Abstract :
[en] This paper explores the intersection between taste and education in
the early modern period. The first part investigates the close connection
between the sense of taste and the sin of gluttony, highlighting
taste’s close association with food disorders in the late Middle Ages
and early modernity. Silencing taste was by then a key aspect of the
education of the body, which needed to be learned from the earliest
age, at home as well as at school. The second part charts the rise of
a moderate and honest gourmandise from the late seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries onward, accompanied by the invention of the
polite bon goût and later the aesthetic taste of beauty, which contributed
to a new social valorization of taste, while also complicating
contemporary practices of learning (to) taste. Using a wide variety of
early modern printed sources, including conduct books, religious and
moral treatises, books of emblems, and treatises on the senses and on
taste in particular, as well as aesthetic works, this paper sheds light on
the multiple ways in which taste – of the body as much as of the
mind – was used, learned, and displayed, hence revealing
a transformation of the experience and understanding of taste
throughout the early modern period, as well as its impact on educational
practices.
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