Fulton TasteseeLord 2006

“Taste and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps.
33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West

Author(s): Rachel Fulton
Source: The Journal of Religion , Vol. 86, No. 2 (April 2006), pp. 169-204
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/499638
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to The Journal of Religion
This content downloaded from

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
“Taste and see that the Lord is sweet”
(Ps. 33:9): The Flavor of God in the
Monastic West*
Rachel Fulton / University of Chicago
Which of the senses tells us most about God? Perhaps you will say, “It
is a matter of perspective.” Others might insist, “It is a matter of taste.”
Let us think for a moment about what these two metaphors entail.1
Perspective is an entailment of vision. We see how and what we do—
a text, a devotional image, a spiritual discipline; a person, thing, or
event—depending upon our particular vantage point. Clarity of vision
is contingent upon not only the relative strength or weakness of our
eyes but also an absence of obstacles. We cannot see if something or
someone is in our way, nor, because vision is dependent upon relative
location, do we as viewers necessarily see the same thing even when we
are looking at it at the same time. This is the perceptual metaphor
most often invoked by historians as we seek to gain a “view” on the past,
recognizing all the while that our view on that past can never be iden-
tical with that of the people whom we are studying, nor can their view
as they experienced it actually become ours.2 It is, accordingly, a po-
* Earlier versions of this article were delivered as the Vincent DeSantis Lecture for the
Department of History at the University of Notre Dame (2004) and for the Marco Institute
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee (2005). I would like to
thank both audiences, as well as my anonymous readers for the Journal of Religion, for their
enthusiasm and good taste in allowing me to experiment with some of the messier metaphors
in both the medieval and contemporary Christian spiritual vocabularies. Thanks, also, to all
those who upon hearing of my plans to serve certain medieval delicacies as appetizers for
my original talk responded viscerally with both pleasure (“I’ve always wanted to try . . .”)
and disgust (“What are we going to eat, dirt [or, alternately, ‘worms’]?”).
1
On the importance of paying attention to such metaphorical entailments generally, see
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980), and Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New
York: Basic, 1999).
2
On this problem in medieval historiography in particular, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “In
the Mirror’s Eye: The Writing of Medieval History in North America,” in her The Past as Text:
䉷 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0022-4189/2006/8602-0001$10.00
169

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
The Journal of Religion
tentially quite comforting metaphor, precisely because it keeps things

at a distance. What we see may or may not be true, but for all that it
cannot—at least, according to current theories of vision—touch us. We
remain distinct from the objects of our view.
Taste is another matter altogether. While we can see (and hear) ob-
jects other than ourselves without touching them, we cannot taste with-
out taking something of their substance into our mouth and absorbing
it through the membranes of the epithelial cells in our tongues. (I am
distinguishing here between taste and flavor, the latter of which is also
dependent on smell, temperature, mouth feel, the look of our food,
and its sounds.) In contrast with vision, taste is arguably a somewhat
threatening sense. Metaphorically, it is a profoundly alienating one: “De
gustibus non est disputandum.” “There’s no accounting for taste.” And
yet, taste—as in the sense of having “good” or “bad” taste—is likewise
taken as a marker of aesthetic discrimination. To “have taste” is to be
able to distinguish the kitsch, or merely pretty, from the beautiful, the
grotesque from the sublime. It is—as David Hume (d. 1776) would have
it—the ability to judge those qualities in objects that are “fitted by na-
ture to produce . . . feelings [of pleasure or displeasure]” in their per-
ceivers.3 From this perspective (note the metaphor), one’s sense of
taste may be more or less refined; nevertheless, that which is adjudged
beautiful or deformed must partake, however finely, of the quality or
essence of such. Concordantly, in modern chemosensory terms, there
are generally said to be only four or, perhaps, five “taste primaries,” the
perception of each of which is dependent upon the presence in solu-
tion and in appropriate quantities of particular chemical stimuli, alias,
“essences”: sodium chloride (NaCl) and other salts for saltiness; hy-
drogen ions, as with ascorbic acid, for sourness; certain amino acids,
peptides, and proteins, and almost all sugars in appropriate concen-
trations for sweetness; certain other proteins and alkaloids such as
strychnine and quinine for bitterness; and, for the fifth suggested
The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1977), 57–80 and 230–38.
3
David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard
Adams, rev. ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 308–15, at 311. As one
anonymous reader of this article has remarked, taste is, of course, for Hume “a much broader
category than taste as one of the five senses.” What is significant for our purposes is precisely
the jump from how food tastes to general aesthetic judgments that use of the perceptual
metaphor entails. As Lakoff and Johnson have shown (see n. 1), such leaps are never made
without entailments; indeed, it is arguably the very strength of these entailments that enables
our perceptual language to carry the philosophical and spiritual weight that it does. Would
we use “taste” as an aesthetic category if our taste of food was not so vital, that is, necessary
to our survival, and, therefore, so intense?
170

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
The Flavor of God in the Monastic West
primary, the monosodium salt of L-glutamic acid (MSG) for umami

or “delicious taste.” 4
Unlike scientists, aestheticians, and, presumably, cooks, historians,
including historians of religion, are by and large somewhat uncom-
fortable with taste. What would it take to gain access to the historical
experience of taste? It is, after all, more than strictly a matter of know-
ing which foods people ate, how they produced them, who had access
to which ones and when, and how the foods were prepared and pre-
sented at what social occasions. It is also, at least potentially, a matter
of cooking and eating samples of those same foods, at which point
things get, well, messy.5 Anachronisms aside—no medieval feast fea-
tured roast turkey or, for that matter, roast beef, even in England6—
there is the nagging question of what, exactly, we would be able to
learn from such an exercise in gustatory sampling other than what the
foods and drinks taste like to us. Taste seems at once too essentializ-
ing—who among us today would subscribe to Hume’s universal “stan-
dards of taste”?—and too individualizing—“non est disputandum”—to
serve as a modality for historical or cultural analysis. More to the point,
although tastes change and we might judge each other more or less
civilized or socially acceptable on the basis of tastes (“You eat that?”),
tastes themselves are semantically highly ambiguous, even if our re-
sponses to them are most definitely not. 7 What, aside from the pres-
4
On these “taste primaries” and their chemical stimulants, see H. R. Schiffman, Sensation
and Perception: An Integrated Approach, 3rd ed. (New York: Wiley, 1990), 156–63; Joseph G.
Brand, “Biophysics of Taste,” in Tasting and Smelling, ed. Gary K. Beauchamp and Linda
Bartoshuk, Handbook of Perception and Cognition, 2nd ed. (San Diego: Academic Press,
1997), 1–24; Susan S. Schiffman and Charles Dackis, “Taste of Nutrients: Amino Acids, Vi-
tamins and Fatty Acids,” Perception and Psychophysics 17, no. 2 (1975): 140–46; Howard R.
Moskowitz, “The Psychology of Sweetness,” in Sugars in Nutrition, ed. H. L. Sipple and K. W.
McNutt (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 37–64; and Gordon G. Birch, “Chemical Aspects
of Sweetness,” in Sweetness, ed. John Dobbing (Berlin: Springer, 1987), 3–13. The now standard
“taste tetrahedron” of sweet-sour-bitter-salty was first proposed by Hans Henning, Der Geruch
(Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1916).
5
The metaphor is intentional. Compare Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed. (1989),
s.v. “mess, n.,” 1.1a. “A serving of food; a course; a meal; a prepared dish of a specified kind
of food.”
6
Constance B. Hieatt, “The Roast, or Boiled, Beef of Old England,” Book Forum 5 (1980):
294–99. On the dangers of roasting beef, see Terence Scully, “The Opusculum de saporibus of
Magninus Mediolanensis,” Medium Aevum 54, no. 2 (1985): 178–207, at 185–86.
7
On the range and strength of our responses to food, see Paul Rozin, “Food Is Fundamental,
Fun, Frightening, and Far-Reaching,” Social Research 66 (1999): 9–30; Elizabeth Rozin and
Paul Rozin, “Some Surprisingly Unique Characteristics of Human Food Preferences,” Food in
Perspective: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Ethnological Food Research, Cardiff,
Wales, 1987, ed. Alexander Fenton and Trefor M. Owen (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1981),
243–52; and Richard I. Stein and Carol J. Nemeroff, “Moral Overtones of Food: Judgments
171

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
ence or absence of particular chemicals in our food, does a sweet or

bitter taste mean? Can recipes as recipes carry meaning? Why, if tastes
do not mean anything other than themselves, do we like or dislike
particular foods, regardless of culture or upbringing; lima beans, for
example, or cantaloupe or chilies or liver?
Think again about the metaphors with which we began, particularly
the relationship that each implies between the one viewing or tasting
a (historical) object and the object perceived. What is it that we hope
to achieve when we take a “new perspective” on, for example, the re-
ligious practices of the past? Clearly, something cognitive: we seek to
understand. What is it, then, that we are suggesting when we describe
something we have encountered in our viewing, say, the practice of
self-flagellation or the use of gory images in meditation, as a “matter
of taste”?8 Not, it would seem, that we ourselves should seek clarity
about, or even engagement with, the object of our regard but rather
that we should leave it alone. We are, in other words, refusing to taste
because, of course, we already know what we like, and we can tell,
simply from a verbal description, that chicken cooked in a pastry with
saffron, raisins, dates, currants, pine nuts, cloves, cinnamon, mace, al-
monds, quince, ginger, apples, and sugar will be “too spicy” or “too
sweet” and so “not to our taste.”9 And yet, are we not, in our strategic
jockeying for the right analytical perspective, also perhaps just a little
bit afraid? It is all well and good, after all, to read a description of
visual or, even, gustatory ecstasy in a text and to exercise our imagi-
nation on what it might mean, but is it not somewhat risky to try
tasting the food? What if it “disagrees” with us or makes us sick? Per-
of Others Based on What They Eat,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 21, no. 5 (May
1995): 480–90.
8
See, e.g., the fourteenth-century drawing of the Crucifixion (Cologne, Schnütgen Mu-
seum, Inv. No. M340) reproduced by Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture
of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), fig. 1 and pl. 1. As
Hamburger comments: “This Crucifixion fascinates even as it repels us” (1). The scholar
used to viewing such images, as Hamburger suggests we should—“through [the artist’s]
eyes and those of her contemporaries,” i.e., sympathetically—might find it salutary to reflect
upon his or her own reactions to the recent cinematic rendering of the Crucifixion directed
by Mel Gibson (The Passion of the Christ, Icon Productions, 2004), by the end of which
Christ on the cross appears much as in the fourteenth-century drawing (in Hamburger’s
words), “his body . . . one enormous wound,” “almost entirely obscured by blood” (1).
9
The ingredients listed appear in a fifteenth-century recipe for vyaund ryall as prepared
for Henry V at Windsor. For a modern adaptation of this dish, see Phyllis Pray Bober, Art,
Culture, and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), 312. For the medieval English recipe, see Constance B. Hieatt, ed., An Ordinance of
Pottage: An Edition of the Fifteenth-Century Culinary Recipes in Yale University’s MS Beinecke 163
(London: Prospect, 1988), 73. For a similar recipe from northern Italy, see Odile Redon,
Françoise Sabban, and Silvano Serventi, The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, trans.
Edward Schneider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 89–90 (“Saracen” chicken).
172

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
haps even worse, what if we like it and think it tastes good, particu-
larly if we might otherwise describe it as fattening because of the nuts
or cloying because of the fruit and the sugar? Reading texts and look-
ing at images may transform us intellectually, emotionally, or even
spiritually, but eating the food might poison us—or make us fat.
“he would be good, but he would not be sweet if he did not

allow you to taste him”
Capture in your mind’s eye the following scene. It is early in the morn-
ing, just around daybreak. There is a young man in his twenties—a
Benedictine monk by his tonsure and habit—crouching behind the
altar in a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Perhaps he is cold, if it
is winter, for the chapel is quite possibly a crypt, and this is northern
Europe, the imperial city of Leodium, alias Liège. Perhaps it is summer,
and the crypt is welcomingly cool. He does not say, although the evi-
dence suggests that it is most likely summer, a few weeks before the
feast of St. Matthew (September 20) some 900 years ago, around the
year of our Lord 1100. As you are watching, the young man reaches
up and takes down from the altar an image of the Savior: a wooden
crucifix. He clutches the image to his breast and begins kissing and
adoring it. Suddenly, he looks different, quite possibly amazed, and
stares at the crucifix as if it somehow has changed. After a moment,
however, he seems to return to himself. He puts the crucifix back in
its place on the altar and prepares to leave. Thus far, you have only
been able to watch him; you have not heard him speak. Nevertheless,
you notice that, as he leaves, he seems to have something in his mouth
that he is turning over and over with his tongue, as if perhaps chewing
over a particularly delicious spiritual text, and that he seems to be
pleased.
Now imagine that you can speak with him. “Frater Roberte,” you
might say, for this is his name, “dic mihi, quid tu vidisti”—for you are
a monk, too, and so you whisper to him in Latin, too impatient to try
to find the abbot to ask permission to speak—“et quid habes in ore
tuo?” “Tell me, brother Rupert, what did you see and what do you have
in your mouth?” Imagine your response when, presuming he is willing
to speak, this is what he tells you: “My eyes were opened and I saw the
Son of God; while awake I saw the living Son of Man on the cross. I
saw him not with corporeal vision, but, suddenly, my bodily eyes dis-
appeared, and better ones, that is interior eyes, were opened so that I
might see. . . . What did he look like? Human tongue cannot grasp it
with words, but I should say this much, that there I sensed briefly what
173

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
he so truly said: ‘Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart’”
(Mt. 11:29).10 “But, why,” you might still insist, “do you seem to have
something in your mouth when the Lord appeared to you in a vision?”
To which he, being Rupert, might reply: “Does it not say in the psalm
that we chanted in the office just last night, ‘Taste and see that the
Lord is sweet’ [Ps. 33:9]? Do you wonder then that such an ineffable
taste of sweetness lingers in the mouth of my soul, when Truth himself
promised: ‘Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted’
[Mt. 5:5]? This is the consolation which the Paraclete, that is the
Comforter, has already deigned to give, even in the age of the proph-
ets, above all to children, that is to the weak and the sick.”11
How, as a monk, would you be most likely respond? Would you, per-
haps, envy Rupert his experience and want to know how you might
achieve such a vision yourself? But, then, perhaps, you already know
10
Rupert of Deutz, De gloria et honore filii hominis super Mattheum, bk. 12 (ed. Rhabanus
Haacke, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 29 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1979], 369):
“Verumtamen quoniam similitudinem cognoui . . . quia aperti sunt mihi oculi et uidi Filium
Dei, uidi ipsum uigilans in cruce uiuentem Filium hominis. Non corporali uisu uidi, sed ut
uiderem, repente euanuerunt corporis oculi et aperti sunt meliores, id est interiores oculi,
cum tenerem in sinu atque complecterer crucem ligneam et in ea imaginem eiusdem sal-
uatoris, sedens occultus retro post sanctum altare in quodam oratorio beatae Mariae semper
uirginis claro iam diluculo multis eandem imaginem defigens atque circuiens osculis et ador-
ans, ut sedebam, frequenti dimissione capitis. Solitus eram idipsum facere, sed illo diluculo
agebam in maiore confractione, id est mentis humilitate. Qualis autem uisus est aspectus
eius? Humana hoc non potest lingua uerbis comprehendere, tantumque dixerim, quia sensi
illic breuiter, quam ueraciter dicat ipse: Et discite a me quia mitis sum et humilis corde” (Mt. 11:
29). On this vision (actually, the first of a series) in the context of Rupert’s life at St. Lawrence
in Liège, see John H. Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983), 48–55. For its effects on his career as an exegete, see Van Engen, Rupert, 342–52;
Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 310–17; Christel Meier-Staubach, “Ruperts von Deutz
literarische Sendung: Der Durchbruch eines neuen Autorbewußtseins im 12. Jahrhundert,”
Wolfram-Studien 16 (2000): 29–53; and Morgan Powell, “Vox ex negativo: Hildegard of Bingen,
Rupert of Deutz and Authorial Identity in the Twelfth Century,” in Unverwechselbarkeit: Per-
sönliche Identität und Identifikation in der vormodernen Gesellschaft, ed. Peter von Moos (Cologne:
Böhlau, 2004), 267–95, at 282–91. For the mystical and theological implications of this series
of visions, see Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century
(New York: Crossroad, 1994), 328–33; and Rhabanus Haacke, “Die mystischen Visionen Ru-
perts von Deutz,” in “Sapientia doctrina”: Mélanges de théologie et de littératures médiévales offerts à
Dom Hildebrand Bascour O.S.B., Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale, numéro
spécial 1 (Leuven: Abbaye du Mont César, 1980), 69–90.
11
Compare Rupert, De gloria et honore filii hominis super Mattheum, bk. 12 (369–70): “Nulla
mora interfuit, et ad uisum communem reuersus, crucem quidem super altare loco suo
restitui. Gustus autem quidam ineffabilis, gustus suauitatis eius in ore animae aliquamdiu
ipsa die superfuit, qui tamen paulatim recedens, tandemque deficiens, memorem adhuc
facit me uersiculi huius: Gustate et uidete quam suauis est Dominus [Ps. 33:9]. Et quid mirum,
si ueritas uerum dixit: Beati qui lugent, quoniam ipsi consolabuntur [Mt. 5:5], et consolationis
primitias iam in isto saeculo Paraclitus, id est consolator, spiritus pueris suis dare dignatur?
Nam pueris maxime, id est infirmis et inualidis, pro ipsa infirmitate sua lugentibus, con-
solatione opus est.”
174

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
because you yourself have often tasted such sweetness while singing
the psalms.12 How would you, as a historian, be most likely to respond?
If, as I am sure many readers of this journal have, you have been follow-
ing the scholarly literature on medieval devotional experiences of late,
there are a number of things that have almost certainly already struck
you about Rupert’s account: (1) the fact that Rupert (d. 1129), as a
Benedictine, and a monk at that, should make such sensual use of a
material image, when everybody knows—or, at least, used to know before
Jeffrey Hamburger and Mary Carruthers taught us otherwise13—that im-
ages were for women and other laypeople too weak and ill-educated to
stomach the strong wine of the Scriptures; better for them the more
easily digestible milk of visual images. (2) The fact is that Rupert makes
an analogy between what he was able to see with his “corporeal eyes”
and what he was able to see with his “interior” or “spiritual eyes,” thereby
suggesting a significant correlation between the apprehensions of the
soul and the sensory experiences of the body. Rosemary Drage Hale,
Boyd Taylor Coolman, and Gordon Rudy have recently pointed to the
importance of this doctrine of the “spiritual senses” in the mystical writ-
ing and theology of the later Middle Ages, challenging yet again any
easy dichotomies we might seek to draw between the body and soul as
sites for the medieval experience and understanding of God.14 (3) The
fact that Rupert’s experience involved not one, but several of the
senses—touch, sight, taste, and, in memory of the Scriptures, hearing—
in, as it were, a symphonic synesthesia, left him, by his own account, only
hungering for more. We would be nevertheless hard-pressed to describe
his experience as truly “mystical,” given that Rupert does not mention,
12
Compare Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, “In psalmum CXXXII,” par. 2 (ed. Clemens
Weidmann, Hildegard Müller, and Franco Gori, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Lati-
norum 93, 94, 95.1–2 [Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001–4], 3:
319): “Ista enim verba psalterii, iste dulcis sonus, ista suavis melodia, tam in cantico, quam
in intellectu, etiam monasteria peperit.” For the monastic practice of scriptural ruminatio as
one of physical as well as spiritual chewing, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the
Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi, 3rd ed. (New York: Fordham
University Press, 1982), 73.
13
See, esp., Jeffrey Hamburger, “The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval
Monastic Devotions,” in his The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late
Medieval Germany (New York: Zone, 1998), 111–48, 502–10; and Mary Carruthers, The Craft
of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
14
Rosemary Drage Hale, “‘Taste and see, for God is sweet’: Sensory Perception and Memory
in Medieval Christian Mystical Experience,” in Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor
of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Barlett (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 3–14;
Boyd Taylor Coolman, Knowing God by Experience: The Spiritual Senses in the Theology of William
of Auxerre (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004); Gordon Rudy, Mystical
Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2002).
175

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
at least in this instance, any sensation of having become “one” with the
object of his perception.15
What I would like us to think about is why Rupert described his
experience as “sweet,” more particularly, as leaving in “the mouth of
his soul” (in ore animae) “an ineffable taste, a taste of sweetness” (gustus
autem quidam ineffabilis, gustus suauitatis) that lingered for the better
part of a day (aliquamdiu ipsa die superfuit). At first glance, I admit, the
answer might seem somewhat obvious. Rupert had, after all, been kiss-
ing the image, and kisses are, almost by definition, indescribably sweet.
Moreover, kisses, like tastes, involve a certain proximity: a kiss is not
fully a kiss unless it is given, as the bride says of her bridegroom in
Song of Songs 1:1, “with the kisses of his mouth.” This is the way Am-
brose of Milan (d. 397) described the experience in his De Isaac et
anima: “For a kiss is that by which lovers mutually adhere to one an-
other and take possession [of each other] as if by the sweetness of an
interior grace (uelut gratiae interioris suauitate). By this kiss the soul
adheres to God the Word, by this kiss the breath-spirit of him who
kisses is transfused into [the soul], just as those who kiss one another
are not content with the tasting of their lips but seem to pour their
spirits into one another.”16 Within this tradition, kissing God was ex-
pected to leave a sweet taste in the mouth; we would be surprised if it
did not.
Likewise, as anyone who has sung the famous twelfth-century hymn
“Dulcis Jesu memoria” knows, the experience of Christ as Rupert saw
Him, in his crucified humanity, had a long—it is difficult not to say
cloying—association with the sensation of sweetness. 17 As Augustine
15
McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, 187–88, 328–33. Compare Rudy, Mystical Language of Sen-
sation, 14, 54–55, 132, on the relative appropriateness of the term “synesthetic” in this context.
On synesthesia as physiologically experienced, see Richard E. Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted
Shapes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
16
Ambrose, De Isaac vel anima, chap. 3, par. 8 (ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 14 [Paris,
1845], col. 506; compare the version ed. Carolus Schenkl, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum
Latinorum 32.1 [Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1897], 648; trans. Nicolas James Perella, in The Kiss
Sacred and Profane: An Interpretive History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes [Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1969], 44).
17
For the composition, transmission, and variants of this hymm, see André Wilmart, “Le
‘Jubilus’ sur le nom de Jésus dit de Saint Bernard,” Ephemerides Liturgicae: Analecta historico-
ascetica, n.s. 27, 57 (1943): 3–285. On the importance of this hymn, see F. J. E. Raby, A History
of Christian Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1953), 329–31; and Denis Renevey, “Anglo-Norman and Middle English Trans-
lations and Adaptations of the Hymn Dulcis Iesu Memoria,” in The Medieval Translator, vol. 5,
Traduire au Moyen Age, ed. Roger Ellis and René Tixier (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996), 264–83.
For the hymn as it was sung at the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus prior to Vatican II, see
The Liber Usualis with Introduction and Rubrics in English, ed. Benedictines of Solesmes (Tournai,
Belgium: Desclée, 1953; repr., Great Falls, MT: St. Bonaventure Publications, 1997), 452–53.
On the “sweetness of God” more generally, see Jean Chatillon, “Dulcedo, Dulcedo Dei,”
176

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
(d. 430) explained in his commentary on Ps. 134:3 (“Praise the Lord,
for He is good [bonus]; sing to his name because it is sweet [suavis]”):
Indeed, He would be good (bonus), but He would not be sweet (suavis) if He

did not allow you to taste (gustare) Him. And yet, He offered himself to men
(hominibus), when He sent bread from heaven and gave his Son, who is equal
to Him and who is what He is himself, to be made man and to be killed for
men, that through that which you are (ut per hoc quod tu es), you might taste
that which you are not (gustes quod non es). Indeed, it was a great thing for
you to taste the sweetness of God (gustare suavitatem Dei), that sweetness so
distant and exceedingly high, when you were cast down so low and lying in
the utmost depths. Into this great separation you were sent a Mediator. . . .
He himself is the Mediator, and thus he was made sweet (inde factus est
suavis).18
In Rupert’s day, the metaphor was already quite popular, as we might

expect from his explanatory account of his otherwise extraordinary vi-
sion. Indeed, thanks in large part to the writings of Rupert and his con-
temporaries, including, above all, that most “mellifluous doctor” of the
Cistercians, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), the association between
Christ’s sacrifice and sweetness was to become more or less ubiquitous
in the devotional writing and imagery of the later Middle Ages.19 As the
Benedictine Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) memorably urged in the
third of his great Meditationes: “Christian soul, taste the goodness of your
Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, ed. M. Viller et al., 17 vols.
(Paris: Beauchesne, 1932–95), 3:1777–95; Joseph Ziegler, Dulcedo Dei: Ein Beitrag zur Theologie
der griechischen und lateinischen Bibel, Alttestamentliche Abhandlungen 13.2 (Münster: Aschen-
dorff, 1937); and Friedrich Ohly, Süsse Nägel der Passion: Ein Beitrag zur theologischen Semantik,
Saecula Spiritalia 21 (Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1989).
18
Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, “In psalmum CXXXIV,” par. 5 (in Gori, ed., 4:29–30).
On the centrality of this metaphor for Augustine’s understanding of God, see Franz Posset,
“The Sweetness of God,” American Benedictine Review 44, no. 2 ( June 1993): 143–78, at 147–55.
19
Curiously, given the almost embarrassing ubiquity of these gustatory metaphors, the lit-
erature to date is relatively sparse, particularly in comparison with that on the spiritual sig-
nificance of vision. See, in addition to the works cited above (nn. 14, 17, and 18), Franz
Posset, “Christi Dulcedo: The ‘Sweetness of Christ’ in Western Christian Spirituality,” Cistercian
Studies Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1995): 245–65; Edith Scholl, “The Sweetness of the Lord: Dulcis
and Suavis,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 27, no. 4 (1992): 359–66; Reindert L. Falkenburg, The
Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the Imagery of Love in Flemish Paintings of the Virgin and Child,
1450–1550, trans. Sammy Herman (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1994); and Henri de Lubac,
Medieval Exegesis, vol. 2, The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. E. M. Macierowski (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 162–77. On food imagery in scriptural exegesis more generally, see
also Klaus Lange, “Geistliche Speise: Untersuchungen zur Metaphorik der Bibelherme-
neutik,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum und deutsche Litteratur 95, no. 2 (1966): 81–122;
and Carmela Vircillo Franklin, “Words as Food: Signifying the Bible in the Early Middle
Ages,” Settimane di studio della Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo 52 (Spoleto,
2005), pt. 2:733–62. I would like to thank Professor Franklin for sharing her paper with
me in draft prior to publication.
177

