Forging communities: food and representation in medieval and early modern southwestern europe montse
Forging Communities: Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe Montserrat Piera
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Names: Piera, Montserrat, editor.
Title: Forging communities : food and representation in medieval and early modern Southwestern Europe / edited by Montserrat Piera.
Description: Fayetteville : The University of Arkansas Press, [2018] | Series: Food and foodways | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001567| ISBN 9781682260678 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781682260685 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781610756426 (electronic)
LC record available at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__lccn .loc.gov_2018001567&d=DwIFAg&c=7ypwAowFJ8v-mw8AB-SdSueVQgSDL4HiiSa LK01W8HA&r=4fo1OqKuv_3krqlYYqNQWNKNaWxXN20G1PCOL-2ERgE&m =yZG62i2aCOWjyI9fnogmSvvyfBjyOj19hR1TM8bctDQ&s=yiWRldH_jO3a _-KVspnB2eUtZJq5eqgyoKA1YbQ7Urs&e=
Series Editors’ Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction Montserrat Piera 1
Part I: Connections and Transitions in Muslim, Hebrew, and Christian Communities
Chapter 1 From Kitāb al-tabīj to the Llibre de Sent Soví: Continuities and Shifts in the Earliest Iberian Cooking Manuals 21
Carolyn A. Nadeau
Chapter 2 Food and Death: Foodways and Communities in the Danza general de la muerte 35
Michelle M. Hamilton and María Morrás
Chapter 3 “Los que comedes mi pan”: Food References in the Romancero 55
Hilary Pomeroy
Chapter 4 Magical Morsels: Food in Morisco Aljamiado Incantations
Veronica Menaldi
Part II: Food Choices: Ideals and Practices in Monastic and Lay Communities
69
Chapter 5 Notions of Nutrition and the Properties of Food in the Middle Ages 85
Donna M. Rogers
Chapter 6 Alleviating Hunger without Pleasing the Palate: The Dietetic Proposal of the Cistercian Order in the First Half of the Twelfth Century 105
Antoni Riera i Melis
Chapter 7 Salty, Sweet, and Spicy: Flavors in Benedictine Cuisine in Catalonia at the End of the Middle Ages 131 Ramón A. Banegas López
Chapter 8 Breaking Nonnatural Bread: Alimentary Hygiene and Radical Individualism in Juan de Aviñon’s Medicina sevillana 147
Michael Solomon
Chapter 9 Eating for Success: Where, When, and What to Eat in Early Modern Spain
Patricia Moore-Martínez
Part III: Food as Fetish: Gendering Sexual Desire through Food
159
Chapter 10 “A Whim for Strawberries”: At the Literary Table in Les quinze joies de mariage 187
Nelly Labère
Chapter 11 Have a Heart!: Love, Lust, and the Properties of Heart Consumption from Guillem de Cabestany to Curial e Güelfa 201
Montserrat Piera
Chapter 12 Aphrodisiacs in Medieval Iberian Texts 221
Amy I. Aronson
Chapter 13 Gendering Fasting: The Medieval Battles of Flesh and Lent 233
Ana Pairet
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
The University of Arkansas Press Series on Food and Foodways explores historical and contemporary issues in global food studies. We are committed to representing a diverse set of voices that tell lesserknown food stories and to provoking new avenues of interdisciplinary research. Our strengths are works in the humanities and social sciences that use food as a critical lens for examining broader cultural, environmental, and ethical issues.
Feeding ourselves has long entangled us human beings with complicated moral puzzles of social injustice and environmental destruction. When we eat, we consume not only food on the plate but also the lives of innumerable plants and animals and the labors of many people. This process distributes its costs unevenly across race, class, gender, and other social categories. The production and distribution of food often obscures these material and cultural connections, impeding honest assessments of our impact on the world around us. By taking these relationships seriously, Food and Foodways provides a new series of critical studies that analyze the cultural and environmental relationships that have sustained human societies.
Forging Communities organizes the research of fourteen interdisciplinary scholars into a sophisticated collection that explores the cultural fluidities of food and identity in medieval and early modern southwestern Europe. Throughout the volume, Montserrat Piera and her contributors reveal the complex and contingent roles food played in structuring social relationships in the diverse and dynamic worlds of the Iberian Peninsula and southern France. Far from simply catalog ing the culinary genealogies of Spaniards, Catalans, Muslims, Jews, or Christians, Forging Communities instead emphasizes the power and symbolism of food as a generative force for constituting new communities within and across these social boundaries. As the authors in this volume demonstrate, food had an epistemological impact in premodern Europe that elevated even prosaic labors of eating into significant forms of experience. Devout eaters tasted moral convictions. Monks used appropriate flavors to suppress their lusts,
while the masses consumed aphrodisiacs to intensify their comprehension of love. Feasting and fasting both produced knowledge, and both had the potential to reify or disrupt the social order. By taking these and so many other hungers seriously, Forging Communities provides a unique and fascinating study of how medieval and early modern Europeans intertwined their foods and their bodies into elaborate representational universes.
JENNIFER JENSEN WALLACH AND MICHAEL WISE
x SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to all of those who have helped us with this project, especially the three anonymous readers who carefully read the manuscript and offered us excellent and constructive criticism. My warm thanks are extended also to the authors of the essays in this book for their expertise, professionalism, and good humor throughout the editorial process. It has been a deeply gratifying collaboration.
The initial impetus for this volume was forged, as it often happens, while enjoying good food, wine, and enlightening conversation among the participants in the First International Symposium of the Mens and Mensa Society, celebrated in Barcelona in October 2013. I would like to thank the institutions that provided material and financial support for that fruitful conference that brought us all together: the Institute of Catalan Studies (Institut d’Estudis Catalans) and the Catalan Association of Food Sciences (Associació Catalana de Ciències de l’Alimentació) for hosting and sponsoring the meeting and Temple University for financial support.
Last, but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to our editors at the University of Arkansas Press, Jennifer Wallach and David Cunningham, for their unwavering support for the project and their wise guidance throughout the process. The contributors and I are also greatly indebted to Molly Rector and Kate Babbitt for judiciously shepherding the book to its completion and for their painstaking editing of the text. Their efforts have undoubtedly made this book better.
FORGING COMMUNITIES
MONTSERRAT PIERA
What could I tell you, my lady, of the secrets of nature that I have discovered while cooking? I observed that an egg unifies and fries in butter or oil, but to the contrary dissolves in syrup; that in order to keep sugar liquid, it suffices to throw on it a very little bit of water flavored with quince or another bitter fruit; that the yolk and white of the same egg when separated and combined with sugar have an opposite effect, and one different from when they are both used together. I do not mean to tire you with such foolishness, which I only recount to give you a complete picture of my nature and because I think it will amuse you. But, my lady, what can women know except philosophy of the kitchen? Lupercio Leonardo has said it well: it is possible to philosophize while preparing dinner. As I often say on observing these little things, if Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, 16901
In her definition of “kitchen philosophy” in the above- quoted passage, the famous Mexican nun and writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) very lucidly addresses the fallacy of disregarding seemingly nonrhetorical activities such as cooking. As Julie A. Bokser argues, Sor Juana not only derides Aristotle in this passage by suggesting that the philosopher might have gained even more knowledge if
he had learned to cook, she is also responding to Plato, “whose Gorgias castigates rhetoric as analogous to mere cooking. In this dialogue Socrates says that both rhetoric and cooking are not arts at all, but habitudes. Distinct from the lofty art of dialectic, habitudes merely produce gratification and are branches of the deceitful and base business of flattery.”2 Sor Juana clearly disagrees and not only defies these philosophers by affirming that cooking is philosophical but also tacitly categorizes these wise men’s knowledge as incomplete when she proclaims that much can be learned from food. The authors of the present volume readily acquiesce with her.
