The Sign of the Rose

 Our word "romance" goes back to medieval French, but its meaning was somewhat different then compared to how we use the term now.  A medieval French roman was a story in which the emphasis was on personal interactions, rather than on feats of arms, as was the case with epics.  (In fact the romance-epic demarcation was not always very clear.)  More broadly it meant a story, and in fact modern French still uses roman for a novel.

We now use "romance" in a narrower sense, to mean a love story.  In fact, romance is a well-established genre.  It has its rules, such as that you are required to have a happily-ever-after ending, or at least a happy-for-now conclusion, as the couple intends to be each other's special and only love partner.

It's easy to mock modern romance, and indeed it can easily become formulaic.  Young woman from a small town/big city moves to a big city/small town for reasons that are intended to make the story distinctive.  There she encounters a new man/a previous flame.  Sparks fly!  Problems arise.  Will they get together in spite of them? (I think you know the answer.)  But anything that makes people happy and indeed encourages reading is to be applauded (so saith the author).

Why did medieval people call a story a roman?  It was because a lot of their stories were set in mythical long-ago times.  For us long-ago is the Middle Ages.  For them it was the Roman Empire.  So accounts of deeds could be characterized as Roman stories.  (Our word "story" comes from "history," historia.  Also an account of deeds.)

By the way, because many people made pilgrimages to Rome, pilgrims were often referred to colloquially as Romies, including those going to Santiago in Spain, in the opposite direction from France than Rome.

This brings us to Guillaume de Dole ou le roman de la rose.  This was a roman written around the year 1200 in France, and which I have rewritten under the title of The Sign of the Rose.  It is in part a love story, but the Guillaume of the French title is not one of the lovers.  He gets to have adventures and go to tournaments, while his sister has to overcome slander to win the heart of the king.

The actual people in both versions of the story (the medieval original and mine) are imaginary, but I've tried to set it in something close to the real society of the thirteenth century.  I did have to make some changes for a modern audience, primarily having the lovers meet and fall in love, rather than fall in love just by hearing about each other from afar.

I characterize it as a "historical romance," and it does obey the Happily Ever After law, even though there's a lot more about the heroine's brother than a die-hard romance fan might prefer.  It's for sale on all major ebook platforms and in paperback; here's the Amazon link.

Here's the opening to whet your appetite.

Chapter 1 - Sir Kunz

“Remember how important you are to the realm, sire,” the seneschal said sternly.  “Stay with the party so that the knights can protect you.  Do not ride off by yourself like you did last time.”
Konrad did not answer, other than by giving a huff that could have been either agreement or denial.  What good was it being a king if he was still treated like a child?
It was cold for April, low clouds threatening rain or sleet.  He could feel the stallion under him wanting to run off across the fields, not to continue plodding along with the whole court.  There was a thin layer of mud on the old Roman road, its stones uneven enough to make speed impossible, even if speed had been an option when they had to hold their pace to that of the wagons.
Behind them the ladies had been singing, some songs of fighting and glory but mostly songs of love.  Konrad dropped back in the line, as if intending to converse with one of the ladies, ignoring the seneschal’s dark frown.
But the frown did it.  As soon as he was well back from the vanguard, he dug his spurs into his horse’s sides and was off, almost flying across the fields.  “No one follow!” he bellowed over his shoulder.  The cold wind streamed his hair out behind him, and he laughed as the seneschal’s faint shouts were lost in the distance.
He looked back just before he reached a line of trees.  The court, knights and ladies, servants and squires, horses and wagons, was spread out along a quarter mile of road.  At least no knights were racing after him.  There were advantages after all in being king—the court had to obey him even if they did not want to.
Besides, none of the knights could keep up with his Spanish stallion.
“Old men,” Konrad told his stallion when he finally pulled the horse to a trot, “might as well be old women.”
The seneschal was not really old in truth, he conceded to himself.  But the seneschal and the other barons who had served on the regency council had always been strict and proper.  “They would have been happy to be regents until I was thirty, had I let them,” Konrad added to the stallion.  The stallion was uninterested.
The horse pricked his ears instead at a rustling in the underbrush, and Konrad loosed the reins and let him run again.  Over a hedgerow, over two hedgerows, past a huddle of houses and they were back in the open fields again.  The soil was freshly turned—the peasants must have been plowing, thinking, as had he, that it was really spring.
Mud splashed halfway up Konrad’s legs, but he didn’t care.  A wide loop, he told himself cheerfully, and he would join the Roman road again.  He would trot back to meet his court, let the seneschal say whatever he liked because he would not be listening, and then he would ride sedately the rest of the day, chatting with the ladies.

