to examine what was eaten, where, why and by whom, at a level of detail deemed impossible for Irish history. Such questions will be explored in a comparative British Isles context, situating Irish developments within a broader analytical framework, whilst moving English food historiography beyond its current insular focus. As a corollary, the project will produce the first major database of diet-related archaeological evidence for this period Mapping Diet: Comparative Food-Ways in Early Modern Ireland, while making accessible the only existing household accounts, a hugely significant, and previously overlooked, quantitative and qualitative source for dietary trends. These resources will shed light, not just on consumption patterns, but on Ireland’s broader economic and social development, whilst significantly furthering research agendas in early modern historical and archaeological scholarship.