Food and the exchange of foodstuffs are omnipresent in the historical and literary record, and their impact is felt cognitively and epistemologically as well as sociologically. Despite this inherent centrality, the study of food, now as much as in Plato’s times, is still considered a relatively marginal topic in scholarly discourse. Various scholars have attempted to explicate this disinterest on the topic of food as a subject of inquiry. Carolyn Korsmeyer suggests that the senses and daily activities linked to food (taste, eating, and drinking) have conventionally been regarded as the “lower senses” (as opposed to the higher senses such as vision) and have thus been categorized as too primitive and prosaic to be explored philosophically,3 while Elizabeth Telfer alludes to a prejudice against food as being too material and ephemeral a subject to merit intellectual consideration.4 Another, perhaps more obvious, explanation of the neglect of food as a subject of study is the ubiquitous perception, transparently sketched in Sor Juana’s soliloquy, that food production and preparation are women’s work and therefore not historically relevant.
Nevertheless, in the last three decades, scholarly interest in food and eating has increased tremendously, undoubtedly bolstered by our contemporary society’s anxieties about diet, health, and ecology and by global audiences’ fascination with food books and cooking shows on television. Scholarly discourse is now taking food seriously. All disciplines seem to have been affected by this vogue, from philosophy to sociology. Like Juana Inés de la Cruz, philosopher David M. Kaplan believes that food is pertinent as a subject of philosophical argumentation. In The Philosophy of Food, Kaplan argues that while philosophers (Plato, Epicurus, Seneca, Locke, Rousseau, and Nietzsche,
among others) have always discussed food, perhaps they have done so a bit more tangentially than other topics or solely as a branch of ethical theory.5 But Kaplan asserts that “more philosophical work has been done on food and agriculture in the last five years than the previous thirty.”6 This work has effectively transformed food into a standard philosophical subject. The work of Paul Rozin, in particular “Food Is Fundamental, Fun, Frightening, and Far-Reaching,”7 has also been instrumental in highlighting the importance of food choices in the field of social psychology. In anthropology, one can refer to Mary Douglas’s findings on the symbolism of food in Purity and Danger and in her collected works in Food in the Social Order. Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most influential sociologists of our era, discussed food choices in the context of the broader theme of taste in his La distinction: critique sociale du jugement.8
The scholarly study of food in the medieval and early modern periods received a noticeable impetus with the publication of several seminal books devoted to the cultural history of food by eminent medieval and early modern historians: Caroline Walker Bynum’s landmark study Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Paul Freedman’s Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination; Massimo Montanari’s The Culture of Food (Fame e l’abbondanza); and Felipe FernándezArmesto’s Food: A History, among others. This volume aims at continuing this trend and bringing the topic of food in the early modern period to the fore of scholarly debates.9
The procurement and consumption of food is a constant and basic human need that provides a lens through which scholars can explore relationships among economic, religious, literary, legal, political, cultural, and social activities. The study of food and its surrounding ideas and practices enables scholars to elucidate the intersection of material and mental exchanges that are fundamental to human experience. A comprehensive study of food and how it both nourishes and affects societies and bodies will shed light on medieval and early modern culture in general.
Food and drink appear in a multitude of contexts in premodern Western Europe. It is described in texts and documents and is depicted in artifacts for domestic use and in textiles, paintings, and sculptures. Images of food are carved in religious and civic buildings
and in the ordinary tools of craftspeople. The symbolism of food and drink seems to have been present in all cultures, but in western culture it can be traced back to classical and biblical literature. Greek and Roman treatises on natural history and farming provide references to grains, nuts, fruits, and, of course, wine, while mythological accounts use foodstuffs as the attributes that embody each of the different gods: wheat for Ceres, grapes for Bacchus, for example. The Bible and the Apocrypha also use food symbolically (as, for instance, in the Song of Songs), and Christian exegetical texts of the medieval and Renaissance period borrowed food imagery from pagan symbolism and used it in allegorical descriptions of vices and virtues and in the development of the liturgy. In the Eucharist, for example, bread and wine symbolize the body and blood of Christ.
As anthropologists have amply demonstrated, food establishes identities, defines groups, and brings about change and revolution. Scholars have remarked that in early modern texts, the faithful interpret religious prescriptions surrounding food as conduits to the deity. We unreservedly take for granted that societal pressure always informs and restricts individual food choices. However, the literary and historical record reveals that food acts in varied communities are also bound by gender considerations (a man who fasts is appraised very differently from a woman who does so) and by other factors, such as economic relations and individual agency.
Religion prescription became of paramount importance in delimiting identities in the Iberian Peninsula during the early modern period. Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisted precariously in a world in which eating was infused with sacramental, ritual and symbolic significance and where the act of ritual eating contributed to alienating them further from one another. For example, medieval Jews and Muslims loathed the Christians’ Eucharist custom of eating the body and blood of Christ while Christians ridiculed the Jews and Muslims’ prohibitions against eating pork and other kosher practices and later persecuted them for them. However, all of them were equally bound by ritualistic and symbolic rules regarding food consumption and preparation.
Paradoxically, very often the only harmonious interaction among these three antagonistic groups was the one based on the commercial
exchange of foodstuffs and spices. Trade, commerce, and navigation owe their existence to food and eating. But in premodern culture, eating also had political value. Felipe Fernández- Armesto claims that eating is a culturally transforming act: “It changes personalities, it can sacralize apparently secular acts. It can release power” and, I might add, it can bring about revolutions.10
Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas very revealingly discuss the relevance of food in the context of several revolutionary events in the history of humankind that truly toppled empires. Plutarch, for example, describes the savage demise of the naïve but well-intentioned senator Tiberius Gracchus and 300 of his plebeian and hungry followers, who were clubbed to death by rich opponents on the pavement of the forum in Rome on the day when Gracchus’s land reforms were to be debated in the Senate.11 Fraser and Rimas also refer to the French Revolution and to other revolutionary movements fueled by food shortages; for example, the riots led by Marie Ganz and other poor, disgruntled mothers of hungry children in New York in the early months of 1917 and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994.12 The consequences of food surpluses or shortages are never trivial; they are extremely vital in the processes of historical development. It is because of food that civilizations either thrive and prosper or are exposed to calamitous destruction and violence.
The purpose of this volume of essays is to explore this hitherto neglected subject of the power and symbolism of food in various premodern communities. Because food and foodstuffs are rooted in daily life as tangible objects, our project will use a materialistic approach and argue for the formulation of a material poetics of food. Food as a material reality can be interpreted in several ways. Because it is embedded in culture, it acquires further meaning derived from particular historical situations and not just from symbolic rituals.
The thirteen chapters that follow are devoted to cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship on ideas, practices, and artifacts concerning food in the medieval and early modern periods, particularly in the Iberian Peninsula and, to a lesser extent, in France and Italy. The chronological period under scrutiny ranges approximately from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. The chapters investigate an extensive assortment of texts and documents from Islam, Christianity,
and Judaism, the three monotheistic cultures that coexisted in the West in the premodern era.
The collection endeavors to challenge geographical, chronological, linguistic, and national boundaries in order to examine the subject matter comprehensively and present a more nuanced view of the subject. It draws upon the fields of history (intellectual, social, economic, institutional, and cultural), literature studies, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and religion. The authors share a keen awareness of the crucial significance of food as a focus of inquiry and their chapters are enlightening not only because they further culinary knowledge but also because they offer groundbreaking interpretations of the linkages between food (its production, consumption, and exchange) and the communities that consume it.
