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Andrea Maraschi and Francesca Tasca, "Food, Heresies, and Magical Boundaries in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam UP, 2024)
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Mm.
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Phew.
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts today, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today to be speaking with both of the authors of a fascinating book published by Amsterdam University Press in 2024, written by Dr. Andrea Maraschi and Dr. Francesca Tosca, who have investigated a whole bunch of interesting things in medieval history, medieval religious history, around ideas of what heresy was, what magic was, who got to make the rules about what what was acceptable and what wasn't, which is interesting in and of itself. But they've added an additional element to all of this, which is that we get to ask these questions from a really cool perspective. Food studies. So the book is titled Food Heresies and Magical Boundaries in the Middle Ages. And we're going to talk about all of those things in that title, and I think we'll have quite an interesting discussion.
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So.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So, Andrea and Francesca, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Thanks for having us, Miranda.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could we start off with each of you introducing yourselves and telling us why you decided to write the book and do it together? Francesca, maybe you want to start off.
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Yeah. I thank you, Miranda, for the invitation to this interview, first of all, and I apologize in advance for any mistakes in English. So I am Francesca Tosca. I currently teach Italian literature at high school in Bergamo in northern Italy. I hold a PhD in religious medieval history and specialize in Christian minorities, dissenting movements and heresies. And my research and publications focus in particular on Waldensian history. And so while studying the Waldensian and heretical groups in the medieval sources, I often came across food related details. And so I started to look in this aspect more closely. And that's how I met Andrea at a conference about food and history in Tours in France.
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Yeah, thanks, Francesca, by the way. So I am Andrea Maraschi. I am an assistant professor in medieval history at Pegasus University. It's based in Naples. And I also teach anthropology food at the University of Bologna. And yeah, Francesca said exactly how and when, maybe not when, but how we came across each other. It was, I think, 10 years ago at this conference in Tours. And, you know, we immediately understood that collaborating was a smart idea because we both share this strong interest in food history. But as you, Miranda said, from a. A pretty peculiar point of view or from peculiar point of views. And, you know, this is not very common in medieval studies. There are lots of interesting studies concerning food history, but, you know, they mostly concern, you know, trade and recipes and stuff like that. But it's not very often that you come across somebody who has this very peculiar eye, very peculiar taste for unusual aspects like religious symbolism, like boundaries, like magic. And so we immediately understood there was something in there. And our collaboration started with an article. It was an original idea by Francesca herself, an article for Food in History, centered on an ordeal, the coursenet or bread and cheese ordeal. And so that was like the sign that joining our different but very similar perspectives could help us contribute in an interesting way to medieval studies and to food history as well. And from then on, through the exceptional and fundamental help by Alan Greco, who is the director of the series in Amsterdam University Press dedicated to food history specifically, we decided to embark on this project.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is a lovely introduction. Thank you both. And Andrea, it's exactly on this point of the unusual or peculiar approach that I'd like to talk more about, because obviously food history is in the Middle Ages. There's a lot to talk about, right? Religious studies and ideas of heresy in the Middle Ages, a lot to talk about. Magic and magical boundaries is another really big subject. So in combining all those ideas, how did you decide how to approach this topic and these combinations? And how did you decide how to structure the book?
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Yeah, it evolved quite spontaneously, quite naturally for us, because as it happened in the article that I just mentioned about the bread and cheese ordeal, we decided that it would be best to basically split the book into two parts. In fact, when you open it, you can clearly see that it consists of two different parts. The first one is fully dedicated to religious related aspects, so heresies, namely. And the second half of the book is, you know, leans more on the side of so called magical boundaries. Now the thing is that this word, magic, magical is very tricky. We can, you know, expand on that later if you want. But the thing is that what is magic is really, really close to what religion, because magic at the end of the day was just a different religion. So these two halves are very, very close to each other. They almost overlap, but there are a few differences. And the main difference is that Francesca ended up dealing with, for the most part, with internal boundaries within Christianity. And I mostly dealt with boundaries that were drawn outside of Christianity between Christians and other groups, either minority groups or not minority groups. So this was the main idea. Basically each of us dealt with our own half of the book. In fact, Francesca also wrote a chapter in the second half of the book, but that's another story.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, that's helpful to understand the kind of big picture thinking of how the book came together. And now let's get into some of the chapters in more detail. So when we're talking about rules within Christianity, I was not surprised to find Augustine come up. Right. He's very famous in these sorts of debates. So Francesca, maybe you could tell us a bit about some of the ways that Augustine thought food and food related practices could be heretical.
