Healthy meat

 The current belief (for most anyway) is that meat isn't really part of a healthy diet. We're told about societies where people routinely live past 100, and how they all eat dried beans, garlic, ancient grains, kale, and olives (or something like that).  In the US beef tallow and full-fat dairy products are experiencing a bit of a resurgence, but the overall consensus is that red meat is not healthy.

The Middle Ages thought about things differently.  For them, red meat was both a luxury and a health food.  Most people, most of the time, ate a basically vegetarian diet, a lot of bread (whole wheat for the most part), whatever vegetables were in season, dried beans and lentils, with the occasional egg or piece of cheese to round it out.  The wealthy added in red meat when they could get it, but other than the annual pork-fest (eat a whole lot of fresh pork at pig roundup time in November, salt and smoke the rest and try to make it stretch out for six months), peasants ate red meat very rarely.

(Those skeptical about the wonders of the whole-grain and kale diet might point out that medieval people rarely made it out of their 50s, but we're not going to talk about that now.) 

Monks ate a vegetarian diet all the time (as did even the wealthy on Fridays and during Lent, though fish was OK then), with one exception.  If they were sick, they needed beef broth! Everyone knew that a sick person needed something strong and nourishing, and beef broth did the trick.  Abbots would look with deep suspicion at monks who "got sick" with remarkable frequency, needing to spend time in the infirmary receiving sustenance.

Beef broth of course comes from boiling beef, with probably a few spices, some honey, and some onions to give it a little extra, if being eaten by someone not entirely ill.  (No potatoes for stew of course, as potatoes are New World, and no carrots, as carrots were not yet domesticated.  Maybe some turnips.). All medieval doctors agreed that boiling meat was better for you than roasting it, even though a lot of people preferred the roast-meat flavor (I certainly do).

An interesting work on nutrition written (and rewritten) during the Middle Ages was  "De observatione ciborum," or as we might translate the title, "Comments on Food."  It was originally written in the sixth century by a physician named Anthimus, in exile from Byzantium (where he was doubtless known as Anthimos). He came both to the court of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic the Great and to the Frankish royal court to serve the Merovingians.

He believed that if you ate the proper foods (including meat), and in the proper way (no gobbling or stuffing oneself), one would not need medicine.  (Sounds sort of New Age-y.  Everything old is new.) He listed several dishes that would (supposedly) help one recover from such ailments as dysentery or a fever.

Given that medicine at the time relied heavily on theories of humours, with blood-letting a big feature, and that the many powders and tinctures doctors might suggest had most definitely not been tested against a placebo, maybe one really would do better with some nice beef broth.

Anthimus is noted today not only for his healthy-living tips but some of his comments on typical behavior of the Franks.  For example, he said that they considered raw bacon a great delicacy.  (Not entirely clear if it was smoked and salted but just not fried, or if it was plain raw pork belly.  I think I won't be a Frank.)

Anthimus's work was copied and expanded in subsequent centuries.  It reappeared at the Carolingian royal court, where again it discussed a particular kind of diet as uniquely Frankish, an aspect of cultural identity.  It continued to be used and quoted at the courts of the powerful through at least the twelfth century.  We are what we eat, and the idea of building healthy living on a proper diet has a very long history.

Abby Riehl of Purdue University is making an extensive study of Anthimus and his work.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available everywhere in paperback

 

 

Medieval Monsters

 Medieval people talked a lot about monsters. Their "bestiaries," books that discussed the supposed nature of different animals (such as that dogs were very faithful, or that lions feared white roosters), also included such monsters as the manticore, a creature with a human face, the body of a lion (usually red), and the tail and stinger of a scorpion. It ate human flesh (note the leg in the monster's mouth).

 

Depictions of manticores in the 13th century often gave them features similar to the features found in images depicting Jews. Faces would have a big hooked nose and a scruffy beard, and the manticore might wear a so-called Phrygian cap, a conical cap with a peak that tipped forward. Thus the artist could make a cruel antisemitic statement while also drawing a monstrous beast. (Julia DeBardeleben has been studying such "Jewish" manticore images.)

(Interestingly, the Phrygian cap was used in ancient Rome to identify freed slaves and during the French Revolution to designate citizens revolting against tyranny. But in the Middle Ages it meant Jews. It had many uses.)

As this example illustrates, medieval monsters were often hybrids. They had body parts of several different kinds of creatures. Deformed features could also count as monstrous, which was rather hard on disabled people.