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
Redeemer (gusta bonitatem redemptoris tui), be on fire with love for your
Savior; chew the honeycomb of his words (mande favum verborum), suck
their flavor which is sweeter than sap (suge plus quam mellitum saporem),
swallow their wholesome sweetness (gluti salubrem dulcorem). . . . Christ
has brought you back to life. He is the good Samaritan who healed you.
He is the good friend who redeemed you and set you free by laying
down his life for you.”20 Anselm’s archiepiscopal Cistercian successor
Baldwin of Ford (d. 1190) put it perhaps most succinctly, in the conclu-
sion to his De sacramento altaris:
Jesus is sweet (dulcis), his name is sweet, his memory is the desire of the soul
[compare Is. 26:8]. . . . He is sweet in prayer, sweet in speech, sweet in read-
ing, sweet in contemplation, sweet in compunction, and in the jubilation of
the heart. He is sweet in the mouth, sweet in the heart, sweet in love; he is
the love of sweetness and the sweetness of love. His inestimable sweetness
(suavitas) is the first of his gifts and the greatest of his delights. Those who
have tasted of him grow hungry, and those who are hungry will be satisfied
and the sated will cry out (eructabunt) the memory of his abundant sweetness
[compare Ps. 144:7].21
Nor was it only Cistercians or, for that matter, monks who found
the image of Christ particularly sweet. Indeed, some of the most dul-
cet evocations of the Lord’s overwhelming sweetness come not from
the monasteries, but from the Beguinages and convents of northern
Germany, most famously thirteenth-century Helfta. As Gertrude of
Helfta (d. 1301/1302) exclaimed in the fifth of her Exercitia spiritu-
alia: “Blessed the mouth that tastes, O God, my love, the words of your
consolation, sweeter than honey and the honeycomb. When, oh when,
will my soul be filled again out of the fat (adipe) of your divinity and
become inebriated with your plentiful voluptuousness? Ah! Let me
taste you thus here, my Lord, for you are sweet (suavis), that there I may
for eternity happily and thoroughly enjoy you.”22
Gertrude’s longing for the taste of such sweetness may have been
20
Anselm, Meditatio 3 (ed. F. S. Schmidt, S. Anselmi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia, 6
vols. [Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1946–61], 3:84; trans. Benedicta Ward, in The Prayers and
Meditations of Saint Anselm, with the Proslogion [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973], 230).
21
Baldwin, De sacramento altaris, pt. 3, chap. 2.6, “Ex libro Sapientiae” (ed. J.-P. Migne,
Patrologia Latina 204 [Paris, 1855], col. 769; compare the version ed. J. Morson, trans. E. de
Solms, Sources chrétiennes 93–94 [Paris: Les É ditions du Cerf, 1963], 2:566–69; trans. Scholl,
“The Sweetness of the Lord,” 366, with changes).
22
Gertrude, Exercitia spiritualia, bk. 5, lines 481–86 (ed. Jacques Hourlier and Albert Schmitt,
Gertrude d’Helfta, oeuvres spirituelles, vol. 1, Les exercises, Sources chrétiennes 127 [Paris: Les
Éditions du Cerf, 1967], 194; trans. Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, as Spiritual Exercises,
Cistercian Fathers Series 49 [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1989], 90, with changes).
178

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
inspired by the revelations of her mentor and spiritual friend, Mech-

thild of Hackeborn (d. 1298/1299), who once, in a vision, was led by
Love to the Lord. There “she bent over to the wound of the honeyed
heart (melliflui Cordis) of her only Savior, drawing from it draughts of
sweetness (dulcoris) and very full of sweetness (suavitatis). There all her
bitterness was turned to sweetness (dulcedinem) and her fear to trust.
And there she sucked the sweetest fruit ( fructum dulcissimum) from the
sweetest heart of Christ (de Corde Christi suavissimo), which she drew
from the heart of God and put in her mouth. This signified [her sisters
concluded in their account of Mechthild’s vision] that eternal praise
which comes from the heart of God.”23 “Alas, my well-beloved,” the
Loving Soul complained in Mechthild of Magdeburg’s (d. ca. 1282)
eclectic theological meditation Das fließende Licht der Gottheit, “I am
hoarse in the throat of my chastity, but the sugar of your sweet mildness
(das zuker diner suessen miltekeit) has made my throat to sound again so
that I can sing thus: Lord, your blood and mine are one, untainted.
Your love and mine are one, inseparable. Your garment and mine are
one, immaculate. Your mouth and mine are one, unkissed . . . by any
man but you alone.”24
It is easy, if somewhat overstimulating, to multiply the examples,
whether in Latin or in the vernacular: “O good Father, sweet brother
(dulcis frater), sweet Lord (suavis Dominus), you are everything that is
good and sweet (bonus . . . et dulcis et suavis). . . . Open yourself to
us, that your sweetness (suavitas) may flow forth from you to us, and
fill us” (William of St. Thierry [d. 1148], in the sixth of his Meditationes,
on the “joy of the blessed and the contemplation of the humanity of
Christ”);25 “Ihesu swete ihesu, mi druð, mi derling, mi drihtin, mi hea-
land, mi huniter [honey-drop], mi haliwei [balm]. Swetter is mune-
gunge [the memory] of þe þen mildeu o muðe [honey in the mouth]”
23
Liber specialis gratiae, pt. 2, chap. 16 (ed. Louis Paquelin, Revelationes Gertrudianae et Mech-
tildianae 2: Sanctae Mechtildis virginis ordinis sancti Benedicti Liber specialis gratiae [Poitiers: Oudin,
1877], 150; trans. Bernard McGinn, in The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New
Mysticism, 1200–1350 [New York: Crossroad, 1998], 279, with changes).
24
Mechthild, Das fließende Licht der Gottheit, bk. 2, chap. 25 (ed. Hans Neumann with Gisela
Vollmann-Profe, Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mit-
telalters 100–101 [Munich: Artemis, 1990], 1:67–68, lines 131–39; trans. Frank Tobin, as The
Flowing Light of the Godhead [New York: Paulist Press, 1998], 96, with changes from Hale, “Taste
and see,” 12).
25
William, Meditatio VI: Anima gaudium beatorum, ac coelum, id est Deum, et arcam testamenti,
id est humanitate Christi, contemplatur (ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 180 [Paris, 1855], col.
226; trans. Sister Penelope, in The Works of William of St. Thierry, vol. 1, On Contemplating God;
Prayer; Meditations, Cistercian Fathers Series 3 [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1977], 132, with
changes).
179

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
(the opening address of the Middle English meditation known as “The

Wooing of Our Lord” [þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd]);26 “Swete Ihesu, now
wol I synge” (a long fourteenth-century poem written under the inspi-
ration of Richard Rolle [d. 1349]);27 “Swete Ihesu, king of blisse,”
“Iesu, swete is the love of thee / Noon othir thing so swete may be”
(two of the lyrics from MS Harley 2253);28 “O Jhesu, endles swetnes of
lovyng soules” (the first of the “Fifteen Oes” attributed to St. Bridget
of Sweden [d. 1373]).29
You get the picture. What do you make of the taste? To judge at least
from the decisions many recent translators have made when con-
fronted with such eructations of sweetness—dulcis, suavis, mellifluus;
dolce, süeze, swete—you may be feeling not simply overstimulated but
rather overwhelmed, perhaps even slightly queasy. You may also, at a
guess, be feeling somewhat embarrassed, particularly if you are some-
one who has worked closely with any of the texts I have mentioned
and would read in them something rather more intellectually or spir-
itually sophisticated than such an intemperate profusion of sweetness
would tend to suggest. As Gertrud Lewis and Jack Lewis noted con-
cerning their lexical efforts to avoid saturating their translation of Ger-
trude’s Exercitia spiritualia with “sweets”: “However right ‘sweet’ may be
for suavis or dulcis in an individual sentence, its repetition throughout
the Exercises would [have] created what we feel would be an untruth-
ful impression of saccharinity. To guard against such cloying sweet-
ness,” Lewis and Lewis explained, “we have taken these steps: dulcis is
represented by its English cognate ‘dulcet’ and mellifluus by its cognate
‘mellifluous.’ Suavis has become ‘pleasant.’”30 Franz Posset has noted a
similar tampering with the gustatory sense of süeze and süezekeit in one
recent translation of Johannes Tauler’s sermons, where süeze is rendered
26
þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, ed. W. Meredith Thompson, Early English Texts Society, o.s.,
241 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 20.
27
Carl Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole, an English Father of the Church,
and his followers, 2 vols. (NewYork: Macmillan, 1895–96), 2:9–24. On this lyric, see also Rosemary
Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 176.
28
Douglas Gray, English Medieval Religious Lyrics, rev. ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
1992), 48–49 nn. 47 and 48. See also Woolf, English Religious Lyric, 174.
29
“The Fifteen Oes,” ed. Rebecca Krug, in Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Lit-
erature in Translation, ed. Anne Clark Barlett and Thomas H. Bestul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1999), 212.
30
Gertrude, Spiritual Exercises, 32 n. 63, commenting on the phrase “suaviter gustare amen
dulce, quo ipse reficit” (Hourlier and Schmitt, Gertrude d’Helfta, ouevres spirituelles, 76), which
Lewis and Lewis translate as “taste with pleasure the dulcet Amen with which he himself
refreshes [the soul].”
180

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
“tender,” “blissful,” or “spiritual,” and süezekeit is taken to mean not only

“sweetness” but, more generally, “bliss” or “joy.”31
Translators of the psalms have frequently taken similar ways out. In
both versions of the psalter used throughout the Middle Ages for the
recitation of the Divine Office in the churches of the Latin West (iuxta
Romanum and iuxta Gallicanum), Ps. 33:9 reads “gustate et videte quoniam
suavis est Dominus”: “Taste and see that the Lord is sweet.” In Jerome’s
AD 393 translation from the Hebrew that, with the Tridentine reforms
of the sixteenth century, was to be taken up as the authoritative, Vul-
gate version of the Roman Catholic Church, however, the same verse
reads, “gustate et videte quoniam bonus Dominus”: “Taste and see that the
Lord is good.”32 (The original Hebrew is tob, which can mean “good” or
“lovely” as well as “sweet.” The Septuagint Greek translation is χρηστoσ ´ ,
33
literally “useful.”) More recent translators have tended to follow Je-
rome’s lead. In Martin Luther’s sixteenth-century translation, Ps. 34:9
reads, “Schmecket und sehet, wie freundlich der Herr ist.” In the sev-
enteenth-century King James Version (KJV), Ps. 34:8 reads, “O taste
and see that the Lord is good.” In the twentieth-century Revised Stan-
dard Version (RSV), the translation is the same. Similar permutations
have attended the translation of Ps. 134:3 [135:3, Luther, KJV, RSV]:
“laudate Dominum quia [R: quoniam] bonus [R: benignus] Dominus, psallite
nomini eius quoniam suave [R: suavis est]” (Romanum and Gallicanum);
“laudate Dominum quoniam bonus Dominus, cantate nomini eius quoniam
decens” (Hebraicum); “Lobet den Herrn, denn der Herr ist freundlich;
lobsinget seinem Namen, denn er ist lieblich!” (Luther); “Praise the
Lord; for the Lord is good: sing praises unto his name; for it is pleasant”
(KJV); “Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good; sing to his name, for he
is gracious!” (RSV).
31
Posset, “Christi Dulcedo,” 254 n. 47, citing Johannes Tauler, Sermons, trans. Maria Shrady
(New York: Paulist Press, 1985).
32
For the psalterium iuxta Gallicanum as translated from the Septuagint, see Biblia Sacra
iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Robert Weber with B. Fischer, H. I. Frede, H. F. D. Sparks,
and W. Thiele, prepared by Roger Gryson, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft,
1994), 770–955 (left-hand pages). The psalterium iuxta Romanum was used until the ninth
century everywhere in the West except northern Italy and in Rome until the pontificate of
Pius V (1566–1572); see Le Psautier Romain et les autres anciens psautiers latins, ed. Robert Weber,
Collectanea Biblica Latina 10 (Rome: Abbaye Saint-Jérôme, 1953). For history, relationship,
and liturgical use of the psalter versions, see Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations
of English Benedictine Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 22–25; Andrew
Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to Their Organization and Terminology
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 225–31; and George H. Brown, “The Psalms as
the Foundation of Anglo-Saxon Learning,” in The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture
of the Middle Ages, ed. Nancy Van Deusen (Albany: State University of New York, 1999), 1–24.
33
Posset, “The Sweetness of God,” 149; Chatillon, “Dulcedo, Duceldo Dei,” cols. 1781–83.
181

