Though subjects of enduring interest in their own right, food and drink are still more revealing archaeologically and historically when they amplify and illuminate broader societal behaviours and trends. This multi-disciplinary collection of fourteen essays explores the collection, cultivation, consumption and culture of food and drink in Ireland from the beginnings of settlement in the Mesolithic to the present. Among its themes, it engages with what the first settlers gathered; how people ate in Neolithic times; cooking in the Bronze Age; the diet of rich and poor in the medieval era; the impact of conquest on culinary patterns; the differences in the diet of different classes in pre-Famine and the impact of the Famine; the history of haute cuisine in Ireland; the impact of modernisation in the twentieth century, and the changing role of drink in society.
This book was commissioned by the editors of the Royal Irish Academy’s journal: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C.
Contributors: Graeme Warren, Jessica Smyth, Richard P. Evershed, Alan Hawkes, Cherie N. Peters, Susan Lyons, Fiona Beglane, Madeline Shanahan, James Kelly, Regina Sexton, Ian Miller, Rhona Richman Kenneally, Diarmaid Ferriter, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Frank Armstrong.
James Kelly, MRIA, is Professor of History in the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University, and a past president of the Irish Historical Society, Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society and Irish Economic and Social History Society. He has served as a member of the Irish Manuscripts Commission and, as editor, of Studia Hibernica and Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. A specialist in the history of late early modern Ireland, he has written extensively on eighteenth-century Irish history, since the publication, in 1992 of his first monograph: Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish politics in the 1780s (Cork University Press, 1992). His publications include: That damn's thing called Honour: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860 (Cork University Press, 1995); Poynings' law and the making of Law in Ireland, 1660-1800 (Irish Legal History Society, 2007); Sport and Society in Ireland 1600-1840 (Four Courts Press, 2014) and Food rioting in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Four Courts Press, 2017). His major editions include The proclamations of Ireland, 1660-1820 (5 vols, Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2014). He is editor of volume 3 of the Cambridge history of Ireland: Ireland, 1730-1880 (Cambridge, 2018), and co-editor (with Tomás Ó Carragáin) of Climate and Society in Ireland: from prehistory to the present (Royal Irish Academy, 2021) He is currently investigating the graphic satire tradition in Ireland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Professor Elizabeth FitzPatrick (PhD TCD 1998) is a historical landscape archaeologist who works independently as an academic researcher and writer. She held a personal chair in archaeology at National University of Ireland Galway (2013-21), and was archaeological editor of Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature, from 2007-15.
Her research, which intersects archaeology, place-history and place-lore, is about recomposing historical landscapes through investigation of lived human practices at monuments and natural places. The focus of her work in this field is medieval and early postmedieval Ireland, with reference to Scotland. She has pioneered cross-disciplinary research on the concept of borders in historical polities, publishing on border landscapes of Irish kingdoms and lordships, landscapes of pedigree and power, places of political assemblies, the border estates and built heritage of literati who served ruling families, and the territorial context of hunting grounds and sites of conflict. Her current research concerns the landscape thinking and human practices associated with the origins and life-courses of hill-centred borderscapes in historic territories. Her most recent publication in that field is 2023 Landscapes of the learned: placing Gaelic literati in Irish lordships 1300ꟷ1600. Medieval History and Archaeology. Oxford University Press (Pp. 353).
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