Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetites in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

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While moralists may stress the importance of the proper management of appetite, medieval and early modern narratives are full of images of monstrous and deformed appetites running out of control. Consuming Narratives examines the significance of these concepts, metaphors and narratives of appetite for understanding gender, politics, race and nation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The essays in this wide-ranging collection consider appetite in relation to sexual and textual consumption, monstrous bodies and genders, races and nations. Each section is introduced by a leading academic in the field, while individual papers deal with a variety of texts, from the Revelations of Divine Love to Massinger's The Sea Voyage, and cover topics ranging from trade and colonialism to vampires, witchcraft and the sheela-na-gig figure. Consuming Narratives analyses representations of monstrous appetites, highlights the role of consumption within narrative practices and considers the ways in which appetites and ideas about them contributed to the production of textual, human and national bodies. It will be an essential book for all those interested in the intersections of gender, politics and narrative in the medieval and early modern periods.

Author Bio

Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters teach in the Department of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.