I have just added to our resources section a wonderfully detailed and engaging guest article written by author, Vanora Bennett. How to eat to save your life (and soul) is essentially a “beginner’s guide to the medieval way of feasting (and fasting).”
Meticulously researched, informative and accompanied by some great pictures, I know you are going to enjoy reading this article.
I read about everyday life in Medieval and Tudor England with relish and am curious about seemingly mundane everyday tasks and how they accomplished them 500 years ago.
This article is about more than just medieval food. It’s about religious fasts, medieval feasts, medicine and cooking. We learn about food preparation, how food defined your social status, the use of herbs, flowers and more!
I very much enjoyed the inclusion of contemporary quotations, some of which had me in stitches. I won’t spoil the surprise but I wonder if you can guess what piece of advice made me laugh out loud!
Thank you Vanora and happy reading!
How to eat to save your life (and soul)
By chance, I started a diet on the first day of Lent. I marked the night before, Shrove Tuesday, by making maximum-calorie pancakes for my children and thought no more about the coincidence. But, as the pounds slipped away in the forty days that followed, that awareness of Lent came back to me. I found myself reading more and more about the religious fasts, and feasts, of the Middle Ages (I am a historical novelist, after all) and realizing that our pre-modern ancestors lived by an extraordinary and complex system of culinary balance that was designed and able to promote perfect health.
Europeans from 1200 to 1500, the pre-Reformation period when Western Christianity was at its most cohesive, lived by a religious – and culinary – calendar of alternate feasts and fasts. Both fasting and feasting were gestures of faith in God and trust that the divinely ordered world would provide for mankind at the right time.
Continue reading here.
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