This book thus aspires to make a significant contribution to the increasing scholarship on food in the medieval and early modern periods. The distinctiveness of our collection lies in several factors. First, it approaches the topic of food and the forging of communities from an interdisciplinary perspective by drawing upon the study of history, sociology, literature, magic, gastronomy, religion, anthropology, and medicine. Second, it brings together scholars from distinct but interrelated disciplines for a challenging and engaged examination of the representation of food and foodstuffs in medieval and early modern Spain, France, and Italy. And third, it relates cultural developments associated with food in discrete communities in this region of Europe to those of wider western and eastern culinary and religious traditions.13
Furthermore, while there are many other works that delve into the separate history of Spanish food or Catalan food or Islamic food or Jewish food or French food, there are no studies that integrate these traditions in a conversation with each other. Hence, by pulling together discussions of Spanish, Catalan, French, Jewish, and Islamic foodways our volume is treading new ground in Iberian studies scholarship14 and in the emergent general discipline of food studies.15
The book is organized into three parts. Through the careful analysis of culinary and literary or performative texts, the first, “Connections and Transitions in Muslim, Hebrew, and Christian Communities,” corroborates the cultural hybridity prevalent in
medieval Spain and reveals how food was used to preserve identity and to establish or destroy relationships in the communal and fluid borders between Muslim, Jews, and Christians in Medieval Iberia.16
The second part, “Food Choices: Ideals and Practices in Monastic and Lay Communities,” groups the chapters dealing with food choices and prescriptions and proscriptions about food. These chapters examine an array of communities: monastic communities and the surrounding rural communities that emerge from or depend upon the former, lay urban communities, and medico-scholastic intellectual communities. All of these were forged, in part, through partnerships associated with the production, preparation, distribution, availability, and selection of food. The third part of our collection, “Food as Fetish: Gendering Sexual Desire through Food,” focuses on the links between food and sexuality, particularly by analyzing instances of the act of eating as a seduction strategy in literary texts. These contributions allude not only to communities of eaters within the narrations but also to a community of readers or viewers/listeners who readily recognized the food symbolisms portrayed in the stories and were able to recall previous texts and literary traditions that used such imageries. Furthermore, in their analysis of the ties between gender, sexuality and power the chapters in this last section broaden the geographical scope of the collection, not solely because they include texts composed in the lands above the Pyrenees (Les quinze joies de mariage, troubadour poetry, Caresme Et Charnage) and the Italian Peninsula (The Decameron) but also because they examine the fruitful linkages between neighboring literary and cultural traditions and their use of similar gastronomic motifs.
The first part begins with Carolyn A. Nadeau’s “From Kitāb altabīj to the Sent Soví: Continuities and Shifts, in the Earliest Iberian Cooking Manuals,” which examines the transculturation that shaped Iberian cuisine through Arabic and North African foodstuffs. Nadeau studies a well-known medieval Catalan cooking manual, the anonymous fourteenth- c entury Llibre de Sent Soví [Book of Sent Soví] and compares it to two earlier medieval cooking manuals that came from the Almohad dynasty: the anonymous Kitāb al-tabīj fi l-Magrib wa-l-Andalus fi ‘asr al-muwahhudin li-mu’allif mayhul [The book of cooking in Maghreb and Andalus in the era of Almohads] (1228–1243)
and Ibn Razin al Tugibi’s Fudālat-al-Hiwan Fi Tayyibat al-Ta‘am Wa-lAlwan [The delicacies of the table and the finest of foods and dishes] (ca. 1243–1328). Through her exploration of notions of authorship and the implied reader, the structures and shared culinary lexicon of these works, strategies of imitation, and diverse narrative voices, Nadeau traces some of the narrative bridges that bring these manuals together even though time, space and language separate them. Additionally, the chapter examines continuities of and shifts in foodstuffs in the Llibre de Sent Soví that contribute to a deeper understanding of the changing cultural and social identity of the people of the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages.
In “Food and Death: Foodways and Communities in the Danza general de la muerte,” Michelle M. Hamilton and María Morrás look at an anonymous text, the Danza general de la muerte, that purports to describe death but does so through powerfully symbolical food imagery. The fifteenth-century Danza general de la muerte is full of allusions to food and drink: the fat abad doesn’t want to leave behind all the tasty munchies that he was hoarding in his cell. The physician, even though he follows Avicenna’s advice concerning fasting, teetotaling, and following a regimented diet, is also fated to die, as is the canon whose parish provides him with good wine and juicy piglets and the laborer who never stopped working and ate only goat and sometimes lamb. In this work, in which one victim after another is given one brief copla (stanza) in which to reveal his/her character and to define him/herself as representative of a particular social group, food and drink become indispensable ways of making this identification recognizable for the audience/reader. The images of feasting, fasting, and food in this work offer glimpses of the significance of fifteenth-century Iberian foodways and food communities and of how food and drink serve to define social groups. Ultimately, though, all the food serves to distinguish the living from the dead and is one of the most powerful symbols of that which is lost in death.
The romancero (the corpus of romances or ballads) also provides ample material for analyzing the subject of food in medieval communities. Hispanic ballads are characterized by their direct style and absence of redundant detail. The short succinct references to food in ballads provide immediate information about the poem’s protagonists
and their power struggles and status. In “‘Los que comedes mi pan’: Food, Power and Identity in the Sephardic Ballad,” Hilary Pomeroy analyzes several examples of this highly effective alimentary code and demonstrates how the references to food, especially those concerning that most basic of foods, bread, inform and amplify our understanding of the ballad text and its links to Sephardic identity. In medieval culture, bread was a polysemous term that could have sexual, religious, feudal, and class connotations. For example, a reference to bread or the act of partaking of a meal conveyed considerable information about the bonds that existed between family members, among friends, or between a ruler and his subjects. References to bread also indicated the social, religious, and economic status of a ballad’s protagonists and the general historical background of the ballad.
In addition, providing and accepting a donation of bread in the ballads also served to distinguish between different social classes and communicated differing degrees of power. The provider of bread clearly symbolized the ruler, while any nobleman who accepts and eats that bread immediately became a ruled subject and vassal of the former. Thus, references to food functioned as a code that emphasized social hierarchy. Far removed from the hospitality that commensality suggests, these references foster inequality and, at times, convey outright hostility.
Veronica Menaldi’s chapter, “Magical Morsels: Food in Morisco Aljamiado Incantations,” also considers how food can induce people to act in certain ways. She explores the ways that food plays an important role in a selection of early sixteenth-century morisco aljamiado spells. As Mary Elizabeth Perry has explored in “The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain,” food was of paramount importance in the Iberian morisco community, serving as one way to preserve their culture within the relative safety of the home. In both Perry and Menaldi’s studies, food is presented as a part of the creation and preservation of morisco identity. Several of the aljamiado spells require the use of apples, saffron, oil, onions, and honey, among other foods. And a few incantations require the caster of the spell or the intended target to consume the concocted ingredients. Menaldi focuses on a few particular spells. One requires words and symbols to be written on the peel of an apple and later
consumed. Another requires the preparation and consumption of the heart of a hoopoe, a colorful bird that is well known in European folklore and magic, particularly that of Arabic origin. The materiality and talismanic nature of these spells makes the connection with food readily apparent. But with these examples of magical morsels, Menaldi also illustrates the interplay between commonplace and supernatural practices, showcasing how the pseudo-Muslims in Spain living under Christian rule were able to continue their practices with easily accessible consumable goods.
The second part of this collection, “Food Choices: Ideals and Practices in Monastic and Lay Communities,” begins with Donna Rogers’s “Notions of Nutrition and the Properties of Food in the Later Middle Ages,” which provides a general and descriptive overview of how medieval people perceived food and its uses. Rogers discusses how notions about the properties of food and drink and their consumption in our past and in our present are often bound up with notions of need and desire, obsession and control, subsistence and decadent indulgence. Prescriptions and proscriptions about food have long been associated with medicine, hygiene, and health and with opposing notions of satiety, pleasure, and extravagance. In medieval Europe, the three great religions each imposed constraints on the consumption—and sometimes the production—of certain foods. Based on a variety of doctrinal, medical, historical, and literary sources, Rogers examines the regulations, customs, and practices underlying food consumption in medieval Europe in general and in the Iberian Peninsula in particular.
