To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic, edited by Rachel B. Herrmann was reviewed in the March 2021 issue of the Journal of American History.
“Europeans in the early modern world imagined the Americas and Africa to be full of dangers, cannibals perhaps most disturbing among them. To Feast on Us as Their Prey collects ten compelling essays that expand our understanding of anthropophagy, both real and imagined. … This collection expands the scope of cannibalism studies, putting this history into conversation with broader studies of race, gender, and empire, and approaches taken by food historians to studies of hunger and cultures of consumption. … Herrmann and the other authors in this volume present a history that is intensely human, caught up with questions about bodies, spiritual power, and control. An index, too often omitted from essay collections, allows readers to quickly connect ideas present in different essays. Historians of the Atlantic world, exploration, and early encounters broadly, as well as scholars investigating the hunger that pervaded the region and the fear that accompanied it, will find much that is useful in this book, which encourages us to consider how cannibalism influenced so much of this period.”
—Adrian Finucane, Journal of American History, March 2021
Long before the founding of the Jamestown, Virginia, colony and its Starving Time of 1609–1610—one of the most famous cannibalism narratives in North American colonial history—cannibalism played an important role in shaping the human relationship to food, hunger, and moral outrage. Why did colonial invaders go out of their way to accuse women of cannibalism? What challenges did Spaniards face in trying to explain Eucharist rites to Native peoples? What roles did preconceived notions about non-Europeans play in inflating accounts of cannibalism in Christopher Columbus’s reports as they moved through Italian merchant circles?
Asking questions such as these and exploring what it meant to accuse someone of eating people as well as how cannibalism rumors facilitated slavery and the rise of empires, To Feast on Us as Their Prey posits that it is impossible to separate histories of cannibalism from the role food and hunger have played in the colonization efforts that shaped our modern world.
To Feast on Us as Their Prey is part of the Food and Foodways Series. Food and Foodways is a series from the University of Arkansas Press that explores historical and contemporary topics in global food studies. We are committed to representing a diverse set of voices that tell lesser known food stories and to provoking new avenues of interdisciplinary research. Our strengths are works in the humanities and social sciences that use food as a critical lens to examine broader cultural, environmental, and ethical issues. In addition to scholarly books, we publish creative nonfiction that explores these topics with a focus on food’s sensory dimensions.