Poisoned Meals: Toxic Food, Epistemic Standards, and Retributive Justice in Twelfth-Century Judicial Cases and Anecdotal Narratives

Abstract This article examines case studies and anecdotal narratives in which murderers used poisoned food as a weapon, and government officials used their epistemic authority to solve these crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice. Drawn from Zheng Ke’s 鄭克 (fl. 1124–1149) legal compendium Tortoise and Mirror for Judging Cases ( Zheyu guijian 折獄龜鑑) and Hong Mai’s 洪邁 (1123–1202) anecdote collection Record of the Listener ( Yijian zhi 夷堅志), these narratives reflected the violent threat that poisoners posed to the preservation of gender, familial, social, and political hierarchies. In the Mirror ’s legal realm, astute officials used abductive reasoning to expose poisoning plots, thereby restoring the moral fabric of society; in Hong Mai’s Record poisoners are punished by imperial judges as well as by retributive mechanisms of cosmic justice. These six selected case narratives illustrate the permeability of the boundaries that divide the conceptual categories of food, medicine, and poison, and the connections amongst medical, legal, and socio-moral systems of knowledge.