| Summary: | An unseemly squabble arose between Byzantium and Rome in the eleventh century over the kind of bread that should be used in the sacrament. The azyme controversy, as it is known, was so acrimonious and silly that scholars still struggle to explain something so trivial erupting to the point of schism. This book reverses the normal line of inquiry: instead of asking what we can say about a futile argument over bread, it asks what useful things does the polemic tell us about bread itself? The Byzantine dispute is one of many telling examples where bread attracts conceited and headstrong narratives, commencing with the false belief that certain cultures were too primitive to have developed techniques for baking bread—like the ancient traditions of First-Nations Australia—and ending with zealous dieticians today who want to abolish wheat in the pantry. Dwelling especially on the symbolic prestige of bread in the Christian epoch, this book identifies visceral historical patterns, where the more bread means to people and their institutions, the more it becomes subject to anxieties over symbolic proprietorship. There are many jealous regulatory impulses around the spiritual flourishing of bread; but none of them makes sense without appreciating the underlying viscerality attached to our affection for one kind of bread or another, or a given ritual for eating it. In order to analyse the several reactions to bread and its myths, the book proposes a history of viscerality, which invokes several contemporary themes related to dietary anxieties and a fear of bread. The book narrates how bread—at various times and for different tragic reasons—can lose its innocence.
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