The Middle Ages: Faith, Social Estate, Hunger and Feasting

Mark Twain says something like this: stop living ‘correctly’ according to other people’s rules. Eat what appeals to you, and do not turn every mouthful into an examination in morality and dietetics. The body is wiser than many advisers. It will work out for itself what suits it and what does not — sometimes, admittedly, through a small lesson.

This is not about mindlessly ‘eating everything’. It is about freedom of taste and peace of mind. Success in life is more often obstructed by an endless war with oneself than by food. As for the food, let it ‘argue’ inside and sort everything out.

Medieval Europe: food, art and society — from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance

Summary

This lecture concerns the European Middle Ages, the period from the division of the Roman Empire into East and West, approximately in the fourth century, to the first signs of the Renaissance. It examines social, cultural and dietary conditions after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a period often called the Dark Ages. Its characteristics include population decline, food shortages, a decline in education and culture, a colder climate, the return of forests to cultivated land and continual warfare.

The lecture analyses food’s complex role in medieval society: on the one hand, it was essential to life; on the other, it could be perceived as a source of sin. Guilt about the pleasure of eating and beliefs about food’s effects on health significantly influenced medieval art.

Three key factors shaping society and artistic culture are identified:

1. The Catholic Church

2. Class distinctions

3. Dietetics — medieval ideas about nutrition and medicine

The planned study includes artworks — paintings, mosaics and illuminated manuscripts — from the High and Late Middle Ages, including the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a handbook of health and well-being that helps us understand practices of food cultivation, cooking and serving.

Key knowledge

1) The historical context of the Middle Ages

The division of the Roman Empire and the chronological framework

• The Middle Ages are considered as a period of more than a thousand years, from the division of the Empire into East and West in the fourth century to the beginning of the Renaissance.

• This approach presents the Middle Ages as a bridge between Late Antiquity and the early modern period.

The Dark Ages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire

• After the collapse of the Western Empire, Europe entered a period known as the Dark Ages.

• Principal characteristics:

o population decline; o food shortages; o a decline in education and cultural production; o a colder climate; o the return of many areas to woodland; o continual warfare

• Cultural decline is evident even in the sources: cookbooks are almost absent between 600 and 1000, with the exception of a dietary book written by a Greek physician for Theodore.

2) Food in medieval society

The complexity and moral dimension of food

• Food was a complex phenomenon:

o hunger was a constant threat, so food = necessity; o food also gave pleasure, and pleasure could be considered sinful

• The tension between survival and moral restrictions influenced social norms and everyday life.

Expectations of health and feelings of guilt

• Food was believed capable of bringing either health or illness.

• Guilt associated with the desire to eat well, and expectations about ‘proper nutrition’, became foundations of medieval art, both as a theme and as a system of imagery.

3) What influenced medieval society and art

Three principal influences

1. The Catholic Church

It shaped values, artistic subjects and moral frameworks, including attitudes towards pleasure, sin and food.

2. Class distinctions

Social hierarchy determined:

o access to foods; o methods of preparation; o forms of presentation; o how all of these were depicted in art

3. Dietetics. The medical and dietary theories of the time established ideas:

o about the properties of foods; o about what was ‘beneficial/harmful’

o about how and what different people should eat. This influenced both actual practice and artistic imagery.

Reflections in art

• Food’s connections with necessity, pleasure, sin and health were reflected in visual culture.

• Art recorded and commented on society’s anxieties and norms.

4) Sources and methods for studying medieval food culture

Art as historical evidence

• The proposed sources are:

o paintings; o mosaics; o illuminated manuscripts, used as ‘documents’ to understand:

o what was grown; o how people cooked; o how food was served

Tacuinum Sanitatis

• A handbook of health and well-being.

• It provides information about cultivation, cooking and serving, linking dietary ideas with practical images and recommendations.

Assignments

1. Examine selected works — paintings, mosaics and manuscripts — from the High and Late Middle Ages, and find depictions of:

• food cultivation

• cooking

• serving food

2. Analyse sections of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, identify its dietary principles and compare them with visual depictions of food.

