The Regime of Cheese: Medicine, Experience, and Social relations in Pantaleone of Confienzas Summa Lacticiniourum (1477)

Paolo Savoia, Harvard University savoia@fas.harvard.edu

At the end of the fifteenth century, cheese was losing the bad reputation it had throughout the Middle Ages, when it aroused medical and social suspicions. On the one hand it was considered as a fatty food, not easy to digest, breeding bad humors; on the other, it was traditionally associated with peasantry and the poor, lower classes of society. My research shows how a relatively marginal physician had to neutralize the negative view of cheese as something bad for health entrenched in earlier literature on dietetics, and to try to legitimize forms of knowledge based on experience, both that of the cheesemakers and that of traveling physicians. By overcoming the social obstacle presented by cheese and arguing for cheese as an appropriate food for elites, this book, mixing official medical knowledge, travel reports, and descriptions of artisanal practices of cheesemaking, offers us an important point of observation on the variety of the conceptions of experience, social habits and boundaries, and the transformations of dietetics in the Renaissance.