El pan salvaje

by Camporesi Piero

Basándose en documentos de la época, el presente libro analiza los efectos que la mala distribución de los medios de subsistencia causó tanto en la sociedad como en el arte y la interpretación de la realidad, así como los medios a los que se acudió para paliar las consecuencias de la subalimentación y las las semillas y las hierbas alucinógenas, el pan mejorado con drogas , las medicinas preparadas con cráneos pulverizados, la carne humana.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Food, Medieval, Anthropology, Medieval History, Food and Drink

Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve never read a history book like this before. The style is impressionistic, lyrical, and, for lack of a better term, goth as hell. Camporesi’s thesis is that European peasants of the Early Modern period were constantly in an altered state of consciousness as a result of hunger, illness, adulterated food, and strange remedies:

One of the side-effects of famine, which has not been paid its necessary due, was a surprising fall in the level of mental health, already organically precarious and tottering, since even in times of ‘normality’ half-wits, idiots and cretins constituted a dense and omnipresent human fauna (every village and hamlet, even the tiniest, had its fool). The poor sustenance aggravated a biological deficiency and psychological equilibrium already profoundly compromised (syphilis, alcoholism, etc) and visibly deteriorated. If the devastating effects (beginning around the middle of the eighteenth century) of pellagra on mental equilibrium and the damage caused by a maize-based mono-alimentation are recognised, the effects caused by estranging and stupefying herbs and grains unknown, or almost unmentioned.

Whilst I found this conceptually appealing, it only really got through to me when Camporesi pointed out that today working people are also constantly altering their consciousness: with caffeine, which was unavailable in Europe prior to the 16th century and not widely accessible until the 18th. (As an aside, I am by nature so nocturnal that I cannot function as an employee without a small but vital quantity of coffee. Last Tuesday I tried going without and it was absolutely awful. My brain felt like sludge until 5pm, whereupon I got a bad headache. Needless to say, not a productive day. Surely someone has written a book about the interdependence between hot caffeinated beverages and the standardisation of working hours during the Industrial Revolution?) Anyway, Camporesi weaves together a tapestry of documentary evidence in poetically inflected run-on sentences to convince the reader that the past really is a foreign country, and they think differently there:

The most effective and upsetting drug, bitterest and most ferocious, has always been hunger, creator of unfathomable disturbances of mind and imagination. Further lifelike and convincing dreams grew out of this forced hallucination, compensating for the everyday poverty, the bleak view point of reason and the continual outrages perpetrated on miserable existences and infantile personalities by psychic diseases characterised by convulsive and hysterical tendencies, typical of a society crushed by the weight of the social pyramid’s layers, unchanging by command of divine law and royal will.

There are nineteen short chapters in the book, many of which overlap thematically. Of particular note were the chapter on cannibalism (which inevitably made me think of the TV show Hannibal - there is an aesthetic similarity too), several on medicines, and the one on worms. Regarding the latter, I had not previously contemplated the likelihood that everyone in the pre-modern world had intestinal parasites. Frankly, I wish I still hadn’t, as that chapter is truly revolting in places. More suited to the squeamish are the fascinating sections on the substitutes for wheat used during poor harvests, which resulted in bread with hallucinogenic properties. These included poppy, darnel, and vetch. ‘Bread of Dreams’ is a unique, strange, and beguiling book. Like The Art of Memory, it gives the reader a brief and vertiginous glimpse into the very different mental worlds of our ancestors.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is basically a set of essays on similar themes rather than a book that is presenting a unified coherent argument throughout. most of the essays about things like food and diet and poverty in the early modern period, and how early moderns thought about and viewed this kind of stuff. the books asserts a few things that might be controversial, the two biggest probably being that early modern peasants lived in a near constant state of hallucinatory delirium, owing to the deprivation from hunger and the consumption of bread adulterated with various things like herbs, unusual grains and seeds. he also suggests that this hallucinatory state might have sometimes been deliberately encouraged by the upper classes as a means of controlling the peasants. this is all conveyed through a very dense impressionistic style where he'll freely start quoting from renaissance thinkers you haven't heard of and give you passages like these, which convey the alienness of the past in a way that a more conventional history book wouldn't be able to:

"The collective journey into illusion, followed by ‘domestic drunkenness’- with the help of hallucinogenic seeds and herbs, arising from the background of chronic malnourishment and often hunger (which is the simplest and most natural producer of.mental alterations and dream-like states) - helps to explain the manifestation of collective mental delirium, of mass trances, of entire communities and villages exploding into choreal dancing. But it could also be the path which allows us to catch a glimpse of a two-sided mental model of the world, born under the ambiguous and equivocal sign of dualism, conditioned by a hallucinated and altered awareness of reality, where the layers are overturned, the universal reversed, the world ending up head-over-heels, with head on the ground and feet in the air. The result of an altered measuring of space and time, based on a non Euclidic geometry and a magical, dreamlike perspective where the relations and proportions are regulated by different instruments of verification and measure from those employed in the cultural areas where classical logic predominates, which are none the less not able to separate themselves totally from contamination introduced by the ‘culture of hunger’."

