David B. Goldstein - Böcker

Eating and drinking—vital to all human beings—were of central importance to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Culinary Shakespeare, the first collection devoted solely to the study of food and drink in Shakespeare’s plays, reframes questions about cuisine, eating, and meals in early modern drama. As a result, Shakespearean scenes that have long been identified as important and influential by scholars can now be considered in terms of another revealing cultural marker—that of culinary dynamics.Renaissance scholars, as David Goldstein and Amy Tigner point out, have only begun to grapple with the importance of cuisine in literature. An earlier generation of criticism concerned itself principally with cataloguing the foodstuffs in the plays. Recent analyses have operated largely within debates about humoralism and dietary literature, consumption, and interiority, working to historicize food in relation to the early modern body. The essays in Culinary Shakespeare build upon that prior focus on individual bodily experience but also transcend it, emphasizing the aesthetic, communal, and philosophical aspects of food, while also presenting valuable theoretical background. As various essays demonstrate, many of the central issues in Shakespeare studies can be elucidated by turning our attention to the study of food and drink. The societal and religious associations of drink, for example, or the economic implications of ingredients gathered from other lands, have meaningful implications for our understanding of both early modern and contemporary periods—including aspects of community, politics, local and global food production, biopower and the state, addiction, performativity, posthumanism, and the relationship between art and food. Culinary Shakespeare seeks to open new interpretive possibilities and will be of interest to scholars and students of Shakespeare and the early modern period as well as to those in food studies, food history, ecology, gender and domesticity, and critical theory.

An urgent plea for a broader understanding and awareness of the unconsidered dangers of new genetic technologies  Since 2010 it has been possible to determine a person’s genetic makeup in a matter of days at an accessible cost for many millions of people. Along with this technological breakthrough there has emerged a movement to use this information to help prospective parents “eliminate preventable genetic disease.” As the prospect of systematically excluding the appearance of unwanted mutations in our children comes within reach, David B. Goldstein examines the possible consequences from these types of choices.  Engaging and accessible, this clarion call for responsible and informed stewardship of the human genome provides an overview of what we do and do not know about human genetics and looks at some of the complex, yet largely unexplored, issues we must be most careful about as we move into an era of increasing numbers of parents exercising direct control over the genomes of their children.

Early Modern English Foodways: A Critical Sourcebook is the first anthology of food-related writing in Renaissance England. Bringing together seventy passages from a two-hundred-year sweep of British history, the volume demonstrates how food connects all forms of life in the most intimate and public ways.The sourcebook offers new insights into the early modern experience of sustenance. It introduces readers to the tribulations of the women who started a 1629 grain riot, reveals the primacy of eating in Thomas More's Utopia, and explains the significance of posset pots and wedding cultery. The volume features familiar voices such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton alongside lesser-known texts and objects to illuminate broader questions of gender, body, hospitality, religion, medicine, social status, ecology, and empire. Drawing from an expansive range of sources—including recipe books, travel narratives, philosophical treatises, and agricultural handbooks—these entries, many previously unpublished, have been expertly curated by leading scholars to map food's journey through early modern English culture.With modern spelling adaptations, contextual headnotes, and comprehensive glossaries of culinary terms, this sourcebook is an accessible and engaging entry point into the field of early modern food studies, ready to use in and beyond the classroom. Its interdisciplinary focus makes this resource of value to students and scholars interested not only in food history but also in cultural studies, art history, and literature.

The study of pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics focuses on how our genes and complex gene systems influence our response to drugs. Recent progress in clinical therapeutics has led to the discovery of new biomarkers that make it technically easier to identify groups of patients which are more or less likely to respond to individual therapies. The aim is to improve personalised medicine - not simply to prescribe the right medicine, but to deliver the right drug at the right dose at the right time. This textbook brings together leading experts to discuss the latest information on how human genetics impacts drug response phenotypes. It presents not only the basic principles of pharmacogenetics, but also clinically valuable examples that cover a broad range of specialties and therapeutic areas. This textbook is an invaluable introduction to pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics for health care professionals, medical students, pharmacy students, graduate students and researchers in the biosciences.

David B. Goldstein argues for a new understanding of Renaissance England from the perspective of communal eating. Rather than focus on traditional models of interiority, choice and consumption, Goldstein demonstrates that eating offered a central paradigm for the ethics of community formation. The book examines how sharing food helps build, demarcate and destroy relationships - between eater and eaten, between self and other, and among different groups. Tracing these eating relations from 1547 to 1680 - through Shakespeare, Milton, religious writers and recipe book authors - Goldstein shows that to think about eating was to engage in complex reflections about the body's role in society. In the process, he radically rethinks the communal importance of the Protestant Eucharist. Combining historicist literary analysis with insights from social science and philosophy, the book's arguments reverberate well beyond the Renaissance. Ultimately, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare's England forces us to rethink our own relationship to food.

David B. Goldstein argues for a new understanding of Renaissance England from the perspective of communal eating. Rather than focus on traditional models of interiority, choice and consumption, Goldstein demonstrates that eating offered a central paradigm for the ethics of community formation. The book examines how sharing food helps build, demarcate and destroy relationships - between eater and eaten, between self and other, and among different groups. Tracing these eating relations from 1547 to 1680 - through Shakespeare, Milton, religious writers and recipe book authors - Goldstein shows that to think about eating was to engage in complex reflections about the body's role in society. In the process, he radically rethinks the communal importance of the Protestant Eucharist. Combining historicist literary analysis with insights from social science and philosophy, the book's arguments reverberate well beyond the Renaissance. Ultimately, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare's England forces us to rethink our own relationship to food.