Using Household Accounts As Evidence of Food Consumption: Perspectives From Early Modern Ireland

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Records of household management are well known to historians of consumption and offer rich evidence of what people actually ate in the past. Though their survival is erratic in early modern Europe, several examples exist from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland. This paper introduces the different accounts studied by the FoodCult project, including those from a pre-Reformation monastery, a Dublin building site, and the castle of the country’s most powerful English officeholder, and how they can be analysed. It goes on to discuss the various kinds of information these accounts contain and the research topics, such as seasonality and provenance, for which they are particularly useful. Finally, the paper reflects on the limitations of such evidence and how they need to be integrated with other approaches, like literary analysis and archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• FoodCult: Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, c.1550-1650

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Contact(s): Nicole Haddow