Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature

Professor Sarah Gordon holds a Ph.D. in French Language & Literature from Washington University and an M.Phil. in European Literature from Oxford. A medievalist, her research focuses on Medieval French verse narrative and lyric poetry and the topics of comedy, humor, imitation, and translation. She has been awarded fellowships from NEH, Mellon, MLA, and others. She has taught at Ohio University, L'Universite de Paris Sorbonne/ Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Washington University, and elsewhere. She also brings her experiences living in France and the islands of Francophone New Caledonia to the classroom. Her employment experiences in France included working for L'Express/Le Point/EatinParis.com, Xerox, Peugeot, and Langues & Enterprises, writing restaurant reviews in Paris, as well as teaching business language courses at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle. She also enjoys teaching Business French at Utah State University.

Speculum 83.3 (July 2008): 700-01. SARAH GORDON, Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature. (Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures, 37.) West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007. Paper. Pp. ix, 220. Humor seems fundamentally to be the result of an encounter with the unexpected. From the tenderest infant to the most decrepit retired Ph.D., humans learn and understand by drawing analogies. By force of habit, consciously and unconsciously, we continually form expectations. The arts, including literature, themselves have value primarily because of their use of analogy--which itself makes use of that expectation--especially in their use of varieties of allegory and symbol. Anticipation of what will be or what will happen is not merely caninely Pavlovian; it is essentially human. Humans grow by nourishing a habit of foreseeing what must happen or be, given a set of circumstances. The methods of "science" are not new. The connection between what is known and what will likely turn out to be true, given certain similarities, is a fundamental human assumption. However, when the unexpected occurs, either we are flummoxed or we laugh: with either response we are reacting to that affront to our assumptions. We first see that "illogicality" to be a bit of nonsense. If the joke is on us, whether we remain entirely baffled or whether we see the "point" as being a satiric means of demonstrating a certain reality in human existence depends on our own individual mass of real experience accumulated between infancy and decrepit old age. In Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature Sarah Gordon presents one very potent means of creating both humor and lessons about human and social realities. It is the incorporation into literature of references to food, its ingredients, preparation, or consumption. Gordon divides her study into six parts: the nature of humor; the extent to which food, cooking, and eating were present in Old French literature; surveys o