Piero Camporesi is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna.

"Ranging across anthropology, folklore, popular religion, medicine and history, and crafted with unusual dramatic skill, Camporesi's books open to our gaze a pre-industrial underclass of subsistence farmers, seasonal labourers and vagrants, people who lived on bread when they could get it, wild roots and berries when they could not, stilling the pangs of hunger with herbal drugs like wormwood and hellebore." Times Literary Supplement "Piero Camporesi is one of the most stimulating and path-breaking historians." Roy Porter

• Introduction: From Giant to Beggar: the Colossus and the Man of Naught. 1. The Devil’s Carnival.2. Charlatans, Cheats and Malingerers.3. The Science of the Belly: Decline and Death of the Myth of Cockaigne.4. The Land of Hunger.5. The Witches’ Carnival.6. A Blemished World.Notes.Index