In the thirteenth century, a new locus of yearning emerged in both writtenand oral culture across Europe. In this latest land of plenty, gingerbreadhouses had roofs tiled with pancakes, fences were made from sausages, cookedpigs carried their own carving knives, fried fish swam in rivers of milk,and fountains dispensed the finest Malvasia wine. Its very name reflectedthe land's culinary character: Cucania in Latin,Cuccagna in Italian, Coquaigne inFrench, or Cockaigne in English shared their etymological origin incoquina, the Latin for kitchen. Or alternatively, itsappellation captured Cockaigne's allure as a place exempt from toiland trouble in the German Schlaraffen- orSchlawraffenland and its English and Dutch equivalents‘lubberland’ and luilekkerland. Cockaigne wasquite literally a land of gluttonous layabouts, in which sleep was rewardedand work punished. Full of food and leisure and free from death or disease,this dreamland evoked an earthly paradise or the Golden Age of Greekmythology; and yet, Cockaigne was regarded with suspicion.

One of the earliest written sources, a thirteenth-century poem from theCarmina Burana, already adopted a satirical tone inreference to a Cucanesian abbot holding council with his fellow revellers,and by the sixteenth-century, such moralising was commonplace in accounts ofthe supposed delights of Cockaigne.