There were plenty of stories about Wild Men, monsters who were humanoid but large and hairy, one might even say like today's Bigfoot.   These monsters could be rumored to live in some distant, wild place, or be metaphors for what people are not supposed to be like.

Lacking rationality made you into a Wild Man. Jews (again) could be characterized as monstrous because they apparently couldn't grasp the perfectly logical (or at least logical to medieval theologians) arguments why Christianity was right and Judaism wrong.  (It is of course striking that medieval people assumed that your reasoning ability would lead you to the Correct view of religion, unless your brain was deformed.)

Monsters were not always scary. Sometimes they were just the strange creatures supposedly found in distant lands, like the upside-down people on the underside of the planet, with huge toes to cling to the earth so they wouldn't fall off, or the men with heads like dogs believed to live in India (Columbus looked unsuccessfully for them when he reached the Americas).

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval ideas about animals and religion as well as other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback. 

Thirteenth-Century Churches and Documents

 The thirteenth century is strangely neglected by modern scholars.

How can you say that? cry medievalists. After all, Charles Homer Haskins, who really began medieval studies in the US, called the thirteenth the greatest century. In the church, it was the time when the popes came closest to exercising the absolute power they would have liked to have had at several other times, and the new Franciscan and Dominican orders rapidly spread, transforming ideas of the holy. Kings started keeping good records, and great counts and dukes drew up lists of who owed them homage, making political history much more straightforward. It was a time of the glories of Gothic architecture, as seen with the cathedral of Reims (below). It was when a number of great works of literature were composed (both epics and romances).

 But for monasteries, for cartularies, for the documents one finds in the archives, the period is relatively neglected.  This isn't a result of a shortage of records.  This is a matter of having too much.  The great nineteenth-century efforts to collect, analyze, and put into print the documents of a region, a monastery, a bishopric, all tended to start at the beginning, back probably in the Merovingian era.  They published everything they could find up through the tenth century. For the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they tried to include everything they considered most significant.

Then they got to the thirteenth century.  Lots and lots of documents, a lot of them long and highly repetitive.   Someone at the time would make an agreement with a monastery, and several more documents would be drawn up by various people who agreed and confirmed.  The careful nineteenth-century editors looked at all those documents and shook their heads.

They weren't the first.  Those compiling cartularies in the thirteenth century (that is, books into which original documents were copied for ease of reference and safe-keeping), quickly lost steam.

The scribe who compiled the cartulary of the bishops of Auxerre in the late thirteenth century noted that the bishop's documents had been organized into boxes by topic, the boxes identified as A, B, and so on.  He started with A, carefully copying each document, though there were quite a few of them.  Then he got to box B, and his heart must have sunk.  He copied a few, then said, "And many more on similar topics."  On to box C, where he started abbreviating heavily.

At right about the same time, at the monastery of Montier-en-Der (in Champagne), a scribe chose a few major topics for his cartulary and carefully chose documents to copy for each topic.  He did not abbreviate, he did not start writing fast and sloppily, but he had selected only about 100 documents to incorporate.  He skipped over far more documents than he included.  We know this because those documents still exist, in the same bundles as the ones the scribe chose to include.  It wasn't as if he just skipped trivial documents. He even skipped many documents issued by popes, probably because these long, elaborate charters simply confirmed an agreement that had been reached locally.  Too many documents, the scribe seems to have thought, let's just hit the highlights.

Scholars today, understandably, find it easiest to start their research with printed documents.  All serious medievalists studying society and the church will spend some time in the archives, but again the temptation is strong to stick with the printed record,with just brief excursions into documents that exist only in manuscript.  Those who analyze documents from a wide range of sources, over an extended period of time, which is what one does when studying events in the twelfth century or earlier, find the thirteenth-century plethora of records overwhelming and thus not worth investigating.

 Things have changed by the time one gets to the fourteenth century. There are even more records, especially as the spread of paper, far cheaper than parchment, greatly expanded the number of things considered worth writing down.  But scholars have adapted, focusing on just one manor, for example, or the acts of just one bishop.  They could, if they wished, go back and do the same with the thirteenth century, but they find the fourteenth century too interesting (which it is), between pope-king wars, gunpowder, the spread of eyeglasses, the Black Death, and so much more.

So people doing the sixth-twelfth centuries stay away from the thirteenth century, and those doing fourteenth-fifteenth also stay away from the thirteenth century.  Opportunity for grad students looking for a project!

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval documents, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.