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
Augustine would rather insist that, in favoring such translations, we

seem to be missing the point. Of course the Lord is bonus, freundlich,
and good. He is also, however, sweet: “Listen to the psalm: ‘Taste and
see that the Lord is sweet (suavis).’ He was made sweet (suavis) to you
because he liberated you. You had been bitter (amarus) to yourself
when you were occupied only with yourself. Drink the sweetness (dul-
cedinem); accept the pledge from so great a granary.”34 The underlying
assumption here, as Augustine made clear in his comment on Ps. 134:
3, is that, with the Incarnation, Christ himself became not only good
or friendly or pleasant but food, that is, something we might taste:
bread “sent from heaven . . . [giving] life to the world” (compare John
6:32–35, 48–51). But—or so we, in our turn, might still justifiably in-
sist—why, after all, should this bread “giving life to the world” taste
“sweet”? There are, after all, other flavors, other tastes, as Augustine
himself would most certainly agree. Indeed, in the Galenic theories of
physiology popular in Augustine’s own day and current, with certain
ups and downs, in both Arabic and Latin dietetics well into the six-
teenth century, there were as many as eight, as compared with our
more modest four or five, principal flavor categories detectable by the
human palate: sweet (dulcis), greasy (unctuosus), bitter (amarus), salty
(salsus), vinegary or acidic (acetosus or acidus), harsh (stipticus), astrin-
gent or briny ( ponticus), and acrid or sharp (acutus or pungitivus).
Some authors, including Avicenna [Ibn Sina, d. 1037], would specify
a ninth, actually, a negative: tasteless (insipidus).35
Why, with so many flavor categories to choose from, would medieval
Christian authors assert over and over again that Jesus, the “bread of
heaven,” tastes “sweet”? Perhaps because the actual bread that they ate
at communion was prepared so as to taste especially sweet, baked as it
was with only the whitest, purest flour, ideally wheat.36 But, then, of
course, as we have seen, they did not stop with wheat: the taste of the
Lord was “ineffably sweet”—in the words of the hymn—“sweeter than
honey and the honeycomb” and “all other things.”37 Having drunk
from the “honeyed heart of her only Savior,” Mechthild of Hackeborn
34
Augustine, Sermones de Scripturis, sermon 145, par. 5 (ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 38
[Paris, 1841], col. 794; trans. Posset, in “The Sweetness of God,” 149–50, with changes).
35
Charles Burnett, “Sapores sunt octo: The Medieval Latin Terminology for the Eight Fla-
vours,” Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali/Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies: I cinque
sensi/The Five Senses 10 (2002): 99–112. These flavor categories remained current in European
dietetics well into the sixteenth century. See Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2002), 82–84.
36
Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 39–42.
37
Dulcis Iesu memoria, stanza 1 (ed. Wilmart, “Le ‘Jubilus,’” 146): “Dulcis Iesu memoria, /
Dans uera cordi gaudia, / Sed super mel et omnia. / Eius dulcis presentia.”
182

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
offered her own heart as a golden wine cup and as a pomegranate that
her Loved One might taste of his sweetness himself.38 The Dominican
Henry Suso (d. 1366), famous for carving the “sweet name of Jesus” in
the flesh over his heart, prayed thus as, in the guise of the Servant
instructed by Eternal Wisdom, he approached his Lord at the altar: “O
living Fruit, sweet Jewel, delicious Pomegranate of the glorious heart
of the Father, sweet Grape of Cyprus in the vineyard of Engedi. . . .
O sweet, delicious Bread of heaven, which contains within it all the
sweetness every heart desires, let the dry mouth of my soul enjoy you
today.”39 For the Franciscan Rudolf of Biberach (d. 1330), Christ was
a large fig “of infinite sweetness” (infinitae dulcedinis),40 while Gertrude
of Helfta likened the sweetness of Christ’s divinity to the sweetness of
fat (Ps. 62:6: adipe et pinguidine).41
The source for the majority of these mellifluous metaphors is not
far to seek. It is the bride of the Song of Songs who describes her
bridegroom as “a grape of Cyprus in the vineyards of Engaddi” (1:13),
and it is he who calls to her, his beloved, when “the fig tree has put
out its thick shoots” (2:13). “Milk and honey” are under the bride’s
tongue, and her lips “drip honeycomb” as her clothing gives forth its
fragrance (4:11). And it is the bride, again, who invites her beloved
38
Alberta Dieker, “Mechtild of Hackeborn: Song of Love,” in Medieval Women Monastics:
Wisdom’s Wellsprings, ed. Miriam Schmitt and Linda Kulzer (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press,
1996), 231–42, at 236–37. On Mechthild’s use of this imagery of sweetness in the context of
her visions more generally, see McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 278–82; Ann Marie Caron,
“Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord: Mechthild of Hackeborn,” in Hidden Springs:
Cistercian Monastic Women, ed. John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank, 2 vols. (Kalamazoo,
MI: Cistercian, 1995), 2:509–24; and Caroline Walker Bynum, “Women Mystics in the Thir-
teenth Century: The Case of the Nuns of Helfta,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality
of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 170–262, at 210–17.
39
Henry Suso, Büchlein der Ewigen Weisheit, chap. 23 (ed. Karl Bihlmeyer, Enrich Seuse: Deutsche
Schriften im Auftrag der Württembergischen Kommission für Landesgeschichte [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1907], 303; trans. Frank Tobin, as The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons [New York: Paulist
Press, 1989], 285, with changes). According to Falkenburg, Fruit of Devotion, 69, this prayer
circulated widely in Dutch translation. On Suso’s devotional attitude toward food more gen-
erally, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food
to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 102–5.
40
Rudolf, De septem itineribus aeternitatis, bk. 6 (ed. A. C. Peltier, in Opera omnia Sancti
Bonaventurae [Paris: Ludovicus Vives, 1864–71], 8:393–482, at 472; cited in Posset, “Christi
Dulcedo,” 254 n. 46). On Rudolf’s account of the spiritual senses, including taste, see Rudy,
Mystical Language of Sensation, 109–12. Rudolf’s treatise also circulated in a Middle High
German translation, where Jesus is described as “die grossen fige einer vngeendeter sues-
sikeit.” See Margot Schmidt, ed., Die siben strassen zu got: Die hochalemannische Übertragung
nach der Handschrift Einsiedeln 278 (Quaracchi: Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1969),
164.
41
Gertrude, Exercitia spiritualia, bk. 5, line 483 (ed. Hourlier and Schmitt, Oeuvres spirituelles,
194). Interestingly, Lewis and Lewis, Spiritual Exercises, 90, translate adipe as “cream.” Compare
Charlton T. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1879), s.v. “adeps”: “the soft fat or
grease of animals, suet, lard.”
183

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
“to go out into the fields . . . to see if the grape blossoms have opened
and if the pomegranates (mala punica) are in flower” (7:11–12, Vulgate,
my translation). Bread, grapes, milk, honey: it is difficult not to see
here little more than the fruitful—if not always tasteful—extension of
many of Scripture’s most sweet-tasting metaphors. If Christ said not
only “I am the bread of life” ( John 6:35) but also “I am the vine, you
are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much
fruit” ( John 15:5, RSV), surely it is little wonder that the exegetes—
almost by definition, regular communicants at Mass—should discover
figurae of Christ in the cereal and vineal imagines of the Old Testament.
Paul himself likened the teachings appropriate to those less skilled in
the word of righteousness to milk, as compared with the solid food of
the spiritually mature (Heb. 5:13), whereas Peter urged his readers to
be “like newborn infants, [longing] for milk, that by it you may grow
into salvation, if, indeed, you have tasted that the Lord is sweet [dul-
cis]” (1 Pet. 2:2–3, Vulgate, my translation). Which leaves only honey,
again, a fairly obvious “sweet.” In the words of the psalmist: “How sweet
(dulcia) are thy words to my taste ( faucibus meis), sweeter than honey
(mel ) to my mouth!” (Ps. 118:103, Vulgate, my translation; compare
RSV 119:103).
There are, however, certain other images that are somewhat less easy
to reconcile with exegetical precedent or with modern expectations
about which foods are “savory” or “spicy” as opposed to “sweet”: al-
monds, for example. When Aaron’s rod flowered, it put forth buds that
bore ripe almonds (Num. 17:8), a clear image, for medieval exegetes,
of Mary’s virginal maternity of Christ.42 And yet, how many of us would
describe Jesus, in the words of one late medieval Dutch prayer to the
Five Wounds and the Sacred Heart, as “noble almond, soft and sweet”
(edel amandel saecht ende suet)?43 But, you will say, almonds are sweet!
What about cinnamon? According to her biographers, even the air
42
For references, see J.-P. Migne, Index Marianus, sec. 7, Patrologia Latina 219 (Paris, 1862),
col. 521, s.v. “Virga Aaron.”
43
Maria Meertens, De Godsvrucht in de Nederlanden naar handschriften van gebedenboeken der
XVe eeuw, 6 vols., Historische bibliotheek van Godsdienstwetenschappen (Antwerp: Boekhan-
del N.V. Standard, 1930–32), 2:29; trans. Falkenburg, in Fruit of Devotion, 68. It may not be
coincidental that Christ’s side wound is represented in many late medieval images as itself
almond shaped, although many recent commentators have preferred to read the wound as
a vaginal slit. For examples of such images, see Flora Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and
the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,” in Women and the Book:
Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Jane H. M. Taylor and Lesley Smith (London: British Library
and University of Toronto Press, 1996), 204–29; and David S. Areford, “The Passion Measured:
A Late-Medieval Diagram of the Body of Christ,” in The Broken Body: Passion Devotion in Late-
Medieval Culture, ed. A. A. MacDonald, H. N. B. Ridderbos, and R. M. Schlusemann (Gron-
ingen: Egbert Forsten, 1998), 211–38.
184

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
tasted sweet after Christ had come to visit the bedridden laywoman
Lidwina of Schiedam (d. 1433), “so that those who entered her room
thought that it had been filled with various aromatic spices. They per-
ceived this most sweet odor (suavissimus odor) not only as a fragrance
(in odoratu), but also as a taste (in gustu), as if they had eaten ginger
(gingiber) or cloves (gariofilos) or cinnamon (cynamomum). So strong,
indeed, was this taste, that, it was commonly said, it was as if a burning
flavor (ardens sapor) were stinging their palate and tongue with sweet-
ness (cum suavitate).”44 Alan of Lille (d. 1203) would concur. As he
explained in his dictionary of theological distinctions, “Cinnamon is
both an aromatic spice, and inward contemplation; for cinnamon has
the sweetest bark (dulcissimi corticis); therefore, it signifies the sweetness
(dulcedinem) of inward contemplation, whence it says in the Song [of
Songs 4:14]: ‘Nard, saffron, cane and cinnamon.’”45 What about spiced
wines—or myrrh? Myrrh is more usually associated, even in the exe-
getical literature, with bitterness, particularly the bitterness of Christ’s
passion (compare Mark 15:23). And yet, the bridegroom says in the
Song of Songs (5:1): “I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride;
I gathered (messui) my myrrh with my spices; I ate honeycomb with my
honey and drank my milk with my wine; eat, friends, drink, and be
inebriated, o dearest ones!” (Vulgate, my translation).
Perhaps, after all, we are dealing here not with sweetness as a specific
category of flavor or taste but simply sweetness as a mode of pleasur-
able sensation, closely allied with smell, proximity, and touch, but met-
aphorically independent of the perceptions we might have of particu-
lar foods in our mouths or on our tongues. I would be willing to believe
that this were in fact the case, if not for one thing: the effect that this
sweetness is said over and over again to have had on its recipients,
beginning (in my own scholarly experience) with Rupert. Most notably,
they experienced the Lord’s sweetness not only as comforting but,
moreover, as healing. This is Rupert on Song of Songs 5:1: “I have
come into my garden.” It is Christ who speaks, addressing his bride,
his mother Mary:
By descending, indeed, into your womb and assuming flesh, so that I who was
44
Johannes Gerlach and Johannes Walter of Leiden, De b. Lidwige sive Lidwina virgine
Schidami in Hollandia: Prior Vita, chap. 6, par. 57 (ed. G. Henschenius and D. Papebrochius,
Acta Sanctorum, April, vol. 2 [Antwerp: Michael Cnobarus, 1675], XIV Aprilis, col. 283A;
accessed online through the Acta Sanctorum Full-Text Database [Cambridge: Chadwyck-
Healey, 1999–2002], http://acta.chadwyck.com). On the role of food more generally in
descriptions of Lidwina’s spirituality, see Bynum, Holy Feast, 124–29.
45
Alan of Lille, Liber in distinctionibus dictionum theologicalium (ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia
Latina 210 [Paris, 1855], col. 741), s.v. “cinnamomum.”
185

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
true God might be born true man, I have come into my garden; by dying and
descending into hell, returning with all the saints and my chosen ones who
looked for me from the beginning of the world, I gathered my myrrh with my
spices; by rising again, I ate my honeycomb with my honey; by ascending into
heaven, I drank my milk with my wine. . . . And so I say to [my friends], “Eat,
drink and be inebriated, o dearest ones!” What will you eat, and what will you
drink? To be sure, the leftovers (reliquias), which I taking up have given to
you, the leftovers of my honeycomb and my honey, the leftovers of my milk
and my wine, the leftovers of my myrrh and my roasted fish. I invite you to
eat and drink not as the serpent invited the woman Eve, and the woman,
her husband; rather, against that which they ate, I set before you as an an-
tidote the necessary food and drink (ego necessariae comestionis atque bibitionis
appono uobis antidotum). . . . “Eat,” he said to them, “and you will be like gods.”
“Eat and drink,” I say to you, and you will be by grace what I am by nature,
namely children of God. . . . “And be inebriated,” therefore, “o dearest ones; be
inebriated,” I say, so that you forget your necessity and are mindful no longer
of your pain. 46
Again, the metaphor is a familiar one: the food and drink offered
to us by Christ will heal us of our ancient pains, and not only that food
and drink most intimately associated with Christ, that is, the bread and
wine of the Eucharist, but, indeed, all of the food that he ate while
incarnate as a human being. But why? Why should food and drink be
likened to an antidote, as “necessary” against the action of a poison,
itself likewise taken as food? Is food a medicine? Some, even today,
would doubtless say, “Yes.” But, if so, would they then go on, as Rupert
does elsewhere, to describe the experience of tasting this medicinal
food as “sweet”? Probably not: everyone knows that medicines are sup-
posed to taste bitter. But, again, why do we know this? Why shouldn’t
medicines taste good? They are, after all, supposed to be good for us.
And what, if anything, does all of this have to do with the devotional
fact that the Word who became man—that is, flesh—and lived among
us should be experienced more often than not, both in the heart and
on the tongue, as “ineffably sweet”? To answer these questions, clearly
we need to think a little more carefully—indeed, sensorially—about
taste. What, after all, did the food that our monastic commentators
were thinking about in describing their experience of God as “sweet”
taste like? And why did they think that it was a good thing for their
food to taste “sweet” rather than, as so many modern translators have
46
Rupert, Commentaria in Canticum canticorum de Incarnatione Domini, bk. 4 (Song of Songs
5:1; ed. Rhabanus Haacke, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 26 [Turnhout:
Brepols, 1974], 95, 98–99, 102).
186

