Nicolas Trépanier's Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia is an important addition to a growing field of study on medieval Anatolia. Despite the well-known paucity of source material and a still prominent paradigm that casts this period as a precursor to Ottoman history, a number of recent studies have proved that medieval Anatolia is a field in its own right. Trépanier's monograph adds a number of crucial elements to this growing field and stands apart for its focus on social history. As the author points out, there are many more sources on elite levels of society and an almost total lack on the type of material, such as tax registers and land surveys, upon which much social history has been dependent. Using food as his analytic tool, Trépanier constructs a study that looks towards a unique combination of sources to present more of the texture of daily life in Anatolia. Trépanier consults a series of waqfiyyas in conjunction with literary sources to address not just how people made, ate and transported food, but their attitudes to its taste, temptation and the proper ways in which it should be served and by whom. He brings to this task an impressive command and skill with literary texts and provides a social history of food that is both rich in literary illusions and grounded in a real landscape.

This four-chapter study examines the production, exchange and consumption of food as well as its role in religious ritual and practice. Although the nature of the remaining source material has made some chapters more heterogeneous than others, each chapter uses food to convey new insights about medieval Anatolia. The book draws extensively from information found in pious endowment deeds or waqfiyyas and literary texts. The waqfiyyas come from the collection at the Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü in Ankara and, as the author points out, are later copies of earlier documents. These are difficult documents and, in some cases, poorly catalogued. In an appendix, Trépanier includes a very useful discussion of the waqfiyyas in Ankara. As there are some early and original waqfiyyas in the archives of Istanbul, one hopes that in future he may use his considerable expertise to analyse some of these. The appendix also includes an extended discussion of his other major sources, the largest chunk of which comes from literary texts in Persian and Ottoman that are derived from a religious landscape and, as his waqfiyyas, convey the support or reflections of religious figures. In later centuries, most of these figures have been described as Sufis and became founding figures of major orders. Given his care in detailing elements of his approach, a more thorough discussion of the views through which the incidentals of his landscape were gathered would have been a thought-provoking addition.

As he shows in his first chapter, the way food was produced can tell us a great deal about everything from elements of land ownership to what could be termed peasant mobility. Questions about land ownership and those who worked the land, which are rarely if ever dealt with in the historiography of fourteenth-century Anatolia, make this chapter one of the book's most ambitious. A classification of different types of food-producing land comes from a careful and nuanced reading of information in waqfiyyas. He also uses information in these documents to discuss land limits, labour costs, and irrigation systems. In combining this material with that drawn from a substantial corpus of literary texts, Trépanier is able to provide a glimpse into garden security and the use of produce as a commodity. The chapter does more than any other study in constructing a picture of an interdependent society where, at least during certain times of the year, different groups interacted.

Much like its production, the exchange of food offers myriad connections between different groups. Trépanier examines food exchange from a number of different angles to address the places where food and water were provided. In the absence of detailed sources on long-distance trade, the focus of his second chapter is on the smaller and more local interactions where food was exchanged. Some of these include discussions of urban markets which from waqfiyyas seem to be located in special sections of cities. His discussion of food consumption draws a great deal of support from hagiographic material. One of the most important aspects of his discussion of consumption and, to some extent, the rituals surrounding the consumption of food, is Trépanier's challenge to prominent paradigms about life in Sufi lodges. The idea that disciple hierarchies corresponded to their role in food preparation and production as well as other jobs within the lodge is, as he points out, based on nineteenth-century realities. Many of these hierarchical positions were made material though displays at the Mevlana Museum in Konya. These positions have been projected back onto the fourteenth century. In much the same way, he points out that our assumptions about early samāʿ performances rest on unchallenged assumptions that later practices were followed in the fourteenth century.

Trépanier's work is a unique addition to the study of medieval Anatolia. His meticulous examination of a large body of hagiographical sources will be particularly useful to students and scholars in a number of fields ranging from Ottoman history to the study of Sufism. This book has a great deal to offer the study of the fourteenth century. Aside from two useful appendices and some very thoughtful footnotes, Trépanier succeeds in producing a picture of a more textured, but sometimes strangely static, society. He displays an impressive skill with combining information from legal and literary texts with observations from archaeology and other fields. He also writes about Anatolia with a kind of humour and insight that results in a very readable and informative addition to the field.