Monday,        October 21

Butchers, Cannibals, and Meat-Eating in Seventeenth-Century Rome

(Brad Bouley, History, University of California, Santa Barbara)

In Rome in 1644 four butchers were accused of killing seven of their fellow Roman citizens, stripping the meat from their bones, and grinding it together with pork to make sausage, which was then sold to other Romans from their shop behind the Pantheon. Although the butchers were quickly executed, their tale was not so easily forgotten. In several pamphlets issued around the event, the story of the cannibal butchers turned into a morality tale about what to eat—or not. Of course, in the capital of Catholicism this discussion turned back to the Eucharist and what it meant to eat the flesh of Christ. Such concerns also echoed broader dietary issues in the capital, as Romans had been increasingly consuming more meat in the early seventeenth century. Through looking at medical and theological theories of nutrition and consumption as well as food regulations in the Holy City, this paper seeks to use the cannibal butcher episode to talk about the production of food–and especially meat–in Rome, as well as nutrition from both a moral and medical point of view.

912 Sproul Hall, 3:10–5 PM

Sponsored by the UC Davis Humanities Institute

Friday,                May 17

Symposium: “Innovation, Communication and Empire: Knowledge And Technology In The Early Modern Spanish World”

Daniela Bleichmar (University of Southern California), Renée Raphael (University of California, Irvine), Andrés Resendez (UC Davis), and John Lopez (UC Davis)

View the program.

Wednesday,        May 8

Work in Progress: “Earth Trembled: Climate Change in Paradise Lost”

Tobias Menely English, UC Davis

Monday,          April 8

The Body in Question: Science and Vitalist Reform in the Spanish Enlightenment

Nicolás Fernández Medina, Spanish and Philosophy, Penn State University

Wednesday,        February 27

Work in Progress: “What Was the Orient of Early Modern Scholars? ‘Oriental Languages’ and the Roots of Academic Orientalism”

Daniel Stolzenberg, History, UC Davis

Thursday,            January 31

The Kunstkammer at War: Johann Daniel Major (1634-1693) Recruits the Collection for Experiment

Vera Keller, History, University of Oregon 

Wednesday,…  November 7

Seasoning Sickness and the Imaginative Geography of the British Empire

Suman Seth, Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University

Wednesday, October 17

Work in Progress: “Technoscience vs. Technonature: Tools, Implements and Ancient Science”

Colin Webster, Classics, UC Davis

Friday,…    October 5

Tulips and Turbans in Renaissance Art and Natural History

Vin Nardizzi, English, University of British Columbia