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Commercial Narrator 2
Yeah, Augustine wrote many works, very important and famous works. And among his many books he also wrote a work called De Resibus. It means about heresies, in which it describes 88 heretical groups. It talks about their beliefs, but also about some typical behaviors such as clothing, sexual, sexual practices, initiation rites and where they lived. Sometimes he also mentions food. And these food related practices are very different. Some groups feed only on seeds, including human semen. Other completely refused food, connected with animals, meat, eggs, milk, with important exception of fish. There are groups that do not fast, for example, groups whose members eat in complete solitude. There are also alternative form of Eucharist, celebrated without wine but with water, celebrated with bread and cheese, celebrated with semen and menstrual blood, for example. And a group that I find very interesting is the Ophites. Their Eucharist is celebrated through a snake. Let me explain more clearly. Thay place the bread on the altar, then release a snake from a basket. And the bread that is touched by the snake, it is considered consecrated. And the snake is an animal with a strong symbolic and biblical meaning. We know. And the Ophites were probably a gnostic Christian group like many different ones that existed in the first centuries of Christianity.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Really interesting there. Andrea, is there anything you'd like to add?
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Well, I'm not too much into these texts specifically, dearest, but what I really find intriguing about what Francesca has reconstructed is that already since Augustine's times, we can definitely see that Christian authorities were very clear about the use of food to mark boundaries. So this first section of the book, I think this is the first chapter in fact, already, you know, shows the reader that, you know, food, we. We assume that food is just something that we use to have fun, to entertain ourselves, to spend a good time with other people. But we must always remember that people used to use food for very, very serious matters and to address very specific issues. And here we are talking about identity in a time when identity means you are with us or you're not with us. And aside from a few specific examples that might look a little bit exotic to us, like the use of serpents, as Francesca said, or the use of organic matter in liturgies, the thing is that as anthropologists teach us the there is nothing universally good or universally bad to eat or to do for that matter. But over time, authorities decided what was good and what was not. And it was very important to be on the right side rather than on the wrong side, because otherwise you would be seen as, in this case, a heretic. And these drawing of boundaries could be carried on with as mundane a thing as there can be, that is food. So, you know, take food and beverages quite seriously because that's how, you know, people used to do with food in the past.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And of course it wasn't just questions of whether one was being a heretical Christian or not. Right. Andrea, you mentioned earlier that a key structure of the book is food as boundaries within Christianity, but also food as boundaries between Christianity and non Christian groups. So in what sorts of circumstances might we see food being used to draw those particular boundaries? I mean, there's a number of examples in the book. Maybe Francesca, you could tell us a little bit about when those sorts of things come up.
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Commercial Narrator 2
Yes, we can talk about the comas, for example. Comas or kumis. This is a good example, in my opinion. And it is first necessary to explain what komos or kumis is. And kumus is a liquid food, a drink, and it is very nourishing. It is fermented maize milk. It is the main and essential food of the Mongol peoples of the Asian steppes. So in the Middle Ages there was a Flemish Franciscan friar named William of Rubruk, very famous. And he made an extraordinary journey to the court of the Mongol Khan, going there and back in about three years, almost entirely on foot. And he left us a wonderful account of this long journey with many details. Wonderful source for us. And during his long journey, William also lived mainly on Comos or Kumis. Along the way he tried to preach and convert the people he met to Catholic Christianity. But he soon realized that many did not want to receive baptism because they said that after baptism, thay would no longer be allowed to drink commas and would die of hunger. At first, William could not understand this explanation. But little by little, however, he came to understand the problem. The commerce was also used by Mongol people in blessings, libations and offerings to traditional gods and to the dead. So for this reason, Orthodox Christians link the commas to idolatry and to food offered to idols. You know, according to an ancient rule, food offered to pagan gods or idols could not be eaten by Jews or by Christians of Jewish origin and Jewish mindset, because it was considered a form of idolatry and apostasy. So when William understood that issue, he explained that the true, in true Christianity, there are no pure or impure foods and that even food offered to the gods can be eaten. Can be eaten because Christians are free from all laws.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is a very good example. Thank you for sharing that with us. Andreas, is there anything you'd like to add?
