Banquets and Power: Boiardo's <i>Innamorato</i> and the Politics of Gastronomy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Power shapes people's social and political consciousness and, although it rarely reflects a consciousness of self, it is ever mindful of the privileged modes to which it is entitled.It can be displayed through a variety of means, all of which are a deliberate expression and consolidation of grandeur and authority.Foodstuffs as a socio-political metaphor lend itself quite naturally as a tool carving social identity.Aristotle in his Politics (1256a) characterizes the consumption of different foodstuffs in terms of the dissimilar "ways of life" that it produced.The terms of his argument appear inverted in the Renaissance when sophisticated lifestyles were believed to require the consumption of refined food.As we know from extant treatises, the culture and mentality of self-indulgent court life favoured a diet based on rare delicacies elaborately prepared.This type of dietary conventions defined social identity and, by emphasizing cultural divisions and social hierarchy, it effectively conferred a status-building trait to gastronomy.For this reason, the staging of stupendous banquets in Renaissance Italy became another vehicle to express princely power.Through these lavish productions that ensured self-aggrandizement, princes marked social as well as religious events, political alliances, and spe- cial loyalties.For these occasions professional cooks transformed exotic ingredients into delicate morsels and elaborate dishes that suited the sophisticated palates of the upper class.Exquisite concoctions, prepared according to dietetic norms dispensed by highly regarded court doctors and humanists, translated the host's power into gastronomic spectacles that validated, and even magnified, his grandeur.As a coded but calculated language of per- suasion food ingratiated the host to the guests, and this, in turn, enabled him to seize opportunities and capitalize on the advantages that the per- ception entailed.The political overlay superimposed to these convivial gatherings cannot be ignored, for it is precisely because of the political implications that food transmits through its "metaphorical or symbolic qualities," that banquets turned the host's private ambitions into public spectacles.These elaborately choreographed gastronomic manoeuvres daz-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".