Grey Partridge and Middle-Aged Mutton: The Social Value of Food in the Tenzone with Forese Donati

����� ��� n his study of the food practices that tie human communities of different times and places together, Jack Goody noted that Chaucer’s characters—thinking especially of the gourmand Franklin and the well-mannered Physician—offer “a picture of medieval food-ways that is marked by hierarchical distinction and is most unlikely to be purely ‘literary.’ 1 As it happens, more recent research has confirmed that hier archical distinction was a defining characteristic of food and foodways in the European Middle Ages, and that both consumed and consumer were part of a carefully elaborated system of classification that determined and confirmed the social values of each. 2 This taxonomy was not limited to human types and human behaviors but instead acted as a dialogue with the consumable world. The strict codification of edible plants and animals according to their intrinsic virtues was appropriated to the diets of people of correlated status, and in turn, diets and palates shifted to symmetrically reflect status in the community. Commenting on the rigidity of this social-culinary structure, Allen Grieco has observed that food was a primary element of distinction in medieval Europe, and the link between social order and food could sometimes constitute a “quasi-symbiotic rela tionship.”3 As Goody suggested, it is unlikely that an author could have ignored this integral element of his society, and no mention of food or eating habits in medieval literature can be properly understood without a full vision of the social hierarchy of food.