"In reality, western Europe, at least until the seventeenth century, has the appearance of an enormous house of dreams where the diurnal regime becomes confused with the nocturnal, and which is master of surrealistic mythologies whose shadows project themselves even on to the gloomy nosology of the humours tinted with ink and soot, perfecting the ancient figure of the werewolf.
...
The Europe of dreams and nocturnal hallucinations, repelled by mind-boggling cannibalism while at the same time yielding to the spell binding appeal of blood (‘there is neither thing nor food’, observed Girolamo Manfredi, a Bolognese doctor-astrologer of the late fifteenth century, ‘that is more agreeable to man’s nourishment than human flesh. The Europe that, as Jacques Le Goff has splendidly perceived, turned repeatedly to ‘agents of oblivion’ more than to the professional witch, domina herbarum et jerarum , and that had the first innovators of the artificial delights and narcotic sweetness accompanying a concocted and directed diet of dreams in the women of the home: the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, godmothers, the wet-nurses who nursed the infants, and the domestic casters of charms."

"The distress of the few in the face of the crazed surging in the streets, of the innumerable devourers of refuse - the ‘grub-men’ and ‘insectmen - and the anxiety of the groups in power regarding the great, threatening numbers, the uncontrolled proliferation of the wretched and the spectre of a negative society that, reluctant to be integrated, waves the banner of a society in opposition, all stimulate the obsessive image in Bonifacio's sonnets of the rising tide; water that rises irresistibly in order to bring about the final suffocation. The tension between the castes is transformed into this metaphorical series of verses from which seeps the fearful contempt of the eaters of white bread towards the eaters of dark bread or those who went without bread altogether: the picchia-porte (‘door-knockers’) or matta-panes (‘bread-crazy’) who expanded the great cloud of scoundrels and rogues , as threatening as a raging storm of locusts."

"By conquering hunger (at least temporarily), Western society has destroyed the reservoir of dreams which nourished that broadening of conscience, fundamentally irrational and visionary, which certain North American Indian tribes often used to reach by fasting, even before the use of mescaline. With the prohibition of hallucinogenic herbs they have been deprived of the advantages of a ‘fundamentally visionary image of the world’, as well as the features of a consciousness and a science which differ from those - in one dimension only - of reason."

"It is difficult for us to understand what profound changes of consciousness struck the undernourished populations of the past. But if one considers that hunger , like mescaline, produces hallucinations and the tremors of dementia, by inhibiting the formation of enzymes which serve to co-ordinate the ordered working of the brain and by reducing the level of glucose necessary to this organ which absolutely needs it in order to be able to function, we can make some assumptions - even without bearing in mind the poisons of vegetable origin: that a huge stratum of the poorest part of the population, suffering from a profound deterioration of will, socially demoralized and without interest in the highest and most human causes , lived in a world of squalid intellectual and moral apathy, altered in the relations of time and space: a universe of completely unreal extrasensory perceptions. ‘When the brain runs out of sugar, wrote an intellectual who had a deep knowledge of drugs, ‘the undernourished ego grows weak, can’t be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those temporal and spatial relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world."

[Pat Tuna · Rating 4 out of 5]

gran bello, cronache da un mondo schifoso deturpato dalla fame, un mondo in cui avrei vissuto volentieri

[Zachary Mezz · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting but limited work with some repetitive chapters. The main idea is very intriguing, but it seemed as though there simply wasn't enough preserved history for Camporesi to delve deeply into the subject.

[Christine Frost · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly informative! There aren't many books like this out there that cover poverty and famine in the Middle Ages/early Renaissance to this level of detail, and while it's a challenging read (its sometimes graphic nature re: disease and cannibalism, etc., and the density of the writing style), it's well worth the time--it provides rich context in terms of society as a whole, and attitudes toward poverty throughout time. Also makes interesting connections between medicines/remedies and superstition that persist to this day in some circles.

[Massimo Monteverdi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un approccio alla storia dei secoli pre-illuministi poco frequentato che avvicina la vita popolare attraverso lo studio della letteratura minore. E che scova un mondo sotterraneo indicibile nelle sue sofferenze e abbruttito nella sua ineluttabile miseria. I capitoli sul pane "stupefacente" e sull'antropofagia diffusa sono esemplari per rigore ed originalità. Lotta alla classe invece che di classe.

[Cinzia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lordura e sudiciume, vermi e insetti, e povertà, povertà fino alla morte.
In quel girone dantesco che era il mondo premoderno, segnato da pratiche e da un immaginario degni di Bosch, il pane è una mera chimera e al tempo stesso uno status symbol, che demarca il confine tra i "buoni" e i "cattivi". Non tutti i mali arrivano con il capitalismo.

[Devin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely dense but fascinating account of eating (and, importantly, not eating) in the early modern era. Our hungers inform the shape of our society and our imaginations.

[Ibrahim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A unique history book - the author manages to show how fundamentally alien medieval life is while at the same time oddly reminiscent. The central thesis is that the diet and the diseases prevalent in medieval peasant life along with the ever present hunger and starvation are in part a cause of the beliefs in magic and the irrational in medieval life. The author juxtaposes the ‘rationalist’ consumption of mind altering substances in the modern era with the poverty induced consumption of drugs in the medieval era to show how the supposedly irrational events of medieval life came about.

The similarities between the medieval and the modern are made evident with the consumption of drugs as a way to make life easier to digest, the fluctuating but every present homelessness, the strict class divide in care, diet and conceptualization. A unique book - its written in an almost whimsical manner - makes it interesting yet at the same time difficult to completely follow.

[Ivan Campedelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Affascinante viaggio nella cultura alimentare, nelle credenze e nella farmacologia delle classi subalterne dell'Italia moderna. L'impostazione metodologica delle ricerche di Camporesi favorisce una visione laterale del vissuto e delle mentalità dei poveri e degli emarginati dell'epoca: emerge in questo modo un affascinante quadro che predilige il lato bizzarro e "anormale" delle abitudini e nelle credenze riportate alla luce (dal potere narcotizzante del mondo vegetale, agli effetti più potenti della fame, tra allucinazioni e antropofagia), a discapito di una ricostruzione storica più imparziale (siamo nella polemica tra storiografia qualitativa e quantitativa, nella tanto criticata storia o antropologia interpretativa, la "thick description" di Cliffort Geertz, o le "zone di opacità culturale" de Il grande massacro dei gatti di Robert Darnton); ma una scrittura fluida e un fitto richiamo alle fonti letterarie, popolari e non (tra cantari e trattatistica), rendono la lettura di estremo interesse proprio in questo suo prediligere i momenti più difficili della vita urbana e rurale dell'Italia moderna: carestie e epidemie sono il filtro privilegiato da Camporesi per restituirci attraverso la sua analisi il vissuto alimentare, sanitario, farmacologico e religioso dell'epoca. Il pane selvaggio è, in questo modo, la vita fatta di espedienti della povera gente costantemente minacciata dalla fame, dalla malattia e dalla potenza dell'invisibile; una vita profondamente immersa nella natura, che cela una segreta abbondanza di erbe commestibili, miraggio di una pane che si offre spontaneamente come nelle utopiche visioni del Paese di Cuccagna; miraggio che subito rivela la sua inconsistenza nella realtà narcotica e tossica delle panificazioni alternative, elaborate durante le carestie. Natura che promette, quindi, ma anche che toglie, che infligge malattie, dolori e afflizioni attraverso soprattutto la più temibile delle sue forze: la fame. Il pane selvaggio di Camporesi è, dunque, un libro che dipinge questi aspetti materiali della povertà offrendosi ai lettori in modo duplice: agli specialisti, grazie a riferimenti precisi a fonti anche desuete e a un'analisi attenta e precisa di aspetti che possono sfuggire alla storiografia tradizionale; agli appassionati, dipingendo un quadro storico estremamente vivido, che si offre nella forza della scrittura di Camporesi, chiara e penetrante.

[Leonardo]

El inolvidable libro de Camporesi "El pan salvaje" cita originales y vividas fuentes de los estragos que causa el hambre en la piel y los órganos de sus víctimas, los olores pútridos, la suciedad y las heces, los cuerpos apilados en montones de estiércol y el canibalismo, con madres comiéndose a sus propias criaturas. Así, escribe sobre la «intimidad y asociación casi táctil con los productos de la muerte: cadáveres, huesos, enfermos y moribundos». Los campesinos hambrientos afluían periódicamente a las ciudades, creando poblaciones «semimarginadas» y mendicidad masiva.

La Revolución de La Riqueza Pág.17

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The original crazy - writer as well as bread!