Antoni Riera i Melis analyzes the socioeconomic pressures that led to the establishment and consolidation of the Cistercian diet in “Alleviating Hunger without Pleasure: The Dietetic Proposal of the Early Cîteaux Rule.” At the end of the eleventh century, in reaction to the dietary leniency that had become the norm at the majority of Benedictine and even Cistercian abbeys, a series of new precepts appeared that sought to reinstate a stricter observance of Benedict of Nursia’s rule by reestablishing the monks’ link to manual labor and imposing a negative view of food and the act of eating. The monks renounced all earthly and sensual pleasures, including those related to taste and smell. As a consequence, eating acquired a mere nour-
ishing and practical role. Particularly in the Cistercian institutions, a strictly vegetarian diet was instated. In addition, both qualitative restrictions (a prohibition against using animal fat, dairy, or eggs and a mandate to use only unrefined flour for bread production) and quantitative restrictions (even the basest of vegetables had to be consumed sparingly) were imposed. To compensate for this alimentary paucity, wine production was increased. These imperatives functioned very well during the initial and difficult moments of the order under the firm control of its ascetic leader, Bernard of Clairvaux. But his death and the huge social and financial success of the order brought about a reconceptualization of the function and uses of food, ushering in new and more positive viewpoints about eating and nourishment. This change enabled the order to become a decisive contributor to the evolution of medieval European enology.
Ramón A. Banegas López also studies monastic communities in “Salty, Sweet, and Spicy: Flavors in Benedictine Cuisine in Catalonia at the End of the Middle Ages,” which surveys the eating habits of Benedictine communities. Various legal and notarized documents and consuetudines of Benedictine monasteries reveal that the communities used to prepare their food carefully, using spices and sweeteners to achieve complex flavors. The rule of St. Benedict of Nursia gives only guidelines about the food uses of Benedictine communities, which each community could adapt to their circumstances. The flexibility of the rule and the evolution of food behavior in Benedictine monasticism worried moralists and reformers, such as St. Bernard or Peter the Venerable, who wrote mainly about meat consumption in Benedictine communities. However, another cause for concern was the proliferation of dishes that were too elaborate, were made with luxury products, or simply were very tasty. Reformers thought that the use of spices and sweeteners might encourage monks to eat too much, putting them in danger of becoming gluttons. In spite of the danger of gluttony, cooks in Benedictine convents continued to prepare elaborate food with spices and sweeteners. For example, the consuetudines of one particular monastery, Sant Cugat, written in the thirteenth century, document the preparation of torrons, neules, and other sweets; the use of spices to make sauces; and the addition of honey to wine. The use of honey, salt, and spices to make special preparations might have had a direct
relationship to the forbidden, or at least very limited, consumption of meat in Benedictine communities. Since Galenic medicine considered meat as the better food to maintain one’s health, a complete lack of meat in a diet might have been regarded as dangerous for the health of monks. Some of these tasty preparations could have emerged as compensation for the lack of meat in monks’ diets. Banegas López scrutinizes consuetudines and account books from the monasteries of Sant Cugat and Sant Llorenç de Munt i de l’Obac, both situated in the region of El Vallès in Catalonia, to determine the correlation between the emergence of a rich array of flavors and the Benedictines’ aim of achieving balance, avoiding rigidity as well as gluttony. He contrasts the data in these documents with medical advice about food, diets, and flavors and with texts about food and eating composed by Benedictine reformers and other moralists.
Michael Solomon’s article, “Breaking Nonnatural Bread: Alimentary Hygiene and Radical Individualism in Juan de Aviñon’s Medicina Sevillana,” reiterates the symbolism surrounding the consumption of bread, particularly in connection to medicine. Eating bread with others was one of the most important acts in developing collective identities. Physicians extolled the alimentary properties and salutary benefits of bread in many regimina and vernacular health guides that emerged in the late middle ages and early modern period. At the same time, physicians trained in the Galenic tradition gave thoughtful consideration to contingent individual factors that implicitly challenged any received notions of the universal and fixed benefits of eating bread.
Juan de Aviñón (Moses Samuel de Roquemaure), a converted Jew who moved to Seville after being schooled in the Galenic tradition in southern France, was one such physician. After practicing in Seville for thirty years, Aviñón committed his medical knowledge to writing in a treatise he called Medicina Sevillana. In his study of this treatise, Solomon demonstrates that Aviñón considered medicine to be a complex art that was further complicated by contingencies related to the radical individuality of each patient and his or her circumstances. Aviñón believed that each human being is distinctive and that what is necessary for one person’s health will be different from what another individual needs. Aviñón would have abhorred the idea that laypeople could manage their own health by using a medical treatise.
That is exactly what the public began to demand in the later middle ages and early modern period. This led to an explosion of vernacular medical works that nonprofessionals could use. These works responded to the public’s hunger for simple, uniform, and universal medicines, cures, and hygienic imperatives from university-trained professionals. A later edition of the Sevillana medicina by sixteenthcentury physician and botanist Nicolás Monardes exemplifies this decisive trend away from the radical individualism of medieval Galenism and toward nonnatural, less contingent forms of hygiene and therapy.
In “Eating for Success: Where, When, and What to Eat in Early Modern Spain,” Patricia Moore-Martínez looks at how gender and class inform new patterns of consumption in the early modern period as exhibited in the works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-ce ntury Iberian authors Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and María de Zayas. Fasting and forbidden food acts often take place within the context of prescriptive dietary laws. Anthropologists have posited that these laws serve to cleanse a people, unify disparate groups, or contribute to the economic well-being of a region’s population. In medieval Iberian literary studies, scholars have illustrated that the rigorous religious prescriptions surrounding food in medieval texts— prohibition, moderation, fasting—functioned as pathways to God. The commonality among these food studies is the social pressure that was systematized in the prescriptive practices that guided and limited individual food acts. Moore-Martínez ponders what we are to make, then, of an individual’s food decisions when the decisions reflect agency. While a male who chooses to fast was disempowered and his political, psychological, and social status was lost, fasting was the primary source of food agency for women, who were proven pure, virtuous and worthy through the act. In the Iberian works of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and María de Zayas, however, individual food decisions reflect intentional choices designed to enhance the worldly lives of the individual. These new patterns of consumption were clearly informed by gender and class. Female agency was illustrated by women’s ability to manipulate time, space, and men through food by determining not only when a meal happens but also whether it was meager or sumptuous. In “El castigo de la miseria,” an episode in
one of Maria de Zayas’s novelas amorosas y ejemplares, doña Isidora, a widow past her prime, seduces don Marcos through his stomach. This allows her to not only overwhelm him with sensation during his meals in her home but also allows him to conflate marriage with a sense of gustatory well-being. For the men, food choice and more specifically food refusal is inextricably linked to social status; these practices manifested one’s class status or enabled one to maintain it. Through an analysis of quotidian food acts in the comedias of Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca and the works of Zayas, Moore- Martínez demonstrates the motives of the individual in food choice and the power people obtained or lost through seemingly simple decisions. The third part of the collection, “Food as Fetish: Gendering Sexual Desire through Food” begins with a study of a fifteenth-century anonymous text, Les quinze joies de mariage, that uses gastronomic references for the purpose of enacting a sardonic critique of marriage, as Nelly Labére cogently demonstrates in “‘A Whim for Strawberries’: At a Literary Table in Les quinze joies de mariage.” Medieval cookbooks and manuals of conduct defined rules of social interaction that emerged in the context of a European representation of oneself and the “other.” Writing (understood widely in its many various practices) and the codes in which it is based (epistemological, cultural, or linguistic) participated in a European construction of the “arts of the mouth,” that invite us to reflect on the representations of eating and the table. Literature enables us to reveal practices and idealizations of the existing nexus between people and their eating habits. Les quinze joies de mariage tells the unhappy story of a husband who is forced to satisfy his wife with food. In order to seduce her, he must invite her to a lavish dinner, and after their marriage he must continuously refill the pantry in order to feed his wife’s insatiable family and her numerous friends. Moreover, when she becomes pregnant, the husband needs to satisfy all her outlandish food whims (such as strawberries) and sees his pantry emptied again by the voracious matrons who come to help her give birth.