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Yeah, sure. I think that among others, this example is quite interesting because it reminds us of a problem that Christians had. And the problem actually stemmed from a freedom that was allowed by God himself. Actually in the Acts of the Apostles, it is told that St. Peter has a vision. And this vision is of a table set with a lot of food over it. And St. Peter basically immediately understands that that is food that he's supposed to eat. But over this table he sees a lot of food that his culture, his Jewish culture would not allow him to eat because impure. And so in the dream he tells the Lord, I can't eat that. I can't eat most of that because that's impure. But for the first time in the history of these covenants, the Lord tells Peter, but now, from now on, you can eat everything, because I am telling you that you can. And this is very important because this marks a swerve from the Jewish past where these notions of purity and impurity are fundamental. And the new Christian present and future during which you have this novelty, this freedom, you can eat whatever you want, but the Problem is that you have to be very temperate when you are at the table because it's not more a matter of purity or impurity, but it's a matter of your attitude towards the table. Now I'm telling you this brief story which brings us back to the origins of Christianity, because as in the episode that Francesca mentioned, you can still see the importance of these notions. So we are like the 12, 13, hundreds later, and people were still pretty concerned about what could make them pure or impure on the basis of what they would consume. And the freedom that Christians had didn't actually make their lives any easy, but in fact it made them quite harder because you didn't have any specific indication. So it was just about your judgment. And we are talking about a world, generally speaking, the medieval world, where as Francesca mentioned, there were plenty of chances for contamination with so called idolatitis. So food offered to the idols by some pagan, and he should be very careful about that food because yes, technically you could eat that, but it was, you know, something that could bring you closer to the devil than to God. So again, this very, very feeble balance between liberty and freedom and on the other side, danger is one of the things that Christians had to take into account for the whole Middle Ages, both when they were, you know, in Europe, within Christendom, and when they would venture outside.
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Not a problem.
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- [23:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, Andrea, you're very right to help us remember that this was obviously a very different time than we're at now with a lot of anxiety and concern over food. So, so given that circumstance you just outlined for us, that certain foods we're seeing as bringing you closer to the devil, for instance, can you give us some examples of foods or food traditions that were seen as being in that kind of category? I mean, what Francesca was telling us earlier about Comos was clearly not Christian, but was seen as kind of a separate religious tradition that was recognized. It wasn't devil worship. What kind of food was seen as entirely pagan and completely not?
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Okay, well, very interesting question. There are many ways to answer this question, but let's start with the simple one. Virtually every food, any food, could be seen as a pagan food. I believe that a lot of the issue depended on context. Well, of course, within a strictly religious liturgical ones, it was very easy because the church was very clear in telling Christians what they should or should not do. What priests were allowed or were not allowed to do, for example, was very easy during the liturgical eucharistic liturgy that you would offer to God only red wine and wheat bread. And the church was very precise about this because, for example, when Christianity spread over to the northern regions in Scandinavia, well, you know, these regions had quite some issues you would expect in, you know, producing or buying wheat bread, cultivating wheat, you know, having enough red wine for the liturgy. So they would continuously ask the Pope, could we actually replace red wine with, for example, ale and maybe wheat bread with rye bread, for example, and the church would firmly answer, no way. And again, this was a matter of identity. Christian religion was a Mediterranean religion. So it was grounded in Mediterranean foods and products, agricultural products. And so your main and only cornerstones were the so called Mediterranean triad. It's bread, wine and oil and wheat bread Specifically, so there's no room to escape this triad. That said, outside of liturgy, any food could become allowed or dangerous, depending on how you used it, when you would consume it, with whom you would eat it, et cetera, et cetera. So we are talking about, clearly, a very hybrid society. Hybrid meaning that the boundaries, again, this is a book about boundaries. So the boundaries between the right and the wrong were always pretty fluid. For example, baking bread is the simplest of actions that you could imagine in medieval times, for example, or having on your table some vegetables, like, I don't know, crescent, like lettuce, stuff like. Or, you know, lentils, poultry. So there would be nothing wrong about these foods unless you would do