3. Select examples showing how the Church, class distinctions and dietetics influenced depictions of food and meals.

4. Investigate the dietary book written by a Greek physician for Theodore, within the period 600–1000, to understand medieval dietetics more fully against the background of scarce culinary sources.

The Middle Ages — AD 500–1400

The Middle Ages lasted from the fall of Ancient Rome in AD 476 to the beginning of the fifteenth century.

• Early Middle Ages — the Dark Ages: 500–1000

• High Middle Ages: 1000–1250

• Late Middle Ages: 1250–1400

It was a time of wars, ignorance, hunger and pandemics such as the Black Death. This is why the period, particularly before 1000, is often called the ‘Dark Ages’. Europeans made few conspicuous advances in science and art. Interest in Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and scholarship was comparatively weak. Life revolved around survival, and art reflected this: painting frequently focused on religion, morality and health.

In painting, the Middle Ages are a period with numerous narrative, figurative scenes. Paintings reflected the past: biblical stories and the ways of life of the time. Three principal themes can be identified: biblical scenes, depictions of everyday life and medieval feasts.

The Byzantine Empire — 330–1453

Let us consider the Byzantine Empire separately: it deserves particular attention.

While much of Europe lived through the ‘Dark Ages’, Byzantium in the east continued to flourish, with its own culture and food. Surviving religious icons and manuscript illustrations reveal some of the diversity of Byzantine food culture.

The Byzantine Empire existed from 330 to 1453 and extended from Albania to Syria, and from Italy to Turkey. Its capital, Constantinople, today Istanbul, was a trading centre and a city of active cultural exchange. Ancient traditions of art and learning continued there throughout the Middle Ages. Icon: The Hospitality of Abraham, late 1300s, Constantinople. Tempera on wood with gold leaf, 14 3/16 × 24 1/2 inches.

Food in medieval Constantinople

Food in medieval Constantinople combined Ancient Roman, Greek and Anatolian culinary practices. It was also influenced by the rules of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

What did they eat?

• Constantinople had access to a great variety of foods from nearby fertile lands and the sea, as well as through active trading routes to the east.

• The Byzantines ate meat — pork, mutton, poultry, gazelles and donkeys — and fish.

• They continued the Ancient Roman tradition of seasoning almost everything with garum, a fish sauce.

• They used many herbs and vegetables, as well as exotic spices such as ginger and nutmeg.

• Much of their everyday diet was regulated by the Eastern Christian Church.

In this picture, we see some of the earliest evidence for the use of forks, although these were simple two-pronged versions, resembling a modern carving fork.

‘Elegant dining with forks’: a detail of the portrait of Alexios III Komnenos in the Romance of Alexander the Great, 1300s. Made in Trebizond, Turkey. Tempera, gold and ink, 12 5/8 × 9 7/16 inches.

Christian art of this period frequently depicts certain biblical stories: Original Sin, the Garden of Eden, the Last Supper, the Wedding at Cana, the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes and the Supper at Emmaus, to name only a few.

In this section, we shall examine some of the most frequently painted biblical scenes because of their symbolic significance in artistic iconography.

Original Sin

The story of Original Sin is one of the most frequently depicted biblical subjects. According to the creation myth in the Abrahamic religions, Adam and Eve were the first man and woman. They are central to the doctrine of the Fall of Man and Original Sin, which is important to Christianity, although it is not generally accepted in Judaism and Islam. This Old Testament episode is one of the most common subjects in both painting and sculpture from the Middle Ages onwards.

When God created the world and humanity, he placed the man in the Garden of Eden, where many trees grew laden with delicious fruit. Two trees stood in the middle of the garden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God allowed Adam to eat any fruit except that of the Tree of Knowledge. He then created a woman as the man’s companion. The serpent told Eve that God was afraid that, if they ate this fruit, they would gain knowledge of good and evil and become like God. Eve yielded, tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, found it delicious and gave some to Adam. God then clothed the naked man and woman, who had become ‘like God’ in knowing good and evil, and expelled them from the garden to prevent them from eating the fruit of the second tree, the Tree of Life, and living for ever.

