Although it is still a comparatively new branch of history, food history has joined the canon of scholarly endeavors. Likewise more and more historians have started to study the body. Rebecca Earle joins these two currents together in a superb and highly original monograph. While many scholars have examined the things people ate or how they thought about their bodies, Earle’s monograph explores how people thought about the connection between their bodies and the food they consumed. Perhaps because of its topic, the book covers a wide swath of territory and a long period of time. Earle does not restrict herself to one colony but rather conceives of her focus as “the Indies” and takes in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Earle’s book centers on a rethinking of the ways that humoral theory influenced how the Spanish dealt with the new experiences that were part of their colonial ventures....
