Juan Vicente García Marsilla, Food Consumption in Medieval Iberia: A Socio-Economic Analysis, 13th–15th Centuries (London and New York: Routledge, 2022). Pages xvi + 288 + figures 26 + tables 4. £145.00 hardback.

Marsilla’s Food Consumption in Medieval Iberia explicates the way food was made and how it was eaten across the diverse spaces of the Iberian peninsula. This was a wide region, home to many different political, religious, and cultural groups: people of different faiths, people living in different communal spaces, people in cities and people in the country, people who adhered to or were obliged to obey different ruling and governing bodies. The author shows us how some of these groups and organisations had their own unique approaches to food and drink. We learn, for example, that religious communities such as the Monastery of Santa María de Huerta in Soria, Castille, configured its kitchens in a way that was distinct from those at the Royal Palace of Sintra in Portugal; we discover the ways that granaries in the Covetes dels Moros of Bocairent in Valencia were fashioned, dug into the rocky hillsides in order to provide silos for storing food, and how they differed in construction and access from the raised, church-like structures that acted as hórreo in Valdorba, Navarre. Many small, specific examples such as these, from across the Iberian peninsula and also with occasional, comparative case studies in France, are brought together in order to produce a kaleidoscopic sense of medieval Iberian foodways. The book is similarly expansive in its approach to time period. Much of the book’s evidence, and many of its works of art, date from the fifteenth century. This is an understandable choice, with the higher survival rate of sources from this later time period, but the author is careful to include earlier evidence throughout the book to show change over time. There are frequent and important pauses to note the changes wrought by the bubonic plague pandemic of the fourteenth century, as this event had such a notable impact on food, population, and labour across the Iberian peninsula. The author’s attention to matters of sickness and health is notable; in addition to traditional demographic and financial data about the Black Death, with insights into how these changed cultivation and consumption patterns, readers are offered frequent descriptions of diets for sick and injured people, so that we gain