SOURCE: Black, Iris. “Beyond Dietetics: The Use of Language of Food and Drink in the Allegorical Battles of Eustache Deschamps.” Dalhousie French Studies 48, (fall 1999): 3-18.

In the following essay, Black focuses on images and themes of food and consumption in two of Deschamps poems that present comic allegorical battles.

Food and drink, as elements of literature, are almost inevitably bound up with notions of social practice, individual consumption, or both. They are reminders of a world beyond the written text; they threaten to disrupt the integrity of the word. Yet even as they do so, they mirror and define its readers, bringing them closer to the literary construct which they help to create.¹

Eustache Deschamps, fourteenth-century court administrator and poet, regularly uses alimentary images in ways which shed light on the social experience of dining in his time, as well as on individual food habits. He may focus...