In this original text, eating is liberated from its linkage to nature and is exhibited both as a cultural construct and as a reenactment or performance of social and marital relations. Labère’s article interrogates literary texts from a gastronomic perspective and analyzes
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THE OCCUPATION OF NEW ORLEANS.
At eleven o’clock, A. M., on the 24th, the flag-ship raised her anchor, and led the way up the river towards New Orleans. Commander Farragut had been apprised of the obstacles which he would meet, and was therefore prepared to encounter them. There was no occurrences of moment on the way up the river, except the demonstrations of joy or of opposition made by the people, according to their loyal or disloyal sympathies. Boats loaded with cotton were burnt or burning along the river as they passed, and fragments of the Mississippi battery floated down the stream.
At about the same hour of the next day, the fleet reached two forts, one on either side of the river, about two miles below the city, known as the Chalmette batteries, which had no flags flying. At eleven o’clock they opened on the Cayuga, which was then in the advance. After a short time spent in firing the bow-guns, the Hartford poured in a terrific broadside, which appeared to be very destructive. Other discharges followed from other vessels, and the garrison abandoned the works without hoisting a flag. The guns being silenced, and the forts evacuated, the fleet passed on and came to anchor opposite the city about one o’clock. The river was filled with vessels on fire, and along the levee cotton, stores, and other property were wantonly burned, filling the atmosphere with suffocating smoke, and adding to the heat of the day. Vast amounts of property were thus destroyed. On shore and on the wharves the people hastened to and fro, some cheering for Jeff. Davis and the Confederacy, Beauregard, and others, while some of the more exulting loyalists cheered for the Union and the old flag.
NEW ORLEANS AND VICINITY.
SHOWING THE DISTANCES ON THE MISSISSIPPI, AND THE ISLANDS BY THEIR NUMBERS.
At two o’clock Commodore Farragut sent Captain Bailey on shore to communicate with the authorities, and demand a surrender of the city. He started with a flag of truce, and on reaching the levee was greeted with curses by the mob. With some difficulty he reached the City Hall, with the officer who accompanied him, and there found the Mayor, City Council, and General Lovell, the commander of the rebel forces in the city. New Orleans being under martial law, the civil authorities could do nothing, and General Lovell declared he would never surrender it. He was informed that the city was then in the power of the Federal fleet, and the responsibility of any suffering or destruction that might follow his obstinate determination must rest with him. If no resistance were made, nothing would be injured. General Lovell then agreed to evacuate the city, and restore it to the control of the civil authorities. Captain Bailey and Lieutenant Perkins entered a carriage and returned to their boats. Just before they
reached the levee, the new ram Mississippi, already mentioned, floated down the river wrapt in flames. The rebels had attempted to tow her up the river, but finding some of the Federal vessels on the alert in pursuit, they set her on fire. Two or three other similar vessels, partly built, were in the shipyards of the city and Algiers, on the other side of the river, which were also destroyed.
When the news of the passage of the forts by the Federal fleet had been telegraphed to the city, the popular excitement was unbounded. Under apprehension that the city would be pillaged, and given up to the violence of a body of Northern desperadoes, the mob, led on by some of the most bitter secessionists, were anxious to fire the public buildings, and reduce the city to ruin in advance. But other counsels prevailed, and they were fortunately restrained from the commission of these atrocities.
On the following morning, the 26th, at half-past six o’clock, the Mayor sent his secretary and chief of police to see the Commodore, informing him that he would call a meeting of the Council at ten o’clock. Commodore Farragut replied to the message of the Mayor, and sent him a formal demand for the unqualified surrender of the city. The Council met, and on hearing a message from the Mayor, John T. Monroe, that body adopted resolutions in accordance with the message, and the Mayor made a reply to the Commodore, stating that the city was subject to his power. Both the message of the Mayor, and his reply to Commodore Farragut, breathed a spirit of bold defiance to the Federal authority, declaring that they submitted only to stern necessity, and that they still maintained their allegiance to the Confederate States.
At ten o’clock two officers were sent on shore, with a body of marines, to raise the flag on the Custom House; but the protest of the Mayor was so urgent, under the apprehension that the mob would resist this attempt to plant the old flag in its rightful place, that the Commodore deemed it advisable to recall the order. About the same time the Pensacola sent a boat to raise the flag on the mint. A general order for a thanksgiving service at eleven o’clock, on shipboard, had been issued, for the success of the expedition, and while thus engaged, the stars and stripes were torn down by a mob. The Pensacola fired a howitzer, killing one man, which occasioned intense excitement.
On the surrender of the forts, General Butler hastened with his forces to the city, where he arrived, with his transports, on the afternoon of the 28th.
On the morning of the 29th, Pierre Soulé, one of the most prominent men of New Orleans, visited the Commodore for the purpose of a private interview. Soon after he left the ship, the marines of the fleet went ashore in the small boats to raise the flag on the Custom House and Post Office. Two howitzers were in the company, to assist, if necessary, in maintaining order. The duty of hauling down the State flag of Louisiana, and replacing it with the national emblem, was assigned to Commander H. H. Bell. When the boats reached the levee, the men formed in line of march, and proceeded to the Custom House, where the stars and stripes were once more flung to the southern breeze. After leaving the Custom House, they proceeded to the City Hall, where Captain Bell generously yielded the distinction of raising the flag to George Russell, boatswain’s mate of the Hartford, who had won general approbation by his heroic conduct.
General Butler established his headquarters in the city, proclaimed martial law, and commenced his administration without opposition. With this peaceful and successful result was crowned one of the most brilliant achievements in naval history.
THE EVACUATION OF YORKTOWN.
M 4, 1862.
As the month of April was passing away, dispatches from the peninsula gave assurances that the two great armies now confronting each other before Yorktown would in a few days be compelled to test their relative strength in a general engagement, should neither, meantime, voluntarily abandon the position. The daily bulletin of casualties gave evidence of closer and more sanguinary contests among the working or reconnoitering parties, or from the batteries erected on new parallels of rugged embankments springing up daily in closer proximity. A most arduous portion of the soldiers’ labor during the siege is thus graphically described:
W T .—A working party is detailed for night duty. With muskets slung on their backs and shovels and picks on their shoulders, they proceed to the selected ground. The white tape marks the line of excavation—the dark lanterns are “faced to the rear”—the muskets are carefully laid aside—the shovels are in hand, and each man silently commences to dig. Not a word is spoken—not one spade clicks against another. Each man first digs a hole large enough to cover himself—he then turns and digs to his right-hand neighbor. Then the ditch deepens and widens, and the parapet rises. Yet all is silent—the relief comes and the weary ones retire. The words and jests of the enemy are often heard, while no noise from the men disturbs the stillness save the dull rattle of the earth as each spadeful is thrown to the top. At daylight a long line of earthworks, affording complete protection, greets the astonished eyes of the enemy, while the sharpshooters’ bullets whisper terror to his ears.
On the 2d of May the rebels opened fire from an immense gun mounted on a pivot at a corner of the main fort on the heights of Yorktown, which inflicted serious injury on the Federals, who replied with much spirit from their No. 1 battery, mounting one and two hundred-pounder Parrot guns. On the twenty-third discharge of the enemy’s gun it burst into a thousand pieces, tearing up the parapet, and making fearful havoc among the immense crowd surrounding it. The Federal guns on No. 1 battery were then brought to bear on the rebel works at Yorktown and Gloucester, and on their shipping, with marked effect, to which they were unable to reply.
From the 1st to the 4th of May the Confederate army evacuated Yorktown, without awaking the suspicions of the besiegers, making a safe retreat with all their field artillery and most of their stores. Eighty heavy guns at Yorktown and Gloucester, with large quantities of ordnance stores, fell into possession of the Federals, who occupied the rebel ramparts on the morning of the fourth.
