DOI: 10.5325/caliope.31.2.0251 ISSN: 2377-9551

A Poetics of Fermentation: Making Bread and Wine in Early Modern Spain

Daniela Gutiérrez-Flores

Abstract

This article examines early modern Spanish popular lyric about bread and winemaking. Approaching these texts as work songs embedded in the labor and social practices, and analyzing them alongside medical and theological discourses, it proposes the notion of a “poetics of fermentation”: a mode of poetic making grounded in early modern ideas of material and bodily transformation. Rather than treating food as a symbolic motif, the article attends to fermentation as a force that animates the human, the nonhuman, and language itself.

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