something peculiar with them. And now, with peculiar, I don't mean that you would necessarily have to, like, perform some occult rites with them. Of course, we have evidence of some strange rites that people would perform with food, and we can make a few examples if you want. But the thing is that even the simplest of actions could become pretty dangerous. For example, imagine a woman simply taking a stroll to gather some herbs for dinner and for other purposes as well. For example, to prepare some medicinal cocktail. Entirely allowed medicinal cocktail. Now, there was a right way to do so and a wrong way to do so. The right way was to gather these herbs while reciting the Creed or the Our Father. So during the action, so as you were kneeling to gather this herb, you would recite one of these prayers, and you were on the right side of history, so to speak. But were you not to recite these prayers? Or even worse, were you to recite other formulae, like some. They would call them, like carmina, which basically means charms, or some other incantations or even malefice in Latin. Well, then you were basically performing the same action, but the color of this action was now black. It was interpreted as a way for you to interact with demons, even if you're still gathering the same herb. And maybe you're not really planning to do anything wrong with that herb, but you are. Basically, you have crossed a line. And now bear in mind that when I'm talking about. I'm talking about here, the early Middle Ages, early high Middle Ages. And when I talk about interaction with human beings, between human beings and demons, we are not talking about the same interaction that would lead people to being sentenced for witchcraft in the 15th century. That is a very, very late phenomenon that is basically more early modern than it was medieval. For a long, long time in medieval history, up until the 1300s, these potential interactions between human beings and demons through food or any other means for that matter, was not interpreted as witchcraft, but as tricks that the devil used in order to lure you from his side. So the devils were depicted as entities that would normally, on a daily basis, would try to convince you that if you would recite this karma, this charm as you were gathering your syrup, if you would recite this spell while you were kneading bread, if you were perform this gesture with your hands while you were stirring your soup, then they would help you basically achieving whatever you wished. And this is markedly different from what the Christian God would grant you. The Christian God would grant you not necessarily whatever you wished. What was considered just what was considered common sense. And the main difference also was that God would always make you understand that it was not thanks to you. So the virtue, these powers, you did not possess them, they came from God instead. Devils would most often convince you that you possessed those powers and you could simply release them by invoking demons. So it's a pretty different way of using and manipulating food, but it's also a different attitude. Like on the one side, on the magical side, it's me, it's my power and it's my ability to invoke or evoke these entities. And on the other side, the Christian side, it's God and you should pray and he eventually will grant you pretty much what you could desire, what you could wish if he judges it, you know, feasible, for example. So. But virtually any food could, could be involved in these.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting to understand the context in which this is happening, such that, right, it's all about kind of how you engage with the food, not sort of necessarily a specific list of foods. How far though does.
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
And by the way, sorry, if I may add, by the way, this also concerned banquets. So everybody could join and would join banquets for celebrations like New Year's Eve or Christmas or Carnival, etc. Etc. But again, context mattered. Christian authorities were very precise in telling the faithful that there was a right attitude to have during banquets and a wrong one. The right one, of course was being temperate, being if you could, being silent and not indulge too much in food and drink, not getting drunk, not singing profane songs, for example. And instead, you know, the other form of banquets were those where you would behave in so called pagan fashion. So like the pagans used to do, so you would sing profane songs, you would clap, you would dance, you would use your body in that very, very, in a way that didn't really become Christians and you would eat A lot. You would drink a lot, and as a consequence, you would have a lot of fun. And if you remember, for example, Umberto Eco's the Name of the Rose, you can appreciate how having fun, how laugh, was definitely not appreciated by Christian authorities because they underscored the importance of humility and of continent, so to speak. So again, even banqueting could make a difference. Your attitude, you were supposed to behave.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That definitely does come through in Umberto Eco's work, amongst many other places. But was it just about attitude? There were no rules for the food itself at all. I mean, in the book, for instance, one topic that's discussed is magical cannibalism. Surely that would just be completely not allowed, no matter what. Or is there more nuance to understand how this was conceptualized within and between religious traditions?