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
felt, something to be embarrassed about or tempered with more “neu-

tral” sensations, like “creamy” or “pleasant”?
what’s in a taste?
It has been sometimes said that medieval people, particularly medi-
eval Christians, were relatively indifferent to the experience of taste.
To be sure, they liked spices—whole economies, particularly in the
Low Countries and northern Italy, were given over to the importation
of spice—but, it has often been said, wasn’t this simply because oth-
erwise their food was so bad? As every cook worth his salt knew all
too well, “the pervading flavour of pepper, cinnamon and ginger
could”—in Richard Southern’s memorable words—“cover a multitude
of shortcomings in the kitchen.” 47
Food historians would tend rather to disagree. Judging at least from
the legal restrictions enacted in England and France against the sale
of even day-old meat, medieval Europeans were no more willing to
consume rotting meat than are modern Europeans (and Americans),
nor is it now generally accepted that modern eaters would necessarily
find medieval dishes “overly-spiced.”48 Quite the reverse. Spices like
pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, saffron, and cloves were expensive
commodities, traveling thousands of miles from their point of harvest
(messis) to the kitchens and tables of the wealthier classes. If the recipes
that survive include more of them in more unusual combinations than
47
R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1953), 42.
48
On the question of spices and “rotting meat,” see Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a
Temptation (New York: Knopf, 2004), 106–9. On the legal restrictions in the sale of food,
particularly meat, see Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony
(New York: George Braziller, 1976), 67–91; Terence Scully, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1995), 53–54; and Jean-Louis Flandrin, “Seasoning, Cook-
ing, and Dietetics in the Late Middle Ages,” in Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the
Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, with Albert Sonnenfeld, trans. Clar-
issa Botsford et al. (New York: Penguin, 2000), 313–27, at 314; citing Louis Stouff, Ravitaillement
et alimentation en Provence aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1970), on the butchery reg-
ulations in Carpentras against the sale of even day-old meat. Against the insistence that spices
were favored in medieval cooking primarily as preservatives and/or against the flavor of rot,
see also Scully, Art of Cookery, 83–86; Bruno Laurioux, “Spices in the Medieval Diet: A New
Approach,” Food and Foodways 1 (1985): 43–76; Bridget Ann Henisch, Fast and Feast: Food in
Medieval Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 104–8; and Lorna
J. Sass, “The Preference for Sweets, Spices, and Almond Milk in Late Medieval English Cui-
sine,” in Food in Perspective: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Ethnological Food
Research, Cardiff, Wales, 1987, ed. Alexander Fenton and Trefor M. Owen (Edinburgh: John
Donald Publishers, 1981), 253–60. On the relative spiciness (or lack thereof) of medieval
cooking, see also Constance B. Hieatt, Brenda Hosington, and Sharon Butler, Pleyn Delit:
Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), xiii–xiv;
and Redon, Sabban, and Serventi, The Medieval Kitchen, 29–31.
187

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
modern palates might tend to prefer, this is no reason to assume (as

certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culinary antiquarians seem
to have done) that the cooks did not know what they were doing or,
in Southern’s words, were trying to cover up their mistakes.49 Spices
came from Paradise or, at the very least, from wondrous regions to the
East.50 They were no more to be squandered on rotting meat than
luxurious pigments like lapis lazuli were to be applied to any but the
whitest, smoothest parchment or paper. Even monks like Rupert,
chided by his friend Abbot Cuno of Siegberg for being something of
an Epicurean, seem not to have been able to resist their appeal, or
so we may infer from the frustration with which Bernard of Clairvaux
rebuked his young relation and fellow Cistercian Robert for hanker-
ing after the pleasures of the table at the great Benedictine monas-
tery of Cluny, where, much to the danger of their souls, the monks
consumed “pepper, ginger, cumin, sage, and a thousand such types
of seasonings.” 51
But was the presence of such seasonings really about taste? No reader
of medieval cookery books can fail to be amazed by the attention lav-
ished by their authors on the correct presentation of foods. How the
food looked was clearly a matter of concern not only for those who
would prepare the more elaborate subtleties for the great feasts of the
wealthy—for example, roasted peacocks and swans served reassembled
in their own feathers; ships and castles fashioned out of pastry and
49
Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York:
Penguin, 1985), 84–85, quotes William Hazlitt on “the unnatural union of flesh with sweets”
that Hazlitt observed in medieval cookery. See W. C. Hazlitt, Old English Cookery Books and
Ancient Cuisine (London: E. Stock, 1886), 183. On the change in attitudes toward the mixture
of sugar, spices, and meat in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to which Hazlitt was
heir, see Jean-Louis Flandrin, “From Dietetics to Gastronomy: The Liberation of the Gourmet,”
in Flandrin and Montanari, Food: A Culinary History, 418–32.
50
Andrew Dalby, Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000), charts the actual and imagined origins of some of the most popular ancient and
medieval spices. On the appeal of spices’ scarcity, see Paul Freedman, “Spices and Late-
Medieval European Ideas of Scarcity and Value,” Speculum 80, no. 4 (2005): 1209–27.
51
For Rupert’s tendency to Epicureanism, see his self-description in Super quaedam capitula
regulae Benedicti, or Liber de apologeticis suis, bk. 1 (ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 170
[Paris, 1854], col. 479): “Nam quia sum homuncio ventris pigri, et cuilibet Epicuro pene
consimilis, dicere soles.” For Bernard’s condemnation of Cluniac table customs, see Epistola
1.11 (ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 182 [Paris, 1854], col. 77; see also Jean Leclercq,
C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais, eds., Sancti Bernardi opera, 8 vols. [Rome: Editiones cister-
cienses, 1957–77], 7:9). On the presence of spices in the monastic diet generally, see Barbara
Harvey, “Monastic Diet, XIIIth–XVIth Centuries: Problems and Perspectives,” in Alimentazione
e nutrizione secc. XIII–XVIII: Atti della ventottesima Settimana di Studi, 22–27 aprile 1996, ed.
Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1997), 611–41, at 613, 627, 631–32; and Turner,
Spice, 265–81.
188

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
marzipan; pies with false bottoms from which singing birds would fly
when the pie was opened—but even for those making only the most
humble of pottages.52 Assuredly, no manuscript illuminator agonized
more over how to mix exactly the right shade of red, for example, to
depict the blood dripping from Christ’s wounds, than did the author
of the recipes copied sometime in the early fourteenth century into
London, British Library, MS Royal 12.C.xii, over what color to make
haucegeme (veal stew; “sandragon” red) or maumenee (pottage with
minced capon; red or indigo).53 Red sang dragoun (almond milk with
rice, ginger, and sugar); green hauseleamye (chicken with grapes, garlic,
and parsley); yellow double mortrels (pottage with boiled egg); pink rosee
(beef, pork, or mutton cooked with almond milk, cinnamon, and
sugar, and topped with rose petals). Did it really matter what blanc
desirree tasted like—almond milk, rice flour, capon meat, choice ginger,
white sugar, white wine, boiled in a clean pot then set to cool and
served with pomegranate seeds on top—or only that it was blanc, that
is, “white”?54
It is important to be careful here. Medieval Europeans certainly seem
to have delighted in food that appeared otherwise than food or other-
wise than one might expect it, on sight, to taste. It is, nevertheless,
another thing altogether to conclude that what mattered for them in
the spicing and coloring of food was spectacle rather than taste and
from there to suggest that this is why medieval Christians were pecu-
liarly prone to conflate the experience of receiving the Eucharistic host
on their tongues with seeing it at the elevation because tasting it phys-
ically did not really matter.55 Yes, taste could delight and deceive, but
52
For descriptions of these various “subtleties,” see Scully, Art of Cookery, 104–10; Bober, Art,
Culture, and Cuisine, 259–62; and Henisch, Fast and Feast, 206–36. For recipes, see Hieatt,
Hosington, and Butler, Pleyn Delit, nos. 137–42 (including a “fars” boar’s head and a pastry
castle); Cosman, Fabulous Feasts, 198–204 (including a four-part heraldic design made of fish
suspended in gelatin, as well as a “live frog and turtle pie,” singing blackbirds optional); and
Joop Witteveen, “The Great Birds, Part 5: Preparation of the Peacock for the Table,” Petits
propos culinaires 36 (1990): 10–20.
53
Constance B. Hieatt and Robin F. Jones, “Two Anglo-Norman Culinary Collections Edited
from British Library Manuscripts Additional 32085 and Royal 12.C.xii,” Speculum 61, no. 4
(1986): 859–82, at 866–67 and 877. This latter manuscript is copied in the same hand as
London, British Library, MS Harley 2253, source of the lyrics “Swete Ihesu, king of blisse”
and “Iesu, swete is the love of thee” (see above n. 28).
54
Hieatt and Jones, “Two Anglo-Norman Culinary Collections,” 866–68 and 877–79.
55
Compare Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 60–61: “Medieval cookbooks make it clear that
visual effects were more important to a medieval diner than taste and that vivid colors . . .
were often applied at the expense of flavor. . . . Given such assumptions about and expec-
tations of food, it is small wonder that medieval mystics considered sounds and sights as crucial
to the Eucharistic banquet as eating, or that they sometimes felt they ‘ate’ or ‘received’ with
their eyes or in their minds and hearts.” For similar emphases, see Suzannah Biernoff, Sight
189

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
so could sight. The real question was not—although some would put
it this way—which of the senses pleasured most or lied least but rather
what kind of information each of the senses was expected to provide.
Sight, according to the majority of ancient, medieval, and modern
accounts, is the noblest of the animal (i.e., human) senses, followed
closely (if not, in fact, superseded) by hearing.56 For Aristotle (d. 322
BC), sight was the more important of the various faculties of the soul
“for the mere necessities of life and in itself” because it is through
sight that we perceive “the common sensibles” (i.e., shape, magnitude,
movement, and number), whereas hearing “makes the largest contri-
bution to wisdom” because it is through hearing that we participate in
discourse, “the cause of learning.”57 Smelling, like hearing and seeing,
enables animals capable of movement to pursue their food and avoid
danger and contamination, whereas taste and touch are common and,
indeed, necessary to all animals from the simplest to the most complex,
for without them, the animal would not be able to survive.58 Twelfth-
century cosmologists and natural philosophers like Bernardus Silvestris
(d. ca. 1159) and Alan of Lille, along with most late medieval Aristote-
lian commentators and scholastics tended, by and large, to agree, at the
same time, however, placing an even more pronounced evaluative em-
phasis on the senses peculiar to the “higher” animals, particularly hu-
mans, than even Aristotle seems to have intended. In this oft-reiterated
view, sight and hearing are the superior senses because they are most
closely allied with understanding and reason, while smell, taste, and
touch are the inferior ones because they participate ever more pro-
gressively in the sluggishness—and, therefore, perceptual incapaci-
ties—of the body.59
and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 140–43 (on “ocular commun-
ion”); and Rubin, Corpus Christi, 63 (on the elevation as “a sort of substitute ‘sacramental
viewing’”).
56
On the importance of sight in medieval discussions of sensory perception, see Biernoff,
Sight and Embodiment, 63–84; Elizabeth Sears, “Sensory Perception and Its Metaphors in the
Time of Richard of Fournival,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17–39, 276–83; and Michael Camille, Gothic
Art: Glorious Visions (New York: Harry Abrams, 1996), 21–25. For its importance in Galenic
physiology, see Rudolph E. Siegel, Galen on Sense Perception: His Doctrines, Observations and
Experiments on Vision, Hearing, Smell, Taste, Touch and Pain, and Their Historical Sources (Basel:
S. Karger, 1970), 10–216 (NB: this is by far the longest chapter in the book; by comparison,
taste gets only some fifteen pages, 158–73).
57
Aristotle, De sensu, 437a (trans. W. S. Hett, as “On Sense and Sensible Objects,” in Aristotle,
Vol. VIII: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, Loeb Classical Library 288, rev. ed. [Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957], 219).
58
Aristotle, De anima, 434a–435b (trans. W. S. Hett, as “On the Soul,” in Aristotle, Vol. VIII:
On the Soul, 197–203).
59
Sears, “Sensory Perception,” 28–33. For an intriguing early thirteenth-century counter-
190

