The Great Elector's Table
The Politics of Food in Seventeenth-Century Brandenburg-Prussia
Molly Taylor-Poleskey
subjects:
What food production, presentation, and consumption reveals about the exercise of power in early modern Germany
In politics, as with food, presentation is everything. At the court of Elector Friedrich Wilhelm in Brandenburg-Prussia, the two combined in a way that illuminates the social and cultural dynamics of seventeenth-century German life. In this remarkable book, the first of its kind, Molly Taylor-Poleskey offers an innovative critical approach to understanding how a particular dynasty and an unexceptional German state rose to their eminent position on the Central European stage following the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War. Food, she shows, functioned both as a tool of self-aggrandizement for rulers and as a means of coercion and leverage in power negotiations. From bakers to botanists, court servants up and down the social ladder each had a role to play in the political life of this court. Moving beyond dusty bureaucratic narratives, this colorful and inviting book offers readers a new way of appreciating how culture, politics, the natural environment, and science intertwined in early modern German statecraft.
An excellent study of court life, representational power, food culture, and dynastic dynamics, full of smart insights and sparkling prose. It offers a real sense of how power worked at all levels of society.- Mary Lindemann, University of Miami, author of The Merchant Republics: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, 1648-1790
Early modern Prussia was all about soldiers and military drill! Not so argues Molly Taylor-Poleskey in her elegantly conceived and beautifully written The Great Elector's Table. She treats us to a completely different side of life at the Prussian court, a side concerned with food, its preparation, its presentation, and its symbolic uses in a system of social and political hierarchies. With a keen eye for telling detail, Taylor-Poleskey deftly leads us into this world and its myriad intricacies. If, as the German proverb has it, one is what one eats, this is a very different and original picture of early Prussia.- Helmut Walser Smith, Vanderbilt University, author of Germany: A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000
- American Historical ReviewHere is a delightful book on a topic no one has ever written about. If you have taught Western Civ II or Modern Europe, you will know Friedrich Wilhelm: theprince elector of Brandenburg-Prussia who in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War built a powerful centralized military state that laid the foundations for transforming the crazy quilt of tiny principalities into a unified kingdom. But what did Friedrich Wilhelm eat? This, according to the author, is no trivial matter, but integral to the display of power and even the exercise of it across a disconnected state.
- Journal of Modern HistoryA fascinating study of food and culture . . . In Taylor-Poleskey’s hands, food becomes both a reflection and a projection of Friedrich Wilhelm’s statecraft . . . Taylor-Poleskey weaves her many archival sources together into an engaging narrative, told in lively prose. The Great Elector’s Table is full of fascinating details and anecdotes, and it provides important insight into the food preferences of northern Europeans, from the terroir of butter and the importance of local bread to the reliance on imported foodstuffs like sugar, pepper, citrus, and olive oil.
Molly Taylor-Poleskey is the Harvard Map Collection librarian and was associate professor of digital history at Middle Tennessee State University.
