Bread of Dreams (eBook)

Preface by Roy Porter

Introduction

1. The 'Disease of Wretchedness'

2. Elusive Bread

3. Sacred and Profane Cannibalism

4.'They Set Out into the World of the Vagabond'

5. 'They Rotted in Their Own Dung'

6. The World Turned Upside Down

7. 'Famine of Living' and 'Times of Suspicion'

8. Night-time

9. Ritual Battles and Popular Frenzies

10. Medicina Pauperum.

11. 'Tightness of Purse'

12. Collective Vertigo

13. Hyperbolic Dreams

14. Artificial Paradises

15. Poppyseed Bread.

16. The 'Fickle and Verminous Colony'

17. Putrid Worms and Vile Snails

18. A City of Mummies

19. The Triumph of Poverty

Notes

Index

"A remarkable and exciting recovery of an earlier cosmology elaborated around bread and body." (Nature)

"Stimulating and fun to read." (The Historian)

"This is a serious book which makes the body in early modern Europe at the same time more comprehensible and still more strange." (Social History of Medicine)

"Piero Camporesi confronts us here with a baroque panorama of jarring variations, lurid juxtapositions, and vertiginous shifts in setting and scale ... Camporesi insists on being the dramaturge and devil's advocate of an alternative history." (Speculum)

"In Camporesi's breathtaking vision, covering several centuries of early modern peasant society, and focusing chiefly but not exclusively on Italy, real social history and l'histoire des mentalites fuse."
--Roy Porter, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine