Patrimónios Alimentares e Sociabilidade: O Banquete como Metáfora de Poder e Ostentação

Abstract

Food and its uses follow the logic of historical time. The civilizational process integrates food as a cultural product and the phenomenon of commensality as an expression of different cultural, social, anthropological and ethnological models. The banquet is a socially structured event and a privileged space for rituals, presentations and performances. A parallel of symbolisms of magnificence and power in the table apparatus will be interpreted, in different historical contexts and using different types of narrative. In the ancient Rome (biographical work “The life of the 12 Caesars” by Suetonius) and at the royal table of the Middle Ages (pictorial narrative of the prenuptial banquet of King João I, based on the illumination of Chronique d ’Angleterre by Jean Wavrin). It is concluded that the table as a microcosm of social rhetoric and of coding hierarchies, perpetuates through time.