How Table Manners as We Know Them Were a Renaissance Invention

The invention of table manner/

In spite of the general easygoing attitude of the medieval period toward hygiene, table manners were not born in a vacuum. In Italy, the culture that would give rise to Catherine’s crusade for table manners took root in the medieval period itself. Well-born little Florentines, including Catherine, were brought up on the manual Fifty Courtesies for the Table,written by Fra Bonvicino da Riva in the 1290s. Even so, despite such precedents, there is little doubt that Catherine’s arrival in France coincided with a continent-wide Renaissance movement to raise the bar on dining customs.

To judge from the stature of some writers, table manners were no trivial matter. In 1530, three years before Catherine’s journey to France, Erasmus of Rotterdam found time out from creating a modern version of the Greek New Testament and criticizing the abuses of the Church to write a treatise that included a study of table manners.

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SOURCE: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC