The Temperate and the Intemperate, about 1475, Master of the Dresden Prayer Book, Author: Valerius Maximus. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 43
Dining Well at the Medieval Court
GETTY CENTER
Museum Lecture Hall
From the agrarian cycle of planting and harvest to the religious cycles of fasts and feasts, food deeply structured the life experiences of medieval people at all social levels. Christina Normore, professor of art history at Northwestern University, explains how banquets marking important occasions offered a range of sensuous pleasures for the tongue, eye, and ear as well as a range of moral lessons, tying together the ethical and the pleasurable to form an ideal of the good life for medieval elites.