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
A similar hierarchy would seem to be suggested by most medieval

discussions of the so-called spiritual (as opposed to bodily) senses.60
Bernard of Clairvaux offered one such ranking in a sermon he deliv-
ered “on the life and five senses of the soul.”61 Whereas the life (vita)
of the soul (anima) is the knowledge of truth, its sense (sensus, i.e.,
both its faculty of understanding and of perception) is love (caritas).
This sensus, like that of the body, is fivefold, with sight corresponding
to the highest and most “holy” (sanctus sive devotus) love, that directed
toward God. The other loves descend in object and excellence, along
with their corresponding “senses,” from the “violent” love that we have
for our enemies (hearing); to the “righteous” or “general” love we have
toward other human beings (smell); to the “pleasant” (jucundus) love
that we have for our friends “because this is the sense which is most
necessary for human life” (taste); and, finally, to the “pious” ( pius) love
that we have for our parents (touch). The distinguishing criterion of
the various sense objects is distance: God is furthest away from us, our
parents and friends closest. Accordingly, spiritual vision, hearing, and
smell allow the soul to love objects corporeally more remote from it-
self, while spiritual taste and touch communicate only with the friends
and family who nourish us in the flesh.
Elsewhere, however, Bernard offered a rather different ranking of
these same “spiritual senses,” privileging not sight and hearing but
rather touch and taste, suggesting, by the by, that there was more to
the purportedly “lower” senses than one might initially assume from
other, more often-cited medieval sensory lists.62 This alternate hierar-
chy is perhaps most visible in the progression of kisses Bernard ex-
plores in his commentary on Song of Songs 1:1, sermon 3, where he
enjoins his brothers to refer to the “book of our own experience” as
they meditate on the “hidden manna” and “sealed fountain” of the
“mystical kiss from the mouth of Christ” sought by all but granted to
comparatively few; it recurs throughout his works, more often than not
argument in favor of taste, see Charles Burnett, “The Superiority of Taste,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 54 (1991): 230–38.
60
Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation, 4, 19–20, and 127 n. 4. On the importance of vision
for spiritual perception, see, among many studies, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, St. John the Divine:
The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002), 185–201; David F. Appleby, “The Priority of Sight according to Peter the Venerable,”
Mediaeval Studies 60 (1998): 123–57; Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 171–220; and Denise Depres,
Ghostly Sights: Visual Meditation in Late-Medieval Literature (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1989).
61
Bernard, De diversis 10: Discretio vitae a quinque sensibus animae (ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia
Latina 183 [Paris, 1854], cols. 567–69; also Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, Sancti Bernardi opera,
6, pt. 1:121–24). Compare Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation, 51–52.
62
For what follows, see also Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation, 60–65.
191

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
in conjunction with that sweetest of verses, “Taste and see” (Ps. 33:9).
Indeed, in at least one instance, Bernard takes tasting itself to be a
prerequisite for spiritual sight. As he told the clerics of Paris to whom
he was preaching conversion, “Doubtless the Lord is sweetness (suavi-
tas), but unless you have tasted, you will not see (nisi gustaveris, non
videbis). For it is said: ‘Taste and see that the Lord is sweet.’ This is
hidden manna, it is the new name which no one knows except him
who receives it. Not learning, but anointing teaches it; not knowledge
(scientia), but conscience (conscientia) grasps it.”63
To taste that the Lord is sweet is, according to Bernard, more than
simply to be able to see, to be in possession of knowledge about God.
Rather, to taste (sapere) is, first and foremost, to have experience (ex-
perientia) of God’s wisdom (sapientia). It is also, at the same time, to
be restored to moral and spiritual health. “Perhaps,” Bernard mused
in the eighty-fifth of his sermons on the Song of Songs, “sapientia (wis-
dom) is derived from sapor (taste) because when it is added to virtue,
like some seasoning (condimentum), it adds taste (sapidam) to some-
thing which by itself is tasteless (insulsa) and bitter (aspera).”64 Indeed,
“I think,” Bernard went on in the same sermon, “it would be permis-
sible to define wisdom (sapientia) as a taste for goodness (saporem boni).
We lost this taste almost from the creation of our human race. When
the old serpent’s poison (virus) infected the palate of our heart, be-
cause the fleshly sense prevailed, the soul began to lose its taste for
goodness, and a noxious taste crept in.”65 We may recall here the rea-
son Aristotle gave for privileging touch and taste as necessary to animal
survival: Without taste, which is a “kind of touch,” it would be impos-
sible to discriminate between foods that would nourish us and food
that would kill.66 If we could not taste, in other words, we would die,
thus, according to Bernard, our spiritual condition upon having lost
63
Bernard, Ad clericos de conversione, sermon 13, par. 25 (Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, Sancti
Bernardi opera, 4:99–100; trans. Rudy, in Mystical Language of Sensation, 63, with slight changes;
cf. trans. Marie-Bernard Saı̈d, as Sermons on Conversion: On Conversion, a Sermon to Clerics, and
Lenten Sermons on the Psalm “He Who Dwells,” Cistercian Fathers Series 25 [Kalamazoo, MI:
Cistercian, 1981], 61).
64
Bernard, Sermones super Cantica canticorum, sermon 85, par. 8 (ed. J.-P. Migne, Patrologia
Latina 183 [Paris, 1854], cols. 1191–92; ed. Leclercq, Talbot, and Rochais, Sancti Bernardi
opera, 2:312; trans. Irene Edmonds, as On the Song of Songs IV, Cistercian Fathers Series 40
[Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1980], 204–5, with slight changes).
65
Ibid.
66
Aristotle, De anima 434b (trans. Hett, “On the Soul,” 197): “This is why taste is a kind of
touch; for it relates to food, and food is a tangible body. Sound, colour and smell supply no
food, nor do they produce growth and decay. Hence taste must be some kind of touch,
because it is the perception of what is tangible and nutritive.” Compare Aristotle, De sensu
436b (trans. Hett, “On Sense and Sensible Objects,” 217): “For it is taste which discriminates
between pleasant and unpleasant in food, so that the one is avoided and the other pursued.”
192

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
our proper sense of taste when we were infected with the “old serpent’s
poison.” There is hope, however. Bernard goes on: “When [however]
wisdom enters, it makes the carnal sense taste flat; it purifies the un-
derstanding, cleanses and heals the palate of the heart (cordis palatum
sanat et reparat). When the palate is healed (sano palato), it then tastes
the good; it tastes wisdom itself (sapit ipsa sapientia), and there is noth-
ing better.”67
Think for a moment about what Bernard has just told us. Wisdom is
“like a seasoning” that makes the tasteless and bitter taste good because
it both draws away the noxious, harmful taste of evil and cleanses and
heals the palate of the heart so that it becomes capable of tasting the
good. Taste (i.e., spiritual taste), it would seem, is about experience,
but it is also about healing. It tells us something important about the
state of our soul: whether it is infected with the poison of the serpent
or whether it has been thoroughly rebalanced and cleansed and is,
therefore, even capable of tasting that which is good.
What would it take for this metaphor to work? More specifically,
what experiential referents does this metaphor entail, and how, as
historians, are we to gain access to them so as to make sense of the
metaphor along with its cognitive, cultural, emotional, and physio-
logical entailments?
I hope by now that it is clear that this is the real question confronting
us if we are to come to grips with the monastic insistence on “the
sweetness of God,” not to mention our own responses to the metaphor.
Bernard is, of course, speaking above of the spiritual sense of sapor,
but the analogy arguably only makes sense in the context of particular
convictions about the physical experience of taste, that is, that there
is more to it than simply pleasure or aesthetic discrimination. Ask your-
self this: What does it mean when something tastes good? What about
when something tastes sweet, like honey, or almonds, or sugar, or
bread? Can it mean anything other than if we eat too much of it we
will risk becoming diabetic or fat? Can something that tastes sweet also
be good, in the sense of “good for us” as well as “good to taste”? What
is taste telling us other than “eat more”? Is there—as Bernard would
seem to be suggesting there is—Truth (alias, goodness) in taste?
Let us go back to our recipes, say, blanc desirree, with its curious in-
sistence on both flavor—predominantly, sweetness—and color—white.
Note first your reaction to the list of ingredients: almond milk (What
is that? Do almonds have milk?), rice flour (sounds rather bland; Why
not wheat?), capon meat (Would chicken do?), choice ginger (With
67
Bernard, Sermones de cantica canticorum, sermon 85, par. 8.
193

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
meat? Doesn’t ginger usually go in pumpkin pies and gingerbread

cookies? Although there is that entrée at the Thai restaurant called
“ginger chicken” . . .), white sugar (Does it need to be white? Isn’t
brown better for you?), white wine (okay, but what if I don’t want the
alcohol?), pomegranate seeds (I can’t ever get them out without get-
ting juice all over the place). Now think about why you may have re-
acted this way, depending, of course, on your culinary experience.
What seems to have concerned you most? That some of the ingredients
were unfamiliar or hard to get, for example, almond milk, capon meat?
That some of them were not in your regular diet because you prefer
not to consume them for spiritual or moral reasons, for example, meat,
alcohol? That some of them did not seem to fit with each other, for
example, ginger or sugar and meat? Did you think at all about the
color, in fact, white with red droplets, that is, the pomegranate seeds?
Or were you primarily concerned with doing without the sugar? What
if I told you that the name of the dish would seem to translate best as
“white of Syria” and that some food historians think that this means
this recipe, like that for maumenee, made its way into northern Euro-
pean cookery books by way of the Crusader-era Muslim East?68 Would
you be more—or less—willing to try a taste? Why or why not?
Food, although it may be bland or even “tasteless,” is never experi-
entially neutral.69 This is, after all, what makes it symbolically so very
rich. Cultural anthropologists know this; likewise, historians who have
spent time any time at all thinking about food. And yet, although we
68
Laurioux, “Spices in the Medieval Diet,” 69 n. 24; Scully, Art of Cookery, 207–11; and
Maxime Rodinson, “Ma’muniyya East and West,” trans. Barbara Inslip, and “Venice, the Spice
Trade and Eastern Influence on European Cooking,” trans. Paul James, both in Medieval Arab
Cookery, ed. Maxime Rodinson, A. J. Arberry, and Charles Perry (Devon: Prospect Books,
2001), 185–97 and 201–15, respectively. See also Bernard Rosenberger, “Arab Cuisine and Its
Contribution to European Culture,” in Flandrin and Montanari, Food: A Culinary History,
207–23; Toby Peterson, “The Arab Influence on Western European Cooking,” Journal of Me-
dieval History 6 (1980): 317–40. Although Larioux would insist that Peterson goes too far in
attributing the taste for spices to more recent contacts with the flavors of the East, most
scholars accept that some late medieval recipes are recognizably adaptations of Arabic cuisine.
Sugar, classed as a spice, was one of the most important new imports in this period. See Mintz,
Sweetness and Power, 23–32; and Jean-Louis Flandrin, “El azúcar en los libros de cocina franceses
del siglo XIV al siglo XVIII,” in 1492: Lo dulce a la conquista de Europa; Actas del cuarto seminario
internacional sobra la caña de azúcar, Motril, 21–25 de septiembre de 1992, ed. Antonio Malpica
(Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1994), 195–217. For sugar in Arab cookery, see
“Kitāb Waşf al-Az’ima al-Mu’tāda” [Description of familiar foods], chap. 10, trans. with intro.
by Charles Perry, in Rodinson, Arberry, and Perry, Medieval Arab Cookery, 275–465, at 415–23.
69
Compare Rozin, “Food Is Fundamental”; Walter Ong, “The Shifting Sensorium,” in The
Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, ed. David Howes
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 25–30. Perhaps the most colorful exploration
of this truism remains Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du gout, ou Méditations de
gastronomie transcendante; Ouvrage théorique, historique, et a l’ordre du jour, dédié aux gastronomes
parisiens (Paris: A. Sautelet, 1825).
194

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
have become highly proficient in asking it all of our symbolical ques-

tions—about its structures of production, distribution, and consump-
tion; the way it is bound up in systems of reciprocity and power; about
its ability to create and, likewise, naturalize cultural boundaries by ex-
citing appetite and disgust—rarely (especially as historians) do we ask
it to tell us anything about ourselves.70 We act on it, making it signify
things that we want to say about our relationships to each other, and
we judge others (not to mention ourselves) on how they respond to
its relative absence or presence, for example, by eating “too much” or
“too little” or, if they choose not to share their food, sometimes even
by eating each other. From this perspective, however, we could be talk-
ing about almost anything other than food—luxury goods, say, like fine
furniture, fabrics, or works of art—but also other material necessities,
shelter, for example, or warm clothing. Anything, that is, about which
we might be said to have (or lack) “taste.” And yet, the reason we have
taste—as Aristotle pointed out—is so that we can find food. There is a
folk belief often cited by anthropologists when thinking about food:
“You are what you eat,” by which what is usually meant is, “you take on
the characteristics of the food, particularly animals, you consume.” Sea
turtle eaters are assumed to be better swimmers than wild boar eaters,
while boar eaters are assumed to be faster runners. 71 Christians be-
come Christlike upon consuming the bread and wine of the Mass. In
ancient and medieval European terms, however, the aphorism might
be better cited in the reverse—“You eat what you are”—for how else
would one know that turtles or boars or bread and wine were good
to eat in the first place?
The short answer, at least, in Aristotelian and Galenic terms: because
they taste “sweet.” Indeed, the sweeter, the better, making sugar—the
veritable epitome of sweetness—arguably the best foodstuff of all. 72
How can this be? Aren’t sweets—particularly sweets like sucrose and
70
Seminal here: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 41–57; Georges Duby, Rural Economy and
Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1968); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John Weightman and Doreen
Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life:
The Limits of the Possible, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 104–265; and
Mintz, Sweetness and Power. Significantly, Caroline Bynum’s observation made in 1987 (Holy
Feast and Holy Fast, 1) that issues of money and sex tend to hold the attention of most modern
scholars over those of food still holds true even today. For this tendency in studies of such
food-related issues as obesity, see n. 97 below.
71
Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin, “‘You are what you eat’: Applying the Demand-Free
‘Impressions’ Technique to an Unacknowledged Belief,” Ethos: The Journal of Psychological
Anthropology 17, no. 1 (1989): 50–69.
72
Scully, Art of Cookery, 52–53.
195

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
fructose—bad for you? 73 Well, it rather depends on how you define

