History on an Empty Stomach

Commenting on Deuteronomy 28, which foretells a siege-induced famine so grievous that families will fight over who can eat a woman’s afterbirth, Jack Miles posits that this reflects “some firsthand experience of an ancient city under siege [...] the kind of unimaginable detail that only actual experience can provide.” Building a methodology from Miles’s argument, this paper rereads early modern histories of hunger and famine: rather than the customary suspicion that the most gruesomely vivid details are most likely to be rhetorical tropes or hyperbole, I ask whether these extremes actually convey the solidest historical data. Through a survey of early modern descriptions of extreme hunger—saint’s lives, treatises on fasting, accounts of so-called “fasting girls,” and especially reports of famines and sieges—it is possible to isolate those details and vignettes that are not part of a common rhetorical repertoire, but rather unique to specific texts. The paper explores the possibility that these likewise reflect “actual experience,” fragments of genuine social history. In particular, I attend to these moments as evidence of human ingenuity amid desperation, clues to a body of empirical knowledge about how to survive extreme dearth, from the flour that can be extracted from acorns to garments adjusted to emaciated bodies. In turn, I link these expedients to contemporary proposals for preventing or remedying famine by natural philosophers like Hugh Plat and economists like Carlo Tapia, suggesting that these pathbreaking early sciences of want and lack owe something to the vernacular experience of need.