Food, Eating and Identity in Early Medieval England. By Allen J. Frantzen (Rochester, N.Y., Boydell Press, 2014) 290 pp. $90.00

A simple bone spoon with a leaf-shaped handle illustrates the cover of Frantzen’s study of how food shaped identities in Anglo-Saxon England. Excavated from the middle Saxon settlement site at Flixborough, Lincolnshire, the spoon stands for the material culture of food production and consumption, the subjects that Frantzen seeks to elucidate in this genuinely interdisciplinary book. Most of our images of medieval food relate to feasting and its associated ceremonies—drinking, singing, and making speeches—because those are the occasions most frequently described in contemporary written sources. Frantzen widens his study beyond literary texts to include the words found in Old English to describe foods and the physical objects associated with agriculture and cooking, as well as the material evidence of the ordinary, everyday items used by the Anglo-Saxons to grow, transport, prepare, and eat their food. In addition to spoons and knives, he considers bowls, cups, cooking pots, and kneading troughs....