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Food, Culture and Identity in Ireland, 1550-1650

Project description

DEENESFRITPL

Exploring society and culture through food

Daily diet and the exchange of food and drink can explain much about a region’s social and cultural identity. Focussing on Ireland c. 1550-1650, the EU-funded FOODCULT project explores the significance of food during a period of unprecedented change driven by globalisation, war, and colonisation. The project examines how food was used to represent identities, including gender, religion, and ethnicity. It considers what diverse people actually ate and drank, thereby exploring the link between representation and reality. This is achieved through a dynamic interdisciplinary approach that merges micro-historical analytical techniques with science and experimental archaeology. The approach will open new themes in Irish historiography, while developing a ground-breaking model for exploring food cultures and consumption in other regions and periods.

Objective

FOODCULT is the first project to establish both the fundamentals of everyday diet, and the cultural ‘meaning’ of food and drink, in early modern Ireland. Exploring the period 1550-1650, one of major economic development, unprecedented intercultural contact, but also of conquest, colonisation and war, it focusses on Ireland as a case-study for understanding the role of food in the demonstration and negotiation of authority and power, and as a site for the development of emergent ‘national’ food cultures. Moving well beyond the colonial narrative of Irish social and economic development, however, it enlarges the study of food to examine neglected themes in Irish historiography, including gender, class, kinship and religious identities, as expressed through the consumption and exchange of food and drink.
Taking advantage of recent archaeological discoveries and the unprecedented accessibility of the archaeological evidence, the project develops a ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach, merging micro-historical analytical techniques with science and experimental archaeology, to examine what was eaten, where, why and by whom, at a level of detail deemed impossible for Irish history. Such questions will be explored in a comparative British Isles context, situating Irish developments within a broader analytical framework, whilst moving English food historiography beyond its current insular focus.
As a corollary, the project will produce the first major database of diet-related archaeological evidence for this period Mapping Diet: Comparative Food-Ways in Early Modern Ireland, while making accessible the only existing household accounts, a hugely significant, and previously overlooked, quantitative and qualitative source for dietary trends. These resources will shed light, not just on consumption patterns, but on Ireland’s broader economic and social development, whilst significantly furthering research agendas in early modern historical and archaeological scholarship.

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Keywords

Programme(s)

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Call for proposal

ERC-2018-STG

See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

ERC-STG - Starting Grant

Host institution

THE PROVOST, FELLOWS, FOUNDATION SCHOLARS & THE OTHER MEMBERS OF BOARD, OF THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY & UNDIVIDED TRINITY OF QUEEN ELIZABETH NEAR DUBLIN
Net EU contribution
€ 905 088,04
Address
COLLEGE GREEN TRINITY COLLEGE
D02 CX56 DUBLIN 2
Ireland

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Region
Ireland Eastern and Midland Dublin
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 905 088,04

Beneficiaries (6)

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Last update: 11 December 2023

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/803486

European Union, 2024