On the same day the iron battery Merrimac made her appearance off Sewall’s Point, and the Federal gunboats availed themselves of the opportunity to go up the York river, convoying a portion of the army transports, with the design of intercepting the retreating enemy, while most of the cavalry and horse artillery, followed by the infantry, started in immediate pursuit by land.
When within two and a half miles of Williamsburg, at two o’clock on May 4th, General Stoneman’s advance came up with the enemy, who threw out a body of cavalry to check the pursuit. Captain Gibbon’s battery was brought to bear on the horsemen, who on their approach were met by a charge of the First and Sixth regular cavalry, who drove them back, capturing twenty-five of their number. Two of the Federals were killed, and about twenty wounded; and twenty of Captain Gibbon’s horses were killed.
THE BATTLE OF WILLIAMSBURG.
M 5, 1862.
The evacuation of Yorktown, which occupied several days, was completed on the morning of Sunday, the 4th of May, the main body of the retreating rebels taking the principal road through Williamsburg, and smaller portions of the army passing along the road near the banks of the York river. A line of entrenchments had been run about two and a half miles from Williamsburg, and became the scene of a fiercely contested engagement on May 5th.
The rebel forces had succeeded in passing through the city, and left a force of about five thousand men to engage and retard the advance of the Union army.
The approach to Williamsburg from the lower part of the peninsula is by two roads, one on the James river side, from Warwick court-house, and the other from Yorktown, on the York river side. Both these roads lead through a dense forest, broken only by occasional openings, and over alternate soils of sand, reddish clay and swamp. The heavy rains had saturated the soil, and the retreat of the rebels, with their ponderous trains, had cut the roads up to an extent that made them almost impassable. In very many places where they led over swampy ground, horses and wagons would sink together, and other teams were necessary to draw them out and place them upon soil that was firm only by comparison. This was the general character of both these roads. They gradually approach each other through the forest, and meet at a sharp angle about forty rods beyond the edge of the forest, in a large open plain, which stretches away on either side, and lies directly in front of the village of Williamsburg, at a distance of about two miles. Beyond this
intersection of the two roads, and directly ahead, was a long earthwork, some hundred rods in advance, called Fort Page, (also called Fort Magruder,) commanding with its guns and the infantry who were concealed behind its walls both these converging roads. Looking to the right, the eye ranges over a broad open field, stretching a mile or more away, with a rolling surface, backed by a swamp, and dotted with five separate earthworks, placed to command the plain in advance and concentrate their cross-fire upon the troops approaching by the roads. Looking to the left, there are three other works of a similar character, commanding the approaches on that side. Here the woods came closer up to the road, and for a space of some twenty or thirty acres lying along the James river road, the trees had been cut down, and the ground in part had been filled with rifle-pits.
BIRDS-EYE VIEW OF THE COUNTRY FROM RICHMOND TO YORKTOWN.
1. Richmond. 2. Manchester. 3. Hanover C. H. 4. Mechanicsville. 5. Beaver Dam. 6. Gaines Mills. 7. New Bridge. 8. Cold Harbor. 9. Garnetts. 10. Golding. 11. Trent. 12. Couch. 13. Savage’s Station. 14. Fair Oaks. 15. Seven Oaks. 16. Bottoms Bridge. 17. White Oaks Bridge and Swamp. 18. Charles City Roads. 19. Malvern Hills. 20. Turkey Bridge. 21. Turkey Creek. 22. Turkey Island Bend. 23. Berkeley. 24. Harrison’s Landing. 25. City Point. 26. Fort Darling. 27. Dispatch Station. 28. Summit. 29. White House. 30. Cumberland Landing. 31. New Kent C. H. 32. West Point. 33. Williamsburg. 34. Yorktown. 35. Gloucester Point. 36. James River. 37. Chickahominy River. 38. York River. 39. Pamunky River. 40. Mattapony River. 41. Riemkatank River. 42. Rappahannock River. 43. Richmond and York Railroad. 44. Virginia Central Railroad. 45. Richmond and Fredericksburg Railroad. 46. Richmond and Danville Railroad. 47. Petersburg and Richmond Railroad. 48. Appamotox.
As soon as the evacuation of Yorktown was ascertained, on Sunday morning, General Stoneman, with several regiments of cavalry, followed by light field batteries, including horse artillery, started in pursuit of the enemy. About noon General Hooker’s division left the camp in front of Yorktown, followed by General Kearney’s division, both belonging to General Heintzelman’s corps, and marched towards Williamsburg, to support General Stoneman, and assist him in cutting off the enemy’s retreat. The cavalry followed close upon
the rear guard of the enemy, and during the day there was occasional skirmishing between them. After having advanced about six miles the cavalry halted to await the arrival of the infantry. The divisions of Generals Smith and Hooker met at a crossing of the roads, and continued on their routes, and met again at the junction below Fort Page. It was now late in the day, and General Sumner, who desired to engage the enemy, was compelled to defer an attack until the morning.
The troops bivouacked at night in the best positions they could secure. General Hooker’s division was in front of the centre of the enemy’s works. General Smith’s infantry, and General Stoneman’s artillery and cavalry were on the right. Generals Kearney and Couch had also come up, and halted in the rear, while other divisions took position where they could be disposed to the best advantage. Rain had fallen almost constantly during the day, and now a stormy night drew its dark mantle over them, while the wearied army lay upon the wet earth, and sought repose.
Early on the following morning, the 5th, the troops commenced their march, and soon came up to the point where the road passes out of the woods into the open plain before the fort. The first who came up formed a part of General Hooker’s division. As they advanced from the James river road to the opening, they were greeted with a storm of balls and grape from the bastion; and as the men were deployed in the woods, and attempted to pass over the fallen timber, they were met by a heavy fire from the rebel infantry, close in front, concealed in their rifle-pits or behind the trees.
General Hooker ordered up Bramhall’s battery, but just as it left the woods and was coming out into the open ground, the wheels stuck fast in the deep clay mire, in which the horses vainly floundered in the effort to draw them out. The rebels had pushed their infantry into the woods on their right, and were pouring deadly volleys into the ranks of the Federal troops, which compelled them to retire. One gun was abandoned. General Hooker’s men struggled nobly against the terrible disadvantages under which they were fighting,—for the rebels, seeing the progress they were making, sent back for reinforcements, and they increased during the day until not less than twenty-five thousand of their troops turned back from their retreat.
As the enemy gradually augmented in number, the fight became more severe, and was hotly contested on both sides. General Hooker had resolved to maintain his position. General Grover’s brigade, (the First, Eleventh and Sixteenth Massachusetts, and Second New Hampshire,) was on the left; General Sickles’ brigade, (the First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Excelsior of New York,) and General Patterson’s New Jersey brigade, (the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth,) occupied positions nearer the right of the column. Near these were company “H,” United States First Artillery, Captain Bramhall, and company “O,” New York Volunteer Artillery, Captain Smith. These regiments took positions along the edge of the woods, and the artillery opened on the forts, when the struggle became general nearly along the whole line.
At an early period of the battle it was perceived that the enemy was endeavoring to turn the left of the Federal line, when a part of the First and the Eleventh Massachusetts were ordered forward to anticipate and prevent the movement. While the Eleventh was engaged at a point about fifty yards from the enemy, a rebel officer displayed a white flag, and shouted, “Don’t fire on your friends!” Colonel Blaisdell immediately ordered his men to cease firing, and Michael Doherty, a private of company A, stepped forward to meet the flag, upon which the officer called out to his men, “Now, give it to them!” The command was immediately obeyed, and a heavy fire was poured into the regiment, by which a number of men were cut down. Doherty fell among the rest, but he fired his piece at the dastardly officer, who fell dead upon the spot.
