The “Imagination of Eating”: The Role of the Imagination in Appetite Stimulation and Suppression

This chapter focuses on Renaissance understandings of the imagination’s role in appetite for food and its suppression. I contextualize these understandings of the imagination and of appetite within faculty psychology, particularly regarding the relationship of the imagination, senses, sensitive appetite, and emotions. More specifically, drawing upon treatises on the passions and temperance by Lessius, Wright, Descartes, and Huarte, as well as the plays Bartholomew Fair and Pericles, I analyze the function ascribed to the imagination in psychosensory, affective, and physiological responses to food and other ingested products, concentrating on the cravings associated with gluttony and on aversion or disgust. Although my focus is on consumption habits and health discourse, I suggest that the examples I analyze offer insight into the sociopolitical importance of the imagination in habit and socialization more generally—shaping psychosomatic responses (whether positive or negative) not only to specific foods and other ingested products but also to people and behaviors.