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Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Yeah, so with cannibalism, the, you know, the, the topic is a bit easier to approach simply because we are talking about, like a marginal and radical food. And so in this case, we are talking about possibly the long, longest standing taboo in the Western world and in many other regions in the world. But again, it's a taboo, so it's a norm, it's a rule that many peoples in the past set for their societies, but by no means it is a universal taboo. Many other societies performed anthropophagy in the past, and they have done until recent times in places like, for example, South America or Papua New guinea, etc. Etc. Again, it's not a matter what is good to eat, but as Claude Levi Strauss taught us, first things need to be good to think, and if they are good to think, then they are good to eat as a consequence. But speaking of medieval Europe, there's no doubt that cannibalism was not allowed, at least on an ordinary level. But there were again, contexts where it was indeed allowed, even though it was looked upon with suspicion. So one context in which anthropology was allowed was natural magic, for example, natural magic being the respected and highly reputable study of the occult properties of natural things like minerals, like plants, like animals, and body parts, including human body parts. So it was a form of magic that implied the deep knowledge of nature. And again, it was highly respected, for example, in Arab tradition, in Neoplatonic tradition, and through the mediation of Arabs, it came back to Europe, to Western Europe, starting from the 12th century, so the 12th century Renaissance. So why was the human flesh important for scholars of natural magic? Because, you know, they had this conceptualization of nature according to which everything in the cosmos is connected with each other. So grass Stones, animals, trees, stars, constellations, zodiacal signs, the sun, the moon. Everything is connected with each other. And it basically does so according to a fundamental theory of everything, fundamental law, that is the law of sympathy and antipathy, right? Similia, similibus, curanter. So this is not mainstream science. This is another alternative branch of science that was again highly respected, but was not the Hippocratic Galenic model of science. Anyways, according to this theory of everything and to religious interpretations of this law, this principle, everything was connected with everything else. And human beings in particular had been created in the image of God. To Arab scholars, this God would be Hala. Of course, then it would become the Christian God. Didn't really matter. We had been created in the image of God. So of course, there were many animals whose body parts were very, very useful. For example, their heart, their brain, because, for example, you would want to eat the heart of a lion in order to become as brave as a lion. You know, this simple analogic, thinking way of thinking. But even more so, human body parts and organisms and organs were deemed very, very powerful because we were, you know, the image of God himself. And so everything that you could find, any virtue that you can spot in an animal body part, you would find like 10 times more powerful in the body of a human being. But this is one side, one part of the story. This is the learned approach to cannibalism. But there's, of course, another part of the story that is the, let's call it the unlearned or the popular part of the story, where the aforementioned taboo for human flesh was definitely a reality and was shared by everybody in the West. And so in the book, we studied some episodes of encounters between Christians and Muslims, for example, dating from the times of the Crusades, specifically some episodes from the First Crusade and some from the Third Crusade. So we are between the late 11th and the late 12th century. Why these encounters are interesting, first of all, because we have a lot of sources from witnesses that record these battles and these encounters, these exchanges, some contemporary sources, some sources that would be written maybe a few decades later, but that were based on earlier witness accounts, eyewitness accounts, so they are usually pretty reliable. And secondly, because we have sources from both sides, so Christian sources and Arab sources. And this is not the only reason why these stories are important and are interesting, because this tradition of natural magic, as I mentioned, thrived and took an important step in a book, a grimoire or handbook of natural magic and philosophy entitled Gayat al Hakim, that was actually composed in Al Andalus So in modern Andalusia, southern Spain. So around the half of the 10th century. So those were lands owned by the Arabs, but there were many Christians. And that was like a land which was pretty close to the boundaries with Christian land. So this knowledge circulated among both Arabs and Christians. Okay. So we wondered whether we could find any trace of these knowledge, at least from a popular level, popular interpretations of this knowledge at the other side of the Mediterranean, where Christians and Arabs would face each other. And indeed there are essences of this knowledge. There are essences of cannibalism, actually several instances of cannibalism during these encounters and battles between Arabs and Christians, for obvious reasons. For example, because during sieges, armies would very rapidly starve and needed to and ended up eating their enemies bodies. And this is one form of cannibalism that you find in these sources. But then other forms of cannibalism surface in these sources. And these other forms really concern something that we might address, as with inverted commas, magic or medicine or something in between. We have both Christian and Arab accounts of both Christian and Arab soldiers putting their hands on their enemies bodies in order to fetch and get eyes. And you know, pretty much every organ and every Jewish, every liquid humor that you could gather, because they were sure that these humors and organs would allow them to make something. We don't really know what they would do with them. But we try and make this cross comparison between these accounts concerning Crusades and what we found in books of natural magic like the Gayat al Hakim, which by the way means the gold of the wise and would be later translated with the title of Picatrix around the half of the 13th century at the court of Alfonso X, so Spanish Christian king. So by this cross comparison we found out that there were many recipes and remedies based on the use of human organs. You could make, for example, remedies to cure eye ailments with human eyes. You could for example, create some cocktails and remedies to become stronger and healthier by using human genitals, male genitals specifically, etc. Etc, etc. The thing is, again, we don't know what Christian and Arabic soldiers would do with these organs because the sources would not tell us. But interestingly, we get to know that both parties would do this. Both parties were evidently aware of the presumed usefulness of human body parts. And so we've got these two sides of the story. On the one side we got a clear taboo. Nobody would ever dream of eating human flesh on a daily basis. On an ordinary level, but the rare instances, for example, after. During famines and during episodes of starvation or learned magical medicinal contexts, medical contexts, where people would feel they could actually consume human flesh, they wouldn't deem it wrong. Culturally wrong. So this is very interesting. We tend to assume that cannibalism is something that doesn't really concern us Westerners. And maybe it was just a very, very old story and we left it apart and it surfaced in radical and extreme circumstances. The reality is that we practiced anthropology on a number of occasions, and not only when we were in danger, but also because we thought it was useful. But again, context mattered.
