Pieter Bruegel and the Culture of the Early Modern Dinner Party

Claudia Goldstein is an Associate Professor of Art History at William Paterson University, USA.

• Contents: Introduction: private parties and public life; Opulent precedents: Jerome de Busleyden’s humanist banquets; Wine, beer, and butter: Jan Noirot’s dining room and social life at the Antwerp Mint; The dinner party as performance; Sea gods battle and peasants dance: the material culture of the Antwerp dinner party; Antwerp and beyond: envisioning the early modern dining room; Select bibliography; Index.

Winner of the 2013 Joop Witteveen Prize 'Claudia Goldstein's book explores a fascinating and important topic. In focusing on dinner parties in sixteenth-century Antwerp, Goldstein contextualizes some of Bruegel's paintings by examining patronage, intellectual history and the history of food and feasts. Goldstein explores fine art and material culture, letters and books, inventories and archives. Her research is thorough, her conclusions sound, her writing style is clear and lively, and she crosses disciplinary boundaries to contribute original ideas to the study of early modern Europe.' Diane Wolfthal, Minter Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Art History, Rice University 'In Pieter Bruegel and the Culture of the Early Modern Dinner Party, Claudia Goldstein demonstrates that a sixteenth-century dinner in Antwerp was an affair of ostentation and a performance of prestige. Every aspect and object of the dining room, from paintings to spoons to tablecloths, was an element that worked toward establishing the backdrop for a dining event that would display the host’s social status. Goldstein tells the compelling story of Jan Noirot, an Antwerp Mint master who owned a number of paintings by Bruegel and whose property had to be sold after he declared bankruptcy and skipped town.' Renaissance Quarterly 'This study offers a unique perspective on the subject of early modern dinner parties through an examination of performance, audience, expectations, space, and iconography. Despite the growing scholarly interest in food and dining, it remains common for both art and food historians to neglect, or simply overlook, material culture. Goldstein rectifies this disparity through an exploration of people, decoration, dining implements, and the physical places they inhabited. A reader could ask for no more intriguing subject than this.' Sixteenth Century Journal