“sweet.” Here is Aristotle’s explanation for why certain foods taste
sweet: “Now of the sensible elements in the food assimilated by ani-
mals, it is the tangible that cause growth and decay . . . [insofar as
they are] hot and cold, for these effect growth and decay. But the
food assimilated nourishes [only insofar as it is] tastable [i.e., “sweet”];
for everything is nourished by the sweet, either isolated or in combi-
nation [with other flavors]” (παντα
´ ` τ´εφεται τ γλυ␬ει˜).74 Given
γα
that the purpose of eating is to supply our bodies with the elements
that will enable them to live and grow, the function of taste is to help
us detect those foods that will nourish us best while avoiding those that
will make us ill. Foods that nourish us taste sweet, while those that do
not taste bitter; vice versa, we may be confident that they will nourish
us precisely because they taste sweet or, alternately, that we should
avoid them precisely because they taste bitter. Galenic humoral theory,
particularly as elaborated in medieval philosophical and physiological
writings, attempted to explain why.75
In a nutshell, we taste the flavors that we do—sweet, greasy, bitter,
salty, sharp, harsh, astringent, and acid—insofar as the foods we eat
partake of the four elemental qualities: hot, cold, moist, and dry. More-
over, we experience these alimentary qualities as tastes because we our-
selves, as bodily beings, partake of the same elemental qualities, most
notably, in the complexion or mixing of the four elements (earth, air,
fire, and water) in the makeup of our four bodily humors (blood,
phlegm, black and yellow bile). Although these mixtures vary from
body to body, according to sex, and from youth to old age—some tend-
ing more toward the cold and the dry and so melancholy, some tending
73
Recent psychological studies have shown Americans to be particularly prone to consid-
ering sugars like sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup as toxins, even in trace amounts. See
Paul Rozin, Michele Ashmore, and Maureen Markwith, “Lay American Conceptions of Nu-
trition: Dose Insensitivity, Categorical Thinking, Contagion, and the Monotonic Mind,” Health
Psychology 15, no. 6 (1996): 438–47; and Eric Oliver, Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s
Obesity Epidemic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 5. I would like to thank
Professor Oliver for making available several chapters of his book prior to publication.
74
Aristotle, De sensu, 441b–442a (trans. Hett, “On Sense and Sensible Objects,” 242–43).
75
On humors, flavors, spices, and tastes and their importance in medieval culinary theory
and practice, see Terence Scully, “Mixing It Up in the Medieval Kitchen,” in Medieval Food
and Drink, ed. Mary-Jo Arn, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies Acta 21 (1995
for 1994): 1–26, and Art of Cookery, 40–51; Flandrin, “Seasoning, Cooking, and Dietetics,”
313–26; Ria Jansen-Sieben, “From Food Therapy to Cookery-Book,” in Medieval Dutch Literature
in Its European Context, ed. Erik Kooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
261–79; Melitta Weiss Adamson, Medieval Dietetics: Food and Drink in the Regimen Sanitatis
Literature from 800 to 1400, German Studies in Canada 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang,
1995), 10–18; Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to
Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 101–6; and Albala, Eating
Right, 78–84.
196

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
more toward the cold and the moist and so phlegmatic—the normative
temperament, that is, mixing of elements, for the healthy human being
is sanguine, that is, moderately warm and moderately moist. (The
fourth temperament is choleric, tending to the warm and dry.) Foods
that taste sweet are—you guessed it—warm and moist. Those that taste
bitter or acrid (i.e., most spices) tend to the hot and dry; those that
taste sharp or harsh tend to the cold and dry, while those that taste
salty or greasy tend to the cold and moist.76 The correlations, like the
names and number of the flavors, are hardly consistent from author
to author, for example, “salty” is often classed with the hot and dry
flavors; sweet is, however, always warm and moist.
How best to maintain one’s sanguine complexion? By eating foods
appropriately tempered, of course, whether by roasting (to add heat
and dryness) or by boiling (to add heat and moisture) or by spicing
(to add warmth, coolness, moistness, or dryness, depending on the
spice). As culinary historian Terence Scully has shown, this is the logic
behind the majority of known medieval cooking methods and sauces:
not simply, as most modern cooks would tend to think, to add flavor
to the food, be it fruit, vegetable, or meat, but moreover to “temper”
it so as to make it safe for the ordinary (i.e., warm and moist) human
being to eat.77 For example, our blanc desirree, or capon in white sauce.
Capons, that is, castrated male chickens, are relatively warm because
they are male but relatively moist because they do not grow old—that
is, colder—but remain sexually immature and, ideally, fat. This means
that they are already suitable for most human beings to eat; accord-
ingly, the challenge in cooking them is to maintain as far as possible
their warm and moist qualities. This is particularly important in sum-
mer and in climates like Syria that are already relatively hot. Whereas
roasting (to add heat and a bit of dryness) might, therefore, be appro-
priate for cooking capons in winter, in summer one would prefer
rather to boil them “in a clean pot” and then serve them cool. Almonds
are appropriate for this “summer” sauce, being relatively warm and
moist, likewise sugar—which is “warm in the first degree, moist in the
second,” according to one copy of the widely circulating Tacuinum san-
76
Burnett, “Sapores sunt octo,” 112. Albala, Eating Right, 82–83, notes that Averroës classed
bitter tastes as cold and dry (the direct opposite of sweet), but other authors classed bitter,
along with yellow bile, as hot and dry. “Salty” was also sometimes considered a hot-dry taste,
along with “acute” and “acrid.” See also the table of correlations in Flandrin, “Seasoning,
Cooking, and Dietetics,” 321.
77
Scully, Art of Cookery, 46–53, “Mixing It Up,” and “Opusculum de saporibus,” 191–92. See
also Lynn Thorndike, “A Mediaeval Sauce-Book,” Speculum 9, no. 2 (April 1934): 183–90, for
the text of the recipes from Magninus’s Opusculum de saporibus.
197

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
itatis (Table of health).78 (The “degrees” or intensities of the qualities

come ultimately from Galen, although, like the qualities themselves,
they tend to vary from author to author even for the same foods.)79
The pomegranate seeds added on top are presumably sour (granata
acetosa), being “cold in the second degree and moist in the first,” and
therefore ideally suited to counteract the dangers of taking in too
much heat.80 This makes it safe to cook the capon with ginger, which
is warm in the third degree and moist in either the second or first.81
Color from this perspective is as important an indicator as flavor for
how nourishing a particular dish would most likely be.82 In answer to
your earlier question, no, brown sugar would not do; white is the best
because white as a color is absolutely pure. Aristotle drew a direct com-
parison between flavors and colors, noting that “there are seven of
each, if, as is natural, one regards gray as a variety of black (the alter-
native is to class yellow with white, as rich with sweet); red, purple,
green and blue are colors intermediate between white and black, and
the rest are combinations of these. And just as black is a privation of
white in the transparent, so the salt or bitter is a privation of the sweet
in nutrient moisture. This is why the ash of everything burned is bitter;
for the drinkable moisture has been evaporated from it.”83
White, sweet, well-tempered and good for the blood, safe for con-
sumption by all ages, sexes, and temperaments: What more perfect
food could there be than white capon flesh or almonds or sugar—or
the white bread of the Mass? To be sure, yellow foods, particularly
those colored with saffron, might tempt us, promising as they do the
alchemical benefits of consuming gold. If we were feeling particularly
daring, we might mix our white food with red, mimicking the colors
of cinnabar (mercury sulfide) and silver (mercury), hoping that the
red and white would thereby be transmuted by the heat of our diges-
78
Luisa Cogliati Arano, The Medieval Health Handbook: Tacuinam Sanitatis (New York: George
Braziller, 1976), color pl. 48. See Adamson, Medieval Dietetics, 83–91, on the transmission from
the Arabic, translation, and manuscript transmission of the Tacuinam. The Arabic original
was written by the physician Abu l-Hasan al-Muhtar ibn ‘Abdun ibn Butlan (Ibn Butlan; d.
1066). The Latin translation was made in Palermo in the second half of the thirteenth century.
79
Adamson, Medieval Dietetics, 16–18.
80
Arano, Medieval Health Handbook, color pl. 16.
81
Scully, “Opusculum de saporibus,” 185.
82
Scully, Art of Cookery, 113–15; Albala, Eating Right, 80–81; C. Anne Wilson, “Ritual, Form
and Colour in the Medieval Food Tradition,” in her “The Appetite and the Eye”: Visual Aspects
of Food and Its Presentation within Their Historic Context (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1991), 5–27, at 16–26; and Mireille Vincent-Cassy, “La vue et les mangeurs: Couleurs et
simulacres dans la cuisine médiévale,” in Banquets et manières de table au moyen age, Centre
Universitaire d’Etudes et de Recherches Médiévales d’Aix (CUER MA), Sénéfiance 38 (Aix-
en-Provence: CUER MA, Université de Provence, 1996), 161–75.
83
Aristotle, De sensu, 442a (trans. Hett, “On Sense and Sensible Objects,” 245).
198

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
tion into life-enhancing gold.84 But pure white—pure sweetness—

would still be safest, particularly if we were sick and wanted to eat only
foods that would be most likely to act favorably on our digestion and
so bring us back to health. Avicenna, according to an often cited ax-
iom, perhaps put it best. In the Middle Dutch: “Avicenna segt dat beste
smaect voedt dat beste want spyse diemen met genuechten neemt die
wort wel ontfangen vander magen. . . . Sypse die sonder lust wort
ghenomen en wort nyet alsoe verduwet” (Avicenna says: “What tastes
best, nourishes best, for food which one eats with pleasure will be re-
ceived well by the stomach. . . . Food which is eaten without pleasure
does not digest well.”)85 Magninus Mediolanensis (d. ca. 1364) put it
somewhat more fully: “[The condiments and sauces used in seasoning
foods] are of no small value in a healthy diet, because condiments [i.e.,
spices, including almonds and sugar] make food more delectable to the
taste and therefore more digestible. For what is delectable is better for diges-
tion.”86 If it tastes good, in other words, it is better for you, and nothing,
it would seem, tastes better than sweet.
Perhaps, after all, sugar does more than just “help the medicine go
down.” Perhaps sugar, that is, sweetness, is medicine. Certainly, this is
what European Christians for centuries believed.87 What if they were
right? At the very least, it would put a whole different complexion on
the significance of medieval culinary practice and the Mediterranean
spice trade, not to mention the invitation of the psalm: “Taste and see
that the Lord is sweet.”
84
Wilson, “Ritual, Form and Colour,” 18; Peterson, “Arab Influence,” 328.
85
Jansen-Sieben, “From Food Therapy to Cookery-Book,” 264, citing W. F. Daems, ed., Boec
van medicinen in dietsche: Een middelnederlandse compilatie van medisch-farmaceutische literatuur
(Leiden: Brill, 1967), 214.
86
Magninus, Regimen sanitatis Magnini mediolanensis medici famosissimi (London, 1517); cited
and trans. by Flandrin, “Seasoning, Cooking, and Dietetics,” 320. On Magninus’s Regimen
sanitatis, see also Adamson, Medieval Dietetics, 121–33.
87
On sugar as a medicine and in recipes for the sick, see Scully, Art of Cookery, 186–90;
Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 96–108; and David Waines, “Sugar in Andalusi ‘Home Remedies,’”
in Malpica, 1492: Lo dulce a la conquista de Europa, 77–86. Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) made
frequent use of sugar (zuccarum) in her medicines. See Cause et cure, bk. 3, chap. 18, 370 (for
toothache), chap. 21, 374 (for melancholy), chap. 27, 380 (for rupture of the peritoneum);
bk. 4, chap. 7, 400 (for seasonal changes in diet), chap. 10, 403 (for ejaculatory dysfunction
or incontinence), chap. 15, 408 (for hiccups), chap. 22, 415 (for immoderate laughter) (ed.
Laurence Moulinier, Rarissima mediaevalia 1 [Berlin: Akademie, 2003], 215, 217, 223, 236,
238, 241, 245; compare version ed. Paul Kaiser [Leipzig: Teubner, 1903], 173, 175, 179, 191,
193, 195, 199). According to Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), sugared spices (electuaria) were not
foodstuffs but medicines; accordingly, eating them would not violate one’s fast. See Mintz,
Sweetness and Power, 99; and Thomas, Summa Theologia, pt. 2.2, q. 147, art. 6 (ed. OP, Opera
omnia iussu impensaque Leonis XIII P.M. edita [Rome: Ex Typographia Polyglotta S.C. de Prop-
aganda Fide, 1882——], 10:163).
199

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
the flavor of god

Tasting or seeing: Which of the senses tells us most about God? I asked
this question at the beginning of this article to try to get us to think
about the way in which we as historians approach the evidence that we
have for the experiences of the past. I hope by now that it is clear that
a full answer to this question would involve much more than simply
an investigation of metaphor or analogy. Rather, it confronts us—as
do, ultimately, all our questions about God—with the assumptions we
have tended to make, more often than not unthinkingly, about what it
means to be human and so to imagine ourselves in a relationship with
God.88 Perhaps we have no such relationship or would prefer to have
none. But to understand why medieval Christians described their en-
counters with the Divine—whether mystical or Eucharistic, stimulated by
contemplation of images or singing—as “sweet,” we cannot stop (al-
though we might still prefer to start) with their verbal or visual images
of God. “Taste and see that the Lord is sweet”: the psalm would invite
us to start with another of our senses, not that which we, in our post-
Enlightenment ocular centricism, would tend to find the most com-
fortable—or comforting. “Taste”: this is an invitation to more than sim-
ply a new experience or even a familiar one. This is an invitation to
risk being changed; it is an invitation to risk incorporating into our-
selves a substance that might kill us or heal us, nourish us or make us
sick. How will we know until we try?
“Taste and see.” It was in this way that Christ proved himself one
with us in our humanity: he ate our food—bread, milk, and wine; fish,
honeycomb, and myrrh—and offered us the leftovers. Now it is our
turn, or so Rupert and Bernard and Gertrude and Mechthild would
insist, to taste both the sweetness and the bitterness of the food that
Christ ate. That which is bitter may kill us; even Christ asked the Father
that the cup might pass from him. But that which is sweet will nourish
and heal precisely because it is sweet; that is, warm and moist and,
therefore, perfectly tempered to our human complexion. This is also,
of course, why the Lord tastes sweet, at least insofar as he became
incarnate. In becoming human, in taking on the physical composition
of our flesh, he became sweet to our taste. As Augustine put it, by
88
Compare Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), 22–24,
on the problem of metaphor and thinking about God: “All language about God must, as St.
Thomas Aquinas pointed out, be necessarily analogical. We need not be surprised at this, still
less suppose that because it is analogical it is therefore valueless or without any relevance to
the truth. The fact is, that all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of
metaphors. . . . To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of
time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.”
200