- [46:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, context definitely matters there. Thank you for taking us right to the extremes of practices around food and belief. I'd like to go back to what might seem kind of very mundane, but there's a reason it's come up so many times in the book. Bread is mentioned a lot. Even in our discussion today. We've talked about bread quite a few times. So, Francesca, maybe you could tell us a little bit about kind of why bread has such a central role in these sources.
- [46:39]
Commercial Narrator 2
Okay, I can talk about special bread. Bread plays a central role in a ritual described by two medieval sources. And it's the magical bread prepared in Bethlehem on Christmas night. And since it is the Christmas season now, I would like to tell about this special bread. An ancient tradition says that the star of the three Kings, after guiding them, fell into a well, a well near the cave of Bethlehem. And this well is still shown to pilgrims today in the Basilica of Bethlehem. So on Christmas night, according to medieval sources, women made bread mixing flour with water taken from the well of the star. People believed that this bread eased the pain of pregnant women and helped during childbirth. This special bread was created linking powerful symbols. The star, the well, the birth of Jesus, water, flower. And we should also remember that Bethlehem in Hebrew means house of bread. And we should also remember that in Christianity, Jesus calls himself the bread of Life. The Bread of Life. And there is also the rite of the Eucharist, or Holy supper, in which bread represents the body of Jesus Christ. So, in short, the bread from the well of Bethlehem that take away suffering is a ritual full of symbolic meaning.
- [48:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
A very nicely timed example. As you said, we're recording this in December, near Christmas, so perhaps a good place to conclude our discussion about the book with that last example in mind, leaving me to just ask what you each might be working on, given that this book is obviously done off your desks. Andrea, is there anything you're currently working on? You'd like to tell us a little bit about.
- [49:14]
Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Sure. I'm keeping looking into weird stuff that people would consume, and I am about to complete a book about graphophagy. So the eating of words and of surfaces, whether edible or not, where these words were inscribed. So starting from parchment to, you know, leaves and apples, bread and, you know, similar things. So it's going to be published hopefully next year.
- [49:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That sounds intriguing. Francesca, what are you working on?
- [49:55]
Commercial Narrator 2
I have recently published a book on World of Lyon and Francis of Assisi. In this book, I explain why Waldo was condemned as heretic while Francis instead became a great saint. And the year 2026 is a Franciscan year, 800 years since the death of Francis of Assisi. And yes, I believe my book can shed light on dynamics of power and exclusion, heresy and in the Middle Ages. But not only in the Middle Ages, beyond the Middle Ages for the American audience. I'm also working for the English version of the New History of the Waldensians. The book was published in Italy in 2024. And also Andrea contributed to this book.
- [51:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, it certainly sounds like both of you are continuing to investigate these interactions of food and history and belief, so best of luck with those projects. And for anyone who wants to learn more, they can, of course, read the book we've been talking about titled Food Heresies and Magical Boundaries in the Middle Ages, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2024. Francesca and Andrea, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [51:34]
Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Thanks to you for having us, Miranda. Thank you, Miranda. Limu Emu and Doug.
- [51:53]
Liberty Mutual Advertiser
Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [52:08]
Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [52:11]
Liberty Mutual Advertiser
Cut the camera.
- [52:12]
Dr. Andrea Maraschi
They see us.
- [52:12]
Liberty Mutual Advertiser
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty.
- [52:15]
Dr. Andrea Maraschi
Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Fairy, underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates, excludes Massachusetts.