The Culinary Vocabulary of the Anglo-French Lay of Haveloc

Getting it Wrong

Abstract

This note has two objectives. One is to offer a better understanding of some kitchen-related passages in a popular medieval narrative lay concerned with a male Cinderella who gains his rightful kingdom. The other relates to the editing and translating of historical texts in which, despite the refinements of our critical approaches as concerns underlying ideologies, socio-economic realities, the ethics and aesthetics of other ages, implicit cultural understanding, and the like, there is often only a general sense of what some details of everyday life were really like.