A colleague once accused me of not being enough of a gourmet to justify writing a dissertation entitled “Food as a Window into Daily Life in Fourteenth Century Central Anatolia”. While I believe this harsh accusation (which, translated in my native French language, would amount to nothing short of slander) is rather inaccurate, it would miss the point of my project even if it were true: my project is, in fact, simply not about food.

The ultimate aim of my dissertation is to get a glimpse into worldviews of the people who lived in late medieval Central Anatolia. As in many other settings, the sources available in this case are by and large representative of the upper, literate classes. In order to reach into the minds of ordinary people, those who did not write and seldom read, I thus have to proceed in a roundabout way, through a reconstruction (however partial) of their daily lives.

But the “texture of daily life” is not a dissertation topic. The question is much too diffuse, and one could argue that it includes almost every piece of historical information, save perhaps for individual historical events. This is where food comes in.

I use food as an organizing principle, a way to decide which topics to emphasize and how to present them in relation to one another. It is the perfect theme to serve such a purpose, since food touches almost every aspect of human life: it mediates relations between individuals, defines the identities of people participating in various stages of the production-and-consumption cycle, carries symbolic meanings and cultural traditions that reflect worldviews, and constitutes the primary reason for one to seek a minimal amount of monetary wealth (to “earn one’s bread”), to name just a few. To map the different ways in which a person comes in contact with food, in short, provides an in-depth look at almost every aspect of this person’s life.

To the extent that sources allow for it, this is exactly what my dissertation is trying to do with late medieval Central Anatolians. I emphasize the paucity of sources because, quite ironically, it is what makes this research project a realistic one: for a well-documented period like the nineteenth century, it would be an insanely burdensome task to try and reach any degree of exhaustiveness in the mapping process I just described. But the Anatolian fourteenth century is, at least in comparison to later periods in the same region, remarkably poor in source material. This is how I reduce this project to manageable proportions.

Food reaches into almost every aspect of a person’s life and, quite unsurprisingly, is equally pervasive in the primary sources that have reached us. It is true that authors seldom spend more than a few lines discussing any topic of immediate relevance. Yet between the armies of the sultan plundering flocks of sheep (the “walking meat”) and a book of advice discussing the “whether”s and the “how”s of wine consumption, crumbs of relevant information are scattered over the source material.

Of all these narrative sources, it is in hagiographies that I have made my most interesting findings, since their anecdotal format is the one that offers the most by way of contextual information. Take for example the story in which the famed Sufi master and poet Mavlânâ Jalâl al-Dîn Rûmî affirms to his disciples that the fig that someone just brought him contains a pit. For the hagiographer, this was meant as a way to express the miraculous ability of the master to discover even the slightest traces of the illegal and the illegitimate, in this case the fact that the fig had not duly been paid for. But read today by a non-mystical historian of daily life, the details that surround this episode offer quite different a set of information: they tells us about the use of gardens as a place for social entertainment and religious practices; about the status of figs as a worthy offering for someone of high social rank; about the division of gardens between agricultural and social spaces; and about the presence of a gardener whose tasks would include the sale of fruits. These are all topics that, in keeping with mediaeval literary traditions, would normally have been deemed too trivial and widely known to be worthy of discussion. Yet here they are, available to us as the unexpected side effect of a religious master’s miraculous deeds. And while both the number of sources and the level of detail available in the relevant passages may be limited, putting these passages in relation to one another does allow us to get more than a glimpse of the world in which people lived then.

I have spent the last two academic years (2004-5 and 2005-6) first combing through all the original source material written in fourteenth century Anatolia, and then organizing these notes into an index that, by itself, exceeds 225 pages. Then I took the plunge and, last June, began the redaction of my dissertation.

By the end of this summer, I had a rather advanced draft of my first chapter. It consists in a survey of the sources I used, discussing their contents, authors, biases and the particular types of information I was able to derive from each one of them. The chapter also contains an extensive discussion of particularly acute methodological problems, such as distinguishing the typical from the exceptional, taking into account the intended audience of each text, dealing with texts written much later than the stories they tell and defining words whose meaning may or may not have changed over time.

I now live in Istanbul, enjoying along with a number of historians, archaeologists and art historians a residential fellowship at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. This allows me to devote myself entirely to Chapter II, concerning agriculture as a professional activity. I still have much on my plate: a chapter on meals as a moment of social interaction, another on food-related religious practices and fasting, and yet another on food exchanges. But in the meantime, short of de la haute gastronomie, this fellowship affords me what many would say is the best nutrition graduate student can hope for: a daily serving of high-quality scholarly discussion over dinner.

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