This is the first mention of food in the Old Testament, and food here is associated with sin. At the same time, the act of eating can be seen as an act of awareness. The fact that humanity’s fall occurred through food and eating can be understood as a metaphor for acquiring knowledge, giving the theme of food enormous cultural significance.

The Last Supper

The Last Supper is the final meal that, according to the Gospel accounts, Jesus shared with his apostles in Jerusalem before the Crucifixion. During the meal, Jesus predicts that one of the apostles present will betray him, and that before the next morning Peter will deny knowing him three times. The Last Supper provides the biblical foundation for the sacrament of the Eucharist, also known as Holy Communion.

The symbolism of food is especially powerful here. It represents Christ’s sacrifice for humanity. Wine is his blood, and bread his body.

The most interesting aspect of the Last Supper is that different depictions show different foods and table objects, according to the period and country in which the painting was made. The iconography extends beyond the biblical narrative, telling us what people ate and how sacrifice, betrayal and Christ’s body were represented in art. Early depictions corresponded more closely to the Jewish Passover tradition: participants reclined on low couches around low tables, or without tables at all. The Evangelists explicitly mention that they reclined at this meal.

This sixth-century mosaic in Ravenna depicts a scene of reclining in a triclinium, an arrangement of places typical of Roman custom. Christ and the disciples recline together during a communal meal; fish and wine are on the table. Christ is the only figure shown with a halo.

Food is served in a shared dish into which participants dip bread or from which they eat with their hands. The fish was a common symbol of Christ: the initial letters of the Greek words ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’ form the word ichthus, ‘fish’. An apple is sometimes shown on the table. It signifies Christ as the new Adam, who repairs humanity’s Fall from Paradise.

Sometimes a lamb appears on a dish before Jesus, likening Christ to the sacrificial lamb.

Another example is a prayer book from Regensburg, Germany, approximately 1000 years old, with an expressive scene of the Last Supper.

Christ sits with the apostles at a semicircular table and blesses them. Some followers take knives to eat the bread, fish and even a pretzel laid before them.

The two figures closest to Christ raise food towards their mouths but do not actually eat. Only one apostle eats the bread: Christ’s betrayer Judas, who sits separately on the side of the table nearest the viewer.

In the biblical text, Christ identifies the ‘unrighteous’ apostle through the act of eating: ‘Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me — the one who is eating with me’ (Mark 14:18).

The ominous black bird ‘flying’ from Judas’s mouth in the image marks not only his sinful act of betrayal, but also his eating alone. The iconography of food in such works reflects biblical lessons about sins, particularly gluttony and the hoarding of food at the expense of the poor. One example is The Feast of Dives.

The Last Supper in a benedictional, Regensburg, around 1030–1040. J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig VII 1, fol. 38.

The Feast of Dives

This biblical parable tells the story of a rich man, Dives, who refuses to help a beggar, Lazarus, despite the latter humbly asking for even the scraps of food.

Instead of helping, the rich man sets his dogs on Lazarus, who later dies of hunger. The rich man is the frowning, double-chinned figure at the table. He is presented as a ‘bad Christian’: gluttonous and unwilling to help the poor. Even his dogs attack poor Lazarus. In the lower part of the miniature, two angels fly above the dead Lazarus and wrap his soul in a white cloth, marking him as a ‘good Christian’. See the materials below for further information about dogs at medieval feasts.

Gluttony in medieval art

Gluttony is one of Christianity’s seven deadly sins. It was frequently depicted in medieval painting.

