"Would you be served such meat for your supper?": Consumption and Conversation in the Early Modern Atlantic World

A French treatise on travel from 1629 contains a curious description of a dinner during which a Catholic pilgrim and his Protestant host nearly come to blows over the proper way to serve a partridge. What they are really arguing about, the reader soon realizes, is the legitimacy of relics as devotional objects. Price's research focuses on such cross-confessional debates held over meals, offering a new perspective on how the Reformation affected travel and travel writing. In these encounters, the tradition of affording hospitality to strangers—along with the Eucharistic overtones of sharing food and drink—intersected with emotionally charged discussions of belief. Moreover, these exchanges took place when Protestant travelers’ emotions were already heightened by the unfamiliar sights, sounds, smells, and haptic practices of Catholicism. By looking at intimate moments where conversation and consumption met on the road, this talk will illuminate how early modern people understood and expressed their confessional identities through their bodies.

Emily Price is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University, working on the intersections between travel, identity, and the senses in the early modern Atlantic world. She has published on a range of topics, including post-Reformation pilgrimage, touch and proof, and the theft and return of relics. She is a member of the Itinerant Shrine project, an interdisciplinary group of scholars of religion based at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max-Planck-Institut. Their first book, The Itinerant Shrine: Art, History and the Multiple Geographies of the Santa Casa of Loreto, will be published by Brill in 2024. She recently completed a residential fellowship at Gladstone’s Library in Wales, beginning research for her new project, “Jerusalem Builded Here: Medieval England in Modern Travel Guides, 1880-1950.”