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Title: Bread of Dreams
Art Institute of Chicago
Item Number: 9780226092577
Number: 1
Product Description: Bread of Dreams
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780226092577
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780226092577
Rating: 4/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/25/77/9780226092577.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Thomas Noland
reviewed Bread of Dreams on February 16, 2021This book is basically a set of essays on similar themes rather than a book that is presenting a unified coherent argument throughout. most of the essays about things like food and diet and poverty in the early modern period, and how early moderns thought about and viewed this kind of stuff. the books asserts a few things that might be controversial, the two biggest probably being that early modern peasants lived in a near constant state of hallucinatory delirium, owing to the deprivation from hunger and the consumption of bread adulterated with various things like herbs, unusual grains and seeds. he also suggests that this hallucinatory state might have sometimes been deliberately encouraged by the upper classes as a means of controlling the peasants. this is all conveyed through a very dense impressionistic style where he'll freely start quoting from renaissance thinkers you haven't heard of and give you passages like these, which convey the alienness of the past in a way that a more conventional history book wouldn't be able to:
"The collective journey into illusion, followed by ‘domestic drunkenness’- with the help of hallucinogenic seeds and herbs, arising from the background of chronic malnourishment and often hunger (which is the simplest and most natural producer of.mental alterations and dream-like states) - helps to explain the manifestation of collective mental delirium, of mass trances, of entire communities and villages exploding into choreal dancing. But it could also be the path which allows us to catch a glimpse of a two-sided mental model of the world, born under the ambiguous and equivocal sign of dualism, conditioned by a hallucinated and altered awareness of reality, where the layers are overturned, the universal reversed, the world ending up head-over-heels, with head on the ground and feet in the air. The result of an altered measuring of space and time, based on a non Euclidic geometry and a magical, dreamlike perspective where the relations and proportions are regulated by different instruments of verification and measure from those employed in the cultural areas where classical logic predominates, which are none the less not able to separate themselves totally from contamination introduced by the ‘culture of hunger’."
"In reality, western Europe, at least until the seventeenth century, has the appearance of an enormous house of dreams where the diurnal regime becomes confused with the nocturnal, and which is master of surrealistic mythologies whose shadows project themselves even on to the gloomy nosology of the humours tinted with ink and soot, perfecting the ancient figure of the werewolf.
...
The Europe of dreams and nocturnal hallucinations, repelled by mind-boggling cannibalism while at the same time yielding to the spell binding appeal of blood (‘there is neither thing nor food’, observed Girolamo Manfredi, a Bolognese doctor-astrologer of the late fifteenth century, ‘that is more agreeable to man’s nourishment than human flesh. The Europe that, as Jacques Le Goff has splendidly perceived, turned repeatedly to ‘agents of oblivion’ more than to the professional witch, domina herbarum et jerarum , and that had the first innovators of the artificial delights and narcotic sweetness accompanying a concocted and directed diet of dreams in the women of the home: the mothers, grandmothers, aunts, godmothers, the wet-nurses who nursed the infants, and the domestic casters of charms."
"The distress of the few in the face of the crazed surging in the streets, of the innumerable devourers of refuse - the ‘grub-men’ and ‘insectmen - and the anxiety of the groups in power regarding the great, threatening numbers, the uncontrolled proliferation of the wretched and the spectre of a negative society that, reluctant to be integrated, waves the banner of a society in opposition, all stimulate the obsessive image in Bonifacio's sonnets of the rising tide; water that rises irresistibly in order to bring about the final suffocation. The tension between the castes is transformed into this metaphorical series of verses from which seeps the fearful contempt of the eaters of white bread towards the eaters of dark bread or those who went without bread altogether: the picchia-porte (‘door-knockers’) or matta-panes (‘bread-crazy’) who expanded the great cloud of scoundrels and rogues , as threatening as a raging storm of locusts."
"By conquering hunger (at least temporarily), Western society has destroyed the reservoir of dreams which nourished that broadening of conscience, fundamentally irrational and visionary, which certain North American Indian tribes often used to reach by fasting, even before the use of mescaline. With the prohibition of hallucinogenic herbs they have been deprived of the advantages of a ‘fundamentally visionary image of the world’, as well as the features of a consciousness and a science which differ from those - in one dimension only - of reason."
"It is difficult for us to understand what profound changes of consciousness struck the undernourished populations of the past. But if one considers that hunger , like mescaline, produces hallucinations and the tremors of dementia, by inhibiting the formation of enzymes which serve to co-ordinate the ordered working of the brain and by reducing the level of glucose necessary to this organ which absolutely needs it in order to be able to function, we can make some assumptions - even without bearing in mind the poisons of vegetable origin: that a huge stratum of the poorest part of the population, suffering from a profound deterioration of will, socially demoralized and without interest in the highest and most human causes , lived in a world of squalid intellectual and moral apathy, altered in the relations of time and space: a universe of completely unreal extrasensory perceptions. ‘When the brain runs out of sugar, wrote an intellectual who had a deep knowledge of drugs, ‘the undernourished ego grows weak, can’t be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those temporal and spatial relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world."
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