The First Massachusetts remained at its post, doing severe execution among the enemy until all its ammunition had been expended, when it was relieved by the Seventy-second New York, Lieutenant-Colonel Moses, which was in turn relieved by the Seventieth New York, Colonel Dwight, who was also aided by a portion of the Second New Hampshire.
The reinforcements of the enemy were pouring in, and adding continually to the severity of the struggle. Colonel Moses was ordered to the front, for the purpose of silencing a battery on the left. He was soon confronted with a most murderous fire, when he was relieved by the Seventieth New York. The rebel regiments in front were reinforced by another, and soon successfully engaged. Colonel
Dwight was slightly wounded in the leg, and Colonel Farnum, being severely wounded, was carried to the rear. The regiment fought with determined bravery, against superior numbers, when Colonel Dwight ordered a charge through the fallen timber. The Soldiers, with invigorating cheers, advanced upon the rebels, and with irresistible ardor put them to flight. The regiment held its position till its ammunition was exhausted, and then supplied themselves from the cartridge-boxes of their dead and wounded comrades.
On came the rebel reinforcements. Massive and determined columns pressed forward, and at last the helpless regiment, which had expended all its ammunition, was pressed vigorously by the enemy, and Colonel Dwight and many of his men were taken prisoners. They were carried to Williamsburg, where they were rescued the next day, when the Federal army reached that city. The heroism of this regiment may be seen from the fact that out of thirtythree commissioned officers who went into the action, no less than twenty-two were killed or wounded.
The engagement had now become one of grand proportions. Two regiments of the New Jersey brigade were conducted by General Patterson to the front, to assist in repelling another attempt of the enemy to turn the Federal left. They occupied the heavy timber
BATTLE OF WILLIAMSBURG.
which interrupted the view of the enemy’s works. When they advanced they were also met by fresh regiments of the enemy, and for a time the advantage alternated between the contending forces, and the tide of battle was seen to ebb and flow on either side, uncertain as to the issue. The forces of the enemy suffered severely as well as the Federals, who delivered their fire while lying upon the ground. Just then, Colonel Johnson came up with the Eighth New Jersey, in time to check the flanking movement of the enemy, which was rapidly reaching round to the left. Again the orders of the rebel officers, to the front and rear were heard, and again the surging columns of the foe were met and driven back. In this position for nearly five hours the New Jersey brigade stood the fire of superior numbers, and with all the coolness and determination of veterans resisted the advance of the enemy. At a late hour in the day the arrival of fresh troops relieved them from the ground they had disputed with such undaunted courage.
Generals Heintzelman and Sumner united their commands toward the right, on the line of the Yorktown road. General Hooker, finding himself so severely pressed, sent to General Heintzelman for reinforcements, but he was away, and the message was read and returned to General Hooker by General Sumner, who endorsed it, “opened and read by the senior officer on the field.” After some time spent in painful suspense by General Hooker, he was cheered by the arrival of General Peck with his brigade, forming the advance of General Couch’s division, which arrived on the ground at one o’clock, having marched up from Lee’s Mills, ten or twelve miles, that morning, in the midst of a pouring rain, and through mud ankle deep. General Hooker being sorely pressed, the men were marched at once into the field, taking a position on his right, in the centre of the army, where they were at once exposed to the full force of the enemy’s fire. For two hours they held their position against terrible odds. Twice they were driven back, and twice they rallied again, and recovered their ground.
When the brigade first reached the field, the One Hundred and Second Pennsylvania advanced to the front, delivered its fire, and fell back, giving place to the Ninety-eighth Pennsylvania, which held the ground until the One Hundred and Second rallied, and the two maintained the position. The Fifty-fifth New York, De Trobrian’s
Zouaves, came up on the left and then retired, while the Sixty-second New York held the rebels in check, and the One Hundred and Second and Ninety-eighth Pennsylvania delivered a cross-fire. The Fifty-fifth then formed a new line of battle, and advanced to the support of the Sixty-second, and the Ninety-third Pennsylvania came up and opened fire on a battery commanding the road, until the rebels were driven back at all points.
The Federal reinforcements were at last coming up to the scene of action. Urgent requests for aid had been sent to the rear, and Governor Sprague rode back from the field to Yorktown, to report the facts to General McClellan and urge forward the requisite assistance. In the mean time General Kearney, with his division, a part of General Heintzelmar’s corps, had received orders from him to press on with the utmost haste, which was done. He arrived, closely followed by General Berry, with his brigade, when they took a position on the extreme left, in order to prevent flanking by the enemy. The Third Michigan was ordered to the left as a support, while General Berry moved forward with the remaining regiments, arriving on the ground at about half-past two o’clock, P. M. The Fifth Michigan, Colonel Terry, proceeded to the left of the road, in front of some fallen timber and the rifle-pits, while the Thirty-seventh New York, Colonel Hayman, went still further to the left. The Second Michigan occupied a position on the right of the road. As soon as these arrangements were completed, an order was given for the troops under General Berry to advance and charge, which they did in a splendid manner, driving the enemy entirely out of the timber. At this charge the enemy lost sixty-three men killed. The rebels, being posted in the rifle-pits, caused the Federal troops much annoyance. The Fifth Michigan, however, soon compelled them to retreat, although it lost a great many of its men in the effort.
The enemy had the advantage of protection, while the Union men were obliged to expose themselves in bold relief. The Federal bullets could not penetrate the earthworks around the rifle-pits, and the only way to drive the enemy out was to make a bayonet charge. This charge was made in splendid style by the Fifth Michigan in front, and the Thirty-seventh New York at the left, the men pushing up to the pits near enough to bayonet the riflemen behind them. By this charge considerable loss was occasioned on both sides.
When General Kearney’s troops were coming into action, they met the lengthened files of General Hooker’s wounded being carried to the rear. The shrieks of the lacerated and bleeding soldiers, who had been fighting so long and so well, pierced the air, and this, joined to the mud and rain, and the exhaustion of those who had come several miles on a forced march, was not calculated to produce a favorable impression on them as they were going into action. General Heintzelman, however, ordered several of the bands to strike up national and martial airs; and, when the strains of these familiar tunes reached the ears of the wounded, their cheers mingled with those of the soldiers who were just rushing into the battle. The effect was wonderful on the other side; for some of the prisoners state that when they heard the bands strike up the Star-Spangled Banner, followed by that enthusiastic cheer, they knew that the victory would be ours.
The Third and Fourth Maine regiments having been detached from General Birney’s brigade, and temporarily assigned to General Emory, General Birney came forward with the two remaining regiments,—the Thirty-eighth New York, Colonel J. H. Ward, and the Fortieth New York, Colonel Reilly. These were deployed to the right of the Hampton road, and, like those under General Berry on the left, relieved fragments of regiments which had borne the brunt of the battle since its commencement. All this time the rebel artillery was sending a rapid fire into the Federal ranks.
The Thirty-eighth New York regiment was ordered to charge down the road and take the enemy’s rifle-pits in front by the flank. Colonel Ward led seven companies of his regiment in this most brilliant and successful charge. The other three companies, under LieutenantColonel Strong, were doing efficient service in an adjacent portion of the field.
The battle had now been raging uninterruptedly from an early hour in the morning, and seemed at last to be checked by the heroic conduct and successful charge of General Kearney’s troops. The extreme left was still heavily pressed, however, by the obstinate force of the rebels in that part of the line.
To General Hancock was intrusted the most dangerous, because the boldest manœuvre of the day. He passed with his brigade—the Fifth Wisconsin, Colonel Cobb; the Sixth Maine, Colonel Burnham;
the Forty-ninth Pennsylvania, Colonel Lowrie; the Seventh Maine, Colonel Mason, and the Thirty-third New York, Colonel R. F. Taylor, supported by Lieutenant Cowan’s and Captain Wheeler’s batteries— to the right, for a mile parallel to the front, but completely hidden by the forest. Thence across a fifty-acre heath edged with timber, north to the extreme left of the enemy’s line of works. At this point the rebels had dammed a creek which empties into York river, and straight across the narrow causeway frowned an earthwork, which looked imposing as a castle from its commanding position on the opposite hill.