Paintings about gluttony warn the viewer. It is important to remember that wealthy and noble people commissioned such paintings. Naturally, they did not want artists to depict them as gluttonous. That role was often assigned to peasants instead. Many images in medieval and Renaissance art show peasants overeating, as if suggesting that low social status is associated with gluttony and other ‘bad’ habits. In this fifteenth-century image, for example, we see two groups eating. The ‘intemperate’, drunken peasants in the foreground create noise and commotion, while the ‘temperate’ group of nobles behind them eat modestly and sit upright with ‘correct’ posture.

Were peasants gluttonous?

Had they been given the chance, perhaps. Their lives revolved around agriculture, and they mainly ate grain and beans. Famine occurred regularly, the threat of exhaustion was real, and meat was a luxury.

The nobility, meanwhile, had hunts and feasts. The poor could only dream of what the wealthy ate. This dream was idealised in the utopian world of Cockaigne. People could experience a taste of ‘abundance’ during Carnival and other festivals, when the nobility distributed food to the crowd.

‘Dogs at a medieval feast’ — why are they there at all?

What usually matters in interpretation:

• Dogs in the hall do not always mean ‘dirt and bones under the table’. Much of this is a cinematic myth. In reality, table manners and cleanliness were valued at court and in a ‘good household’, and dogs might be kept separately, apart from small ornamental breeds.

• Why a dog appears in a miniature or feast scene:

o as a marker of status — hunting dogs, the elite’s ‘pets’;

o as a symbol — loyalty, a guardian, belonging to the house or master, depending on context;

o as a detail of everyday life — yes, animals around food are part of reality, but the artist chooses whether to show or omit them.

A dog in a feast scene often functions as a social marker and moral commentary, rather than simply as ‘background’.

‘Why do people not eat in medieval depictions of feasts?’

A short line of reasoning that recurs in research:

• Showing the process of chewing means risking the moral meaning. In the Late

Middle Ages, the iconography of food often revolves around temperance/intemperance and the fear of ‘looking like a glutton’.

• Food on the table: yes. A mouth at work: no. Artists prefer to show:

o wealth and table settings; o gestures — blessing, offering, choosing; o order/disorder at the table; o the contrast between ‘temperate’ and ‘intemperate’.

• A separate case: Judas and ‘eating alone’. In several traditions, the act of eating itself becomes a marker of betrayal: one person eats, therefore they are ‘not one of us’. Feast scenes often depict not ‘people eating’, but ‘attitudes towards food’ — moderation, morality, order, sin.

‘What did people actually eat?’ — realistically, without romanticising

The main factors here are class — rich/poor — region/season, and Church rules. The everyday foundation for most people:

• Bread + soup/pottage: a thick ‘pot’ of grain, pulses and vegetables, sometimes a little meat or fish ‘if they were lucky’.

• Ale/beer was often drunk regularly, rather than only on ‘festive’ occasions; water might be questionable.

• Vegetables, leeks/onions, cabbage, beans, grains and local seasonal fruit.

• Meat was rare for the poor and more often eaten on feast days; the nobility had noticeably more meat, poultry and game.

The banquet ‘display’ — the elite

• More meat, poultry and game, much fish — partly because of fasting — elaborate dishes and a demonstration of resources.

• Spices and sugar as status, almond milk, sauces and striking presentation. An important qualification about Cockaigne: the dream of a land of plenty is a cultural reaction to scarcity. When life offers ‘a pot and bread’, fantasy imagines ‘rivers of wine and food falling from the sky’.

In the Middle Ages, most people lived on bread, soups or pottage, seasonal vegetables and drinks such as ale. Meat was a luxury for the poor and, among the nobility, part of status and banquet display. Images of feasts often avoid the act of eating itself because of a moral perspective — the fear of gluttony — preferring to show table settings, gestures and ‘proper behaviour’. Dogs in such scenes may be both everyday details and social or symbolic markers.

Food in medieval Europe

After 1000, temperatures began to rise, more food could be grown, and fertility and birth rates increased. Viticulture expanded in central England.

People were able to grow grapes between 1000 and 1300, much as they can again today. Towns began to grow. Monasteries owned large areas of land. Feudalism emerged as a social system: nobles received land in return for serving the king in war, while peasants were obliged to live on their lord’s land and give him homage, labour and part of the harvest in exchange for protection.

