Religious context and eating in late Middle Ages castile Aubergines as a conflict between Jews, Muslims, and Christians

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the aubergine as a food item and as a tool at the service of the authorities in Spain between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. How could a type of food reveal existing relation- ships between the three religious communities of Spain, which was under Muslim rule till 1492, and under Christian rule in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as well, from the founding of the Inquisition onward? Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are three cultures with different rites and particularly identifiable owing to their liturgical practices, but not just that. Indeed, the role of food is central in such a unique multicultural context as Spain in the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. In this context, religion – Islamic then ­ Christian – appears as the main tool used by the country’s leaders to consolidate their powers. Only a study over the longue durée (Braudel 1958) allows one to grasp this clash of food cultures (Poulain 2018), which can be approached through a comparative analysis of sources written under different religious rules. This clash of food cultures reflects the coexistence withinone territory, in the same period, of three religions with different precepts and where what you eat – or do not eat – becomes a political weapon. And the aubergine – both as the kind of vegetable it is and as what it represented at the time – did, in this sense, play a considerable role in the construction and affirmation of the collective thinking of Renaissance Spain. Literary works and judicial trials thus reveal the thought processes of an anti-Semitic society (Baer 1998; Soria Mesa 2016) determined to see Spain as a unified nation – religiously and in terms of food culture – far removed from past Semitic cultural practices, to which the aubergine was connected. To begin this investigation and attempt to understand how the aubergine came to play a considerable role in this clash of food cultures, it seems logical – at an initial stage – to examine culinary sources. A parallel study is necessary – religion being an essential element on which this discussion is based – since one should clearly identify who the dominant and the domi- nated were, while stressing that the Jews always represented the minority. To read more: email me please