Wooden roundels or “trenchers” (teljoren in Dutch) were a not uncommon fixture of middling and well-to-do dinner parties in sixteenth-century Europe. And, as with the backgrounds for Bruegel’s Twelve Proverbs, they were often “uniformly painted in red”. In an era when sugar was becoming more accessible and affordable than ever before, sweet confections and marzipan figurines are thought to have been served on the plain, unpainted side of the plate. Riding a postprandial glucose high, guests would then be invited to flip over the roundel and contemplate the images while reading aloud the inscriptions on their tableware. “Trenchers have been almost entirely neglected within historical and art historical fields”, wrote Victoria Yeoman in 2017, but they should be studied as much as any other art object, not least because trenchers constituted a kind of performance. As diners rotated, deciphered, and meditated upon the relationship between text and image, they would also reveal their own learning, opinions, manners, and beliefs — prompted by wildly divergent subject matter, depending on the roundel set: “biblical verse and commentary, erotic tales, marriage advice, figural proverbs, the labours of the months, memento mori reminders, clashes of religious ideologies (they are especially anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish), peasant life, anti-papal sentiments and contentious, topical events”.
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