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
taking on flesh, God allowed us to taste him, so that through that

which we are (human), we might taste that which we are not (divine).
And yet, by tasting him—by taking him into our mouth and allowing
the food that he ate to nourish our bodies—we, arguably, do more
than just taste him. We become like God ourselves or, rather, as Rupert
put it, children of God (filii Dei), inebriated and mindful no longer of
our pains. If God is sweet, it is because he is good; but we know he is
good because he tastes sweet.
Why “sweet”? Because (to take an even broader perspective, albeit at
the risk of learning something from our thinking not only about the
past experience of taste but also about ourselves) substances that are
foodlike, however much they may be tempered with other seasonings,
taste sweet because they are foodlike.89 This means not just sugars and
candies. In modern physiological terms, we are omnivores.90 Like rats,
chimpanzees, and other omnivores, we are heavily dependent upon
experience and taste to help us know which foods in our particular
environment are safe and nutritious to eat. We survive only insofar as
we prefer the sweet.91 Aristotle seems to have been right in this. Al-
though we may be able to develop a taste for foods that are bitter or
irritating (food anthropologist Paul Rozin has drawn particular atten-
tion to the worldwide liking for the chili pepper), the liking for sweet
tastes would seem to be innate because it is geared toward our sur-
vival.92 Milk is sweet; it takes a more mature palate to appreciate the
bitterness of some wines, not to mention coffee or tea. Nevertheless,
89
See table 1 in Schiffman and Dackis, “Taste of Nutrients,” 142–43, for the correlation
between tasting “sweet” and “food-like.”
90
For contemporary discussion of sweetness as the preferred human flavor, see Moskowitz,
“Psychology of Sweetness”; Elisabeth Rozin and Paul Rozin, “Some Surprisingly Unique Char-
acteristics of Human Food Preferences”; Norge W. Jerome, “Taste Experience and the De-
velopment of a Dietary Preference for Sweet in Humans: Ethnic and Cultural Variations in
Early Taste Experience,” in Taste and Development: The Genesis of Sweet Preference, ed. J. M.
Weiffenbach, Fogarty International Center Proceedings, no. 32 (Bethseda, MD: U.S. Dept. of
Health, Education, and Welfare, 1977), 235–48; Claude Fischler, “Attitudes toward Sugar and
Sweetness in Historical and Social Perspective”; and Paul Rozin, “Sweetness, Sensuality, Sin,
Safety, and Socialization: Some Speculations,” both in Dobbing, Sweetness, 83–98 and 99–111,
respectively. For food as “medicine,” particularly under stress, see Mary F. Dallmann et al.,
“Chronic Stress and Obesity: A New View of ‘Comfort Food,’” PNAS 100, no. 20 (September
30, 2003): 11696–11701. I would like to thank Eric Oliver for pointing me to this last article.
91
Paul Rozin, “The Selection of Food by Rats, Humans and Other Animals,” in Advances
in the Study of Behavior, ed. Jay Rosenblatt, Robert A. Hinde, Eveyln Shaw, and Colin Beer
(New York: Academic Press, 1976), 6:21–76; Paul Rozin and Jay Schulkin, “Food Selection,”
in Handbook of Behavioral Neurobiology, vol. 10, Neurobiology of Food and Fluid Intake, ed. Edward
M. Stricker (New York: Plenum, 1990), 297–328.
92
Paul Rozin, “The Use of Characteristic Flavorings in Human Culinary Practice,” in Flavor:
Its Chemical, Behavioral, and Commercial Aspects: Proceedings of the Arthur D. Little Flavor Symposium,
ed. C. M. Apt (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1978), 101–27.
201

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
a liking for sweets does not, therefore, mean that we are childish or
weak, except, perhaps, in comparison with God. Rather, it means that
we are human. Chickens and cats are relatively indifferent to sweet
stimuli, whereas koalas do not need to know that eucalyptus leaves are
sweet because that is all they eat.93 Our encounter with food is some-
what more challenging. Again, Aristotle seems to have been right. An-
imals who move to gather their food need taste to help them distin-
guish health-giving from dangerous substances. But it is we—along with
the chimps and the rats—who cannot tell our foods simply on sight.
We must taste to be sure that this plant or this animal is something
that we can eat. Why else would we ever eat a mushroom?
“Gustate et videte quoniam suavis est Dominus.” Perhaps, after all,
you would still prefer to translate “suavis” as “good” and to argue that
we as historians do better to maintain our distance from the objects of
our historical regard by using only our eyes (bodily or intellectual) to
come to terms with them. But I hope, nevertheless, that you will still
perhaps think twice the next time you indulge yourself in a sweet that
what you are doing may have implications beyond simply satisfying a
guilty craving for sugar, a foodstuff that everyone knows has minimal
nutritive value and serves only to fatten its unwary eaters. Perhaps it is
telling you something about yourself: that you are fragile because you
are fleshly and in need of nutrition; that you prefer sweet tastes be-
cause they complement your humors and so, in fact, are good for you;
that sweets taste sweet because they are not bitter and, therefore, not
poisons (however many television programs or newspaper headlines
you may have seen to the effect that “sugar kills”).94 Perhaps you will
also think a bit about the circumstances in which you tend to encoun-
ter sweets, particularly sweets made to look like something other than
themselves. If not the ships, peacocks, or castles of a late medieval
feast, perhaps Christmas cookies, say, or birthday cakes. Heart-shaped
chocolates for Valentine’s Day. Wedding cakes. Gummi bears and
candy canes. Gingerbread men. Why do we make so many shapes out
93
On chickens and cats: Yngve Zotterman, “Studies in the Neural Mechanism of Taste,” in
Sensory Communication, ed. Walter A. Rosenblith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961), 204–16;
Morley R. Kare and M. S. Ficken, “Comparative Studies on the Sense of Taste,” in Olfaction
and Taste, ed. Yngve Zotterman (New York: Pergamon, 1963), 285–97. On koalas: Rozin, “Food
Is Fundamental,” 12.
94
For example, the BBC broadcast, “Why Sugar Kills,” Discovery, ed. 785 (broadcast Oc-
tober 10, 1989), transcript at http://www.nutri.com/wn/bbc.html (accessed December 2,
2004); or Nancy Appleton’s “124 Ways Sugar Can Ruin Your Health,” posted at http://
www.nancyappleton.com/ (accessed December 2, 2004).
202

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
of sweet food?95 And why, after all, are so many of these shaped, sweet
foods—Eucharistic wafers, say, or chocolate Easter eggs—associated
with thinking about God? If Rupert and his contemporaries would
know the answer to this question, it is all the more curious that we
now need reminding of its truism: taste is the last sensation we have
before the Other becomes ourselves. If we are what we eat, better to
eat something that we have cooked in the likeness of God: sweeter than
honey, surpassing the sweetness of all other things.
Why the need for shapes? This may in part have something to do
with the fact that sugar holds sculpted forms so well, but I suspect there
is more to it than that. We make shapes out of sweets because we rec-
ognize in sweets above all the essence of food and so the essence of
our dependence upon the source of our food.96 Insofar as we are will-
ing culturally or individually to acknowledge God the Creator as the
ultimate provider of our food, we will recognize God in the experience
of sweet. From this perspective, I would venture to suggest, both as a
historian and as a politically and socially concerned human being,
there is rather more at stake than social politics or even health in our
current American campaigns against obesity and sweets.97 Rather, it is
an attack upon God for fear of the sweet: for fear of being trans-
formed, even as Rupert was transformed, as he tasted with “the mouth
of his soul” that taste so ineffably sweet, and found himself comforted
95
For example, the sculptures made for the weddings of Maria and Prince Cosimo de’
Medici in the early seventeenth century. See Katharine J. Watson, “Sugar Sculpture for
Grand Ducal Weddings from the Giambologna Workshop,” Connoisseur 199, no. 799 (Sep-
tember 1978): 20–26. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, illustrations following 184, gives further
examples. Medieval sugar shapes tended to be made out of marzipan. For recipes, see Redon,
Sabban, and Serventi, The Medieval Kitchen, 203–6; Hieatt, Hosington, and Butler, Pleyn Delit,
no. 142 (“Ymages in suger”); and Cosman, Fabulous Feasts, 202. Bober, Art, Culture, and Cuisine,
314, gives a recipe for a shaped gyngerebred made with honey rather than sugar.
96
Compare the corresponding Hindu practice of prasad (offering sweets to God) and the
ayurvedic contention that the healthiest, most sattvic diet is sweet. See Sylvain Pinard, “A Taste
of India: On the Role of Gustation in the Hindu Sensorium,” in Howes, Varieties of Sensory
Experience, 221–30; David Frawley, Yoga and Ayurveda: Self-Healing and Self-Realization (Twin
Lakes, WI: Lotus, 1999), 179–82; and Bem Le Hunte, “Eating Wisely: Edible Blessings,” Yoga
Journal 185 (December 2004): 63–66.
97
For current concerns with the debilitating effects of eating too many sweets, see Oliver,
Fat Politics; Glenn A. Gaesser, Big Fat Lies: The Truth about Your Weight and Your Health (Carlsbad,
CA: Gürze, 2002); Greg Critser, Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 132–41; Ali H. Mokdad, Barbara A. Bowman, Earl S. Ford,
Frank Vinicor, James S. Marks, and Jeffrey P. Koplan, “The Continuing Epidemics of Obesity
and Diabetes in the United States,” JAMA 286, no. 10 (September 12, 2001): 1195–1200;
Rogan Kersh and James Morone, “How the Personal Becomes Political: Prohibitions, Public
Health and Obesity,” Studies in American Political Development 16 (Fall 2002): 162–75; and
Simone A. French, Mary Story, and Robert W. Jeffrey, “Environmental Influences on Eating
and Physical Activity,” Annual Review of Public Health 22 (2001): 309–35.
203

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00
along with God’s other children, the weak, the poor, and the sick.
Insofar as our current reaction against sweets has a historical and
political dimension, I would hazard that it likewise has something to
do with the often remarked, but explanatorily curiously elusive, loss
of religious belief among the intellectual classes of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century America and Europe, the same period during
which, as Sidney Mintz has shown, sugar became available in industri-
ally produced quantities to the middle and lower classes, particularly
in imperial Britain.98 But this is an argument for another paper, an-
other context. Let me leave you with a taste of where it might lead.
What would it take for us to find the following address to God pious
rather than ridiculous or cloyingly sentimental: “Jesus, sweet Jesus, my
cupcake, my vanilla yoghurt, my chocolate-chip cookie, my honey-sweet
tea; nor voice can sing, nor heart can frame, nor can the memory find,
a sweeter sound than Thy blest Name, O Savior of mankind!”99 Taste
and see; you are what you eat.
98
Mintz, Sweetness and Power.
99
Compare Dulcis Iesu memoria, stanza 2 (Wilmart, “Le ‘Jubilus,” 146–47; trans. Fr. Edward
Caswall [1814–78], as Jesu, The Very Thought of Thee): “Nil canitur suauius / Auditur nil io-
cundius, / Nil cogitatur dulcius / Quam Iesus Dei Filius.”
204

139.80.239.163 on Tue, 21 Nov 2023 23:52:54 +00:00

Fulton TasteseeLord 2006

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Fulton TasteseeLord 2006

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

“Taste and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps.

33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

tentially quite comforting metaphor, precisely because it keeps things

This content downloaded from

primary, the monosodium salt of L-glutamic acid (MSG) for umami

This content downloaded from

ence or absence of particular chemicals in our food, does a sweet or

This content downloaded from

“he would be good, but he would not be sweet if he did not

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Indeed, He would be good (bonus), but He would not be sweet (suavis) if He

In Rupert’s day, the metaphor was already quite popular, as we might

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

inspired by the revelations of her mentor and spiritual friend, Mech-

This content downloaded from

(the opening address of the Middle English meditation known as “The

This content downloaded from

“tender,” “blissful,” or “spiritual,” and süezekeit is taken to mean not only

This content downloaded from

Augustine would rather insist that, in favoring such translations, we

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

felt, something to be embarrassed about or tempered with more “neu-

This content downloaded from

modern palates might tend to prefer, this is no reason to assume (as

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

A similar hierarchy would seem to be suggested by most medieval

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

meat? Doesn’t ginger usually go in pumpkin pies and gingerbread

This content downloaded from

have become highly proficient in asking it all of our symbolical ques-

This content downloaded from

fructose—bad for you? 73 Well, it rather depends on how you define

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

itatis (Table of health).78 (The “degrees” or intensities of the qualities

This content downloaded from

tion into life-enhancing gold.84 But pure white—pure sweetness—

This content downloaded from

the flavor of god

This content downloaded from

taking on flesh, God allowed us to taste him, so that through that

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

You might also like