Fish on Friday
Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Descrizione dell’editore
How fisherman beat Columbus to the New World, all fueled by the European appetite for fish.
“Brian Fagan weaves a detective story of Friday fish-eating.”—Jared Diamond, New York Times bestselling author of Guns, Germs, and Steel
What gave Christopher Columbus the confidence in 1492 to set out across the Atlantic Ocean? It would be convenient to believe that Columbus and his men were uniquely courageous. A more reasonable explanation, however, is that Columbus was heir to a body of knowledge about seas and ships acquired at great cost over many centuries.
Fish on Friday tells a new story of the discovery of America. In Brian Fagan's view, that discovery is the product of the long sweep of history: the spread of Christianity and the radical cultural changes it brought to Europe, the interaction of economic necessity with a changing climate, and generations of unknown fishermen who explored the North Atlantic in the centuries before Columbus. Encompassing ancient mythology, medieval religion, boatbuilding, commerce, and cutting-edge climate science, this dazzling and wide-ranging book shows the intricate tapestry of history in all its fascinating, astonishing complexity.
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It was fish, not spices, that led to the discovery of North America," speculates anthropologist Fagan. From 1495 to 1525, he tells us, the monks at Westminster Abbey consumed almost 11,000 kilograms of fish per year. The sheer enormity of this piscine cuisine offers a snapshot of the exalted place fish held in the life of religious communities. Fagan (The Little Ice Age) regales readers with a fast-paced, edge-of the-seat tale of Christianity's role in the development of fishing and fisheries as commercial ventures. By the fourth century, fish had become the center of Christian fast days and holy feasts. Early forms of aquaculture were developed to meet the demand, but eventually, as Fagan points out, Europe's rapidly growing Catholic population and its demand for fish on Fridays and fast days led, as early as the Middle Ages, to a North Atlantic fishing industry providing herring and cod and developing salting and smoking to preserve the fish for the transatlantic trip. But the onset of the Little Ice Age forced fishermen further south, and eventually they followed cod down to their winter waters off the coast of Maine. Fagan's rich prose creates a lively social history that will captivate readers of Mark Kurlansky and Jared Diamond. B&w illus.