Peasants could not freely sell their own produce: they used it to feed themselves and their lord. A ‘communal’ economy existed within the community, with tools and resources shared, including mills owned by the lords. Hunting and fishing were privileges of the lords. The nobility held many feasts during this period, supported and embellished by the spice trade through Venice and Genoa.

The fourteenth century: population growth, famine and plague

In the 1300s, the population grew further, while resources were distributed so close to the limit that failed harvests led to famine. Rats carried diseases, including plague, which travelled from Central Asia along trading routes, through Baghdad, to Sicily and then Europe. The plague spread rapidly, and within a couple of years a third of Europe’s population had died.

After the plague, Europe’s entire social structure changed. Lords began paying peasants wages. Peasants began eating more meat. They lived longer. Lords no longer controlled peasants so tightly, but peasants gave their lord half their harvest. This was called mezzadria — métayage, or sharecropping.

Between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, guilds of craftspeople and merchants formed and flourished in Europe, providing mutual assistance and protection for professionals, including a system of apprenticeship.

Spices and sugar as status

Until the end of the fifteenth century, Venice controlled the spice trade. Spices — pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg — and sugar came from distant places and sold at very high prices. People paid heavily for spices and sugar because they were scarce and because they believed them to have medicinal properties. Spices, considered ‘hot and dry’, were thought to balance the ‘cold and moist’, according to ancient medical theories. Being ‘in balance’, eucrasia, was considered a sign of social status. For more about Venice’s spice trade, see the article in the resources below.

Dietetics

The medicinal effects of food were a major subject in medieval society. Medieval diet and medicine drew heavily on the concept of the humours, bodily ‘fluids’. The humours were four fluids in the body believed to influence health, disease, temperament and personality. The Greek physician Hippocrates introduced the connection between the humours and health. Later, the Roman physician Galen added the idea of a link between the humours and a person’s temperament and personality.

The four fluids were blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Each person’s temperament comprised four elements:

• air — warm and moist;

• earth — cold and dry;

• fire — hot and dry;

• water — cold and moist.

Similarly, each food was believed to have its own character: warm/cold, dry/moist. The amount of each ‘fluid’ could increase or decrease because of many factors: diet, season, temperature, sex and time of day. For the body to be healthy, its humours had to be in balance. Too much or too little of any ‘fluid’ produced imbalance and illness. During the Islamic Golden Age, the Persian physician Avicenna, Ibn Sina, adopted humoral theory from Graeco-Roman medicine and presented it in The Canon of Medicine, 1025. Avicenna brought together humours and temperaments, combining them with Persian, Chinese and Indian medicine. In this system, the purpose of a good diet was to prevent a person’s temperament from becoming imbalanced. To achieve this, the dryness of a particular food had to be compensated for by combining it with foods of a ‘moist’ character. Warm and moist foods needed to be balanced by dry and cold ones. Cooking also changed the degree of dryness/moisture, cold/heat and so on. Frying and salting, for example, added ‘dryness’, while boiling added ‘moisture’. Cooks in the Middle Ages and Renaissance spent considerable time ‘balancing’ food in this way. The numerous cookbooks that began to appear after the fourteenth century provide a very good picture of what people ate in late medieval Europe.

Early cookbooks and materials

The earliest cookbooks were written on parchment, usually made from sheep or goat skins. The Roman writer Pliny wrote that parchment was invented in the second century BC in Pergamum, hence the word ‘parchment’, from the Latin pergamena, ‘from Pergamum’. Vellum was considered a higher-quality parchment and was made from calfskin. Paper gradually displaced parchment: paper production began in Italy and Spain in the thirteenth century, and printed paper spread in the fourteenth.