General Hancock found this singular defence deserted, but it was with caution his skirmishers ventured across the dam and planted the Federal flag on the parapet, fifty feet above water mark. Then the whole force went over at double-quick, turned to the left, and followed a narrow, dangerous road, a gorge cut in the hill-side by the pond, till it emerged in turn, from the east, on the open battle-field.
A splendid picture met the eye. Two miles distant Hooker was fighting the rebels on the other side of Fort Page. From the latter point the rebel artillery was playing upon his lines. Between Hancock and the fort were two lesser works, at intervals of half a mile. Their garrisons quickly retreated on seeing him, and retired on the main force—the movement before practiced on the left, and one which plainly indicated that the rebel force was too small to hold the line. But it was also evident, from the determined stand made in and near Fort Page, that the rear guard was under orders to make a desperate maintenance of its position.
Although Hancock had a regiment with him besides his own, yet his force was scarcely five thousand, all told, and totally separated from the main body. If overpowered in front, retreat would be utterly impossible through the narrow gorge behind them. General Keyes appeared on the field at this moment, and told General Hancock that he did not visit him to assume the command as ranking officer, but to see him, Hancock, “carry the left.” General Keyes at once sent back for a support of cavalry and artillery. This was about one o’clock in the afternoon. For some reason, General Sumner omitted ordering the reinforcements forward.
A regiment was soon in the enemy’s deserted works (No. 3 from York river). The old flag was raised with wild cheers from its parapet;
and eight cannon were quickly unlimbered in the field beyond. A smaller, intermediate outwork was still held between this and Fort Magruder. In front of it a line of rebel skirmishers deployed, but were quickly dispersed and forced to retire. In five minutes the Union guns were playing, some on the great fort at six hundred yards distance, the rest on the woods to the north, through which the rebels were retreating on their main body.
Just then the clouds broke away in the west, and a flood of light came in upon the whole panorama. Nothing could be more beautiful and inspiriting. The deserted rebel forts, surmounted with Federal colors; Hancock’s infantry awaiting orders in battle line; a signal officer waving to the centre his flag-signals from the parapet of work No. 3; the long fire-belching, smoke-canopied curve of Fort Page in the distance; still further beyond, white flashes, and huge clouds of smoke appearing from Hooker’s battle-ground on the left, of whose desperate contest the stunning roll of musketry and roar of cannon gave true token—all these combined formed a broad battle-picture worthy of Varney.
Wheeler’s artillery fired with precision and rapidity for an hour, the fort answering gun for gun. But the rebel infantry seemed to have their hands full in managing Hooker, and as it was not yet practicable to storm the fort, the Union forces found little to do, and stood under fire of the artillery with small loss, awaiting a share in the business. It was not long in coming, and came in the shape which more than one observer had feared from the outset. It was preceded at four o’clock by one of those dead, ominous half hour pauses which so often make the decisive turn of an engagement. Many thought the enemy were retreating. Others, who have had occasion to dread these still and awful lapses from the bloody work of a field-day, prognosticated an unknown danger impending close at hand.
Suddenly there burst from the woods on the right flank a battalion of rebel cavalry! Then, to the right and left of the horse, three regiments of infantry supporting it!
But General Hancock was equal to the crisis. Forming his infantry against this sudden attack, he held them in magnificent order, while the rebel foot and horse came on, cheering, firing, and charging in gallant and imposing style. Wheeler’s battery turned and poured hot volleys into them as they came, and over five thousand muskets
riddled them through and through. But they kept on—nearer—nearer —closing up, cheering, and sure of their power to sweep the Federals before them.
Thus they came, swifter than it can be told, until their line, now broken and irregular, was within two hundred yards of the unwavering columns. Then Hancock showed himself the coolest and bravest of the brave. Taking off his hat, and using the courtly prefix of the olden time, he said: “Ready, now! Gentlemen, CHARGE!” The whole line swept forward, as the reaper’s sickle rushes through the grain. Its keen edge had not yet touched the enemy, when his ranks broke simultaneously, fled in confusion to the rear, and the field of Williamsburg was won.
About five o’clock P. M. some excitement was caused in the rear, and soon an officer, with his staff, rode to the opening in the woods where he could get a view of the field. It was General McClellan. The moment he was seen, loud and deafening cheers rose up along the lines of the centre, and rolled away to the right and left, imparting a new enthusiasm to the forces. The chief officers were quickly consulted, and reinforcements were sent to the aid of Hancock and Hooker. Hancock’s brilliant and successful charge had already won the day on the right, and the effect of it in the panic and rout of the
rebels was becoming sensibly felt in front of Hooker’s division, when the long-looked for assistance came to his side. The rebels promptly retired, and the desperate struggle of the day closed on a splendidly contested field. The men were compelled to bivouack on the ground, with the rain still falling, in proud anticipation of a renewal of the conflict in the morning.
The rebels had been reinforced as late as five o’clock, and it was expected that General Johnston would command them in the morning in person, but the opportune appearance of the Federal reinforcements, together with the successful movements of General Hancock, created a panic among them, and they fell back on Williamsburg, and commenced their hasty retreat from that place. At two o’clock on Tuesday morning the Federal forces began to move. As they approached Williamsburg they found the way clear, and on coming up to the city the rear guard of the foe were flying on the road toward Richmond, leaving the town to be occupied by the Federal troops. General McClellan appointed General Jameson Military Governor of the place, and the troops marched through the main street of the city to the homely, but glorious and soul-stirring strains of “Yankee Doodle.”
The houses, churches, barns and stables were found filled with the wounded of the rebel army, as well as the Federals whom they had taken prisoners. It was a sad, heart-rending scene, those brave soldiers mangled, dying and dead. The Federal troops immediately commenced the work of burial, while the surgeons found incessant occupation in the discharge of their duties. The battle field presented a frightful scene of carnage, and several days passed before all the dead and wounded stragglers were found in the woods and among the underbrush where they had fallen.
The loss of the Federals was about 500 killed, 1,600 wounded, and 623 prisoners. That of the rebels was somewhat greater in killed and wounded. Five hundred prisoners fell into Federal hands. Some hundred of the rebel dead were buried on the day following the battle. Lieutenant-Colonel Irwin, of the Eighth Alabama, formerly United States Senator, was found dead on the field.
Thirty-five regiments of the rebels were engaged in the action, that number being represented by the wounded men left after the battle.
BATTLE OF WEST POINT, VA.
M 7, 1862.
West Point is the name given to the landing-place at the head of the York river, which is formed by the junction of the Pamunkey and Mattapony rivers, and is thirty miles above Yorktown.
After the evacuation of that place, and the entrance of the Federal troops, the Union army proceeded in its advance toward Richmond by different routes, as already detailed. One column marched by the land route, under Heintzelman, Sumner, Hooker, Kearney and Keyes, while General Franklin led his corps by transports up the York river to West Point, leaving Yorktown at nine o’clock, on Tuesday morning, May 6th. The banks of the river presented a fine appearance, and white flags were displayed from many of the houses. The house of Mr. Bigler, a firm loyalist, was almost covered with an immense flag, bearing the stars and stripes, while one of the ladies of the house waved the beautiful emblem of peace along its folds, from one of the windows. The rebels had set fire to a valuable mill belonging to Mr. Bigler, and its ruins were still sending up great clouds of smoke into the air, a lurid witness of the destruction which had marked their progress. The army arrived at West Point about two o’clock, P. M., and commenced its disembarkation.
In consequence of the shallowness of the approach by water, it became necessary to use pontoon boats and scows to facilitate the landing. Operations were therefore slow; but the troops were landed by midnight. The rebels did not dispute the landing. Pickets were immediately thrown out into the woods in front, the roads leading to the landing-place examined, and trees were thrown across the roads. The pickets were occasionally engaged during the night, but only two
