La cena di Pitagora. Storia del vegetarianismo dall'antica Grecia a Internet

The intellectual and cultural history of vegetarianism is seen as part of a larger issue, that of the role of otherness and heterodoxy in the making of European modernity. In other words, the historical reading of vegetarianism ( a theme which is inevitably, though not exclusively, connected to the more general issue of the relation between man and animal and consequently of soul-body dualism) touches some core problems of Western intellectual and cultural history which emerged distinctly in early modern times. It involves political history as well, for example in the case of radical non-conformists like Roger Crab in the age of the English Revolution and later, or John Oswald’s or Joseph Ritson’s adhesion to the French Revolution. The challenge to religious and theological authority, one of whose essential tenets is the discontinuity between man and animal, is associated, as Keith Thomas began showing in 1983 in Man and the Natural World, with an evolution of sensibility toward animals and nature, which is an important component of the questioning of anthropocentrism. The evolution of vegetarian ideas and their critical implications from the 16th to the 19th century is considered in a longer-term framework: ancient references, such as book XV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or Plutarch’s writings on animal intelligence, used almost literally for example by Montaigne, remained essential; moreover, that tradition confronted since the beginnings of Christianity both theological visions and ascetic pratices, which are also taken into account in the book.