The four humours

Naturally, around this time we see an ‘explosion’ of cookbooks across Europe. They were mainly written by cooks in Italy and France for important people, including the Pope. These books include Liber de coquina, thirteenth century; The Forme of Cury, fourteenth century; Le Ménagier de Paris, fourteenth century; Anonimo Toscano and Anonimo Veneziano, both fourteenth century; and many others.

A visual source with excellent illustrations of how people cooked, ate and managed their households in the Late Middle Ages is the medical book Tacuinum Sanitatis. It is a Latinised version of an eleventh-century Arabic medical work from Baghdad, Taqwīm as-Ṣiḥḥa.

The medieval diet

The medieval diet was based on bread, beans or pulses, meat, wine and beer. Foods did not all have the same cultural ‘value’. Each had its place in a hierarchy extending from earth to heaven, literally according to where the food was ‘born’: in the soil, on a tree or in the air. Cereals were a staple, eaten mainly as bread. Oats were eaten as porridge. By the end of the Middle Ages, wheat had become the most desirable grain. Rye was grown on poor soils, while millet was particularly widespread in south-western France. In the Late Middle Ages, buckwheat arrived in Europe from Asia through the Middle East and began to spread.

Medieval townspeople liked white bread made from finely sifted, pure wheat. With bran included, the bread of the poor was dark, like the slices on which food was placed during meals. Peasants baked bread in their lord’s oven, while towns had bakers. Vegetables were part of a peasant’s daily diet. Cabbage, spinach and leeks were eaten as purées and in soups. Pulses were another food group mainly eaten by peasants and in monasteries. Onions were very common among peasants. Like garlic, onions were credited with numerous medicinal properties. Fruit was considered food for the nobility. Pears stewed in wine were often the ‘finale’ of a meal.

Making butter. Tacuinum Sanitatis, fifteenth century.

Milk was made into cheese or butter. Physicians discouraged drinking milk, believing that it contained too much ‘moisture’.

Dairy products, like meat, could not be consumed during Lent or on Fridays and Saturdays. During fasting, non-animal oils — olive or nut oil — were used for cooking instead of butter. Abstention during Lent and other days of abstinence, totalling more than 100 days a year, was required by the Church.

Fish consumption was therefore very high, particularly herring, known as ‘the fish of the poor’.

A medieval butcher, artist unknown.

In the final centuries of the Middle Ages, meat consumption became predominant. The number of butchers’ shops increased.

Deer, wild boar, herons and pheasants, pursued on foot or hunted in flight, were considered ‘noble quarry’.

Rural inhabitants hunted hares and small birds.

Wine

Viticulture developed significantly during the Middle Ages, and most peasants grew grapes.

Wine was mixed with honey and spices — usually cinnamon, ginger, cloves, grains of paradise and long pepper — and sometimes heated and filtered. This drink was believed to have medicinal effects and was called hippocras, after Hippocrates. Wine put into barrels immediately after the grape harvest was drunk at the beginning of the year. In noble households, a specialised servant, the cup-bearer, was responsible for serving wine. Until the fourteenth century, sugar was still chiefly regarded as a medicine, and French cooking used it primarily in dishes for the sick. Candied almonds and other spiced sweets were served at the end of select meals to improve guests’ digestion. Illustration captions:

• Wine in a barrel, around 1500

• A merchant selling a sugar cone, from a manuscript of Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, fifteenth century

‘There is no dish that cannot be improved with sugar.’ — Platina, a fifteenth-century cookbook author

Platina says this as calmly as though he were talking about salt. In fact, he is talking about power. In the fifteenth century, sugar was not an ‘addition’. It was a sign that you could afford long journeys, foreign ports and the hands of others who obtained, transported and sold that sugar.

The phrase ‘improved with sugar’ therefore sounds like a password. Like a small movement of the wrist: a little sweetness, and a dish becomes not merely tastier but ‘higher in rank’. The irony is that sugar then cured almost everything. At the very least, it cured the householder’s self-esteem.

Today, sugar has become so accessible that it is no longer added to demonstrate status. It is added to hide an emptiness of flavour. Here is where history completes a beautiful circle.