This open access book is the first major history of food in early modern Ireland, a country deeply affected by the traumas and transformations that swept Europe and the wider world in the 16th and 17th centuries. It draws on a diversity of literature and documentary evidence as well as the findings of cutting-edge archaeological research to challenge centuries-old stereotypes and long-held assumptions about diet, consumption and its meaning.

Food and Drink in Early Modern Ireland reveals that the basic question of what to eat and drink mattered more than ever in a country swept by war, colonization, and religious upheaval; the diet of Ireland's people took on a more profound and complex significance as a consequence. By analysing the way they baked their bread, reared animals for meat, swilled beer, smoked with friends, adhered to arduous fasts and gathered for indulgent feasts, Susan Flavin and Charlie Taverner show these routines and rituals became powerful markers of identity and difference, between rich and poor, civilized and barbaric, Protestant and Catholic, native and newcomer.

Flavin and Taverner reflect on how Ireland consumed the latest trends, fashions, and intellectual currents of the time, bound up in quickening networks of global trade. They convincingly contend that, far from being an isolated backwater on the fringe of Europe, Ireland experienced intensely the transformations that shook the Atlantic world in the 16th and 17th centuries. This history not only provides a new chapter in the story of food and drink, but also helps us understand what made this period so distinctive while breaking new ground in how we study consumption in the past.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.

Susan Flavin is Associate Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of Consumption and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Ireland, Saffron, Stockings and Silk (2014) and the co-editor of Bristol's Trade with Ireland and the Continent 1503-1601 (2009).

Charlie Taverner is Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London (2023).