Except that he did not find the Roman road again.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

Ethnic Identity

 Because the US is a melting pot, an awful lot of us have a distinct ethnic identity related to our ancestry.  African-Americans of course refer back to their ancestors who were captured in Africa and brought to the Americas as slaves (though there are certainly some, like President Obama, who have very recent African heritage, but no ancestors who were slaves in the Americas).  Irish-Americans celebrate Saint Patrick's day, Mexican Americans (and those who like tequila) celebrate Cinco de Maio, and so on.

You can now get your DNA analyzed for further details on your ancestry.  I, not to my surprise, tested out at close to 3/4 English, with the rest a mix of German, French, Dutch, Irish, and Scandinavian.  Interestingly, I am not considered "English-American."  Although those who might be called English-Americans are not the majority in this country, they were the majority among our founders, and are still considered the default. ("We're real Americans, and everybody else is a modified-American!" Yeah. Right. Not in my view.)

But ethnic identity is more than one's DNA.  A big part of it is language and religion and food and customs.  People in the Middle Ages also had ethnic identity, though because they were exposed to other sorts of folks less than we are the topic came up less often.

The French in the Middle Ages liked to say that the French were best (big surprise) and mocked the Germans for not being as good knights or fighters as they considered themselves to be.  England after the Norman Conquest had clear demarcations between the French and the English (some of these "French" were genetically half Scandinavian, but that didn't count).  Italians always knew they were not German, and asserted Germans were bad.  Heretics, non-Christians (especially Muslims), and Greek Orthodox Christians were considered the Other by the Latin Christian majority.  Jewish communities focused on their religion and their family customs to maintain themselves among a sea of non-Jews, as they indeed have for three thousand years.

Language was one of the big markers of identity, as indeed it still is now.  The Norman French may have had a lot of Scandinavian DNA, but they were French because they spoke French.  Each region of medieval Europe had its own language.  Portuguese was like (but unlike) Spanish, which had similarities to Catalan, which was related to the Occitan of southwest France, which had similarities both to the French around Paris and to Provençal, spoken in southeastern France, which was similar to northern Italian.

Italian itself had (and has) many variants.  Sicilian is still almost its own language.  Latin, the language of the area around Rome (Latium), was the language spread by the Roman legions, but other parts of the long Italian peninsula had been speaking their own version of proto-Italian for centuries.  Hence Portuguese, Provençal, and the rest grew out of Latin in different ways, but the various regions of Italy had a long head start in diversification.

Then there's German.  The Rhine was and is the theoretic dividing line between Romance languages and Germanic languages, as it was the theoretic boundary of the Roman Empire of antiquity, but in practice the line was anything but sharp.  Alsace, now part of France and on the French side of the Rhine, went back and forth between school children being taught in French or in German in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as control of the region shifted back and forth.  Now Alsatian kids go to school in French but usually hang out with their friends in Alsatian, a German dialect.

Although the French of France today is derived ultimately from Latin, those who live in the modern French republic (and have ancestors going way, way back there) have Celtic ancestors from pre-Roman and Gallo-Roman times, and Germanic ancestors in the Franks who became the rulers of the region in  late antiquity.  The Franks gave their name to the country but dropped their German language like a hot potato once they settled in the Roman Empire.

Medieval Germany, like modern Germany, had dialects of its own.  Dutch (and Letzburg, still spoken on the streets of Luxembourg) and Anglo-Saxon are Germanic languages, as are all the Scandinavian languages except for Finnish.  Friend or foe could be determined in part by whether one was fluent in the right language.

Regional dialects are strongest if people don't move around much.  The "My Fair Lady" story is predicated on even different regions of London having distinctive accents.  Even now in Britain some regional dialects are considered low-class. In the US regional dialects are rapidly disappearing, due both to population movement and to people all watching the same movies, TV shows, and Tik-Tok videos in different parts of the country.

If the regional dialects are fading, there is still an assertion that one's heritage and food and way of life are the best.  One can get Maine lobster in Alabama and southern fried chicken in Maine, but everyone will tell you that those who "appropriated" their cuisine did a bad job with it.  This doesn't keep people from enjoying the ethnic dishes of other countries.  Pizza demonstrates that Anglo-Americans may have been instrumental in the US's founding, but Italian-Americans are keeping it going.

And I haven't even mentioned the indigenous Americans.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval language and social structures, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Food Waste

 In the modern US, more than a third of the food produced is never eaten.  Instead it goes to waste, some of it composted, but much ending up in landfills where as it decomposes it produces methane, a gas that helps lead to global warming.

How about medieval food?  Was it wasted in the same way?

Well, food waste is always an issue, but it's different in different societies.  In the US, more than half of the food wasted is wasted before it even gets on somebody's plate.  A farmer who produces far more potatoes (for example) than he knows he can sell will just leave them to rot in the field.  A wholesaler won't even bother trying to sell misshapen fruits and vegetables to a grocery store.  A restaurant will cook up a lot of a dish it hopes will sell well, and often there is some left over, ready to be tossed.  A grocery store will fill the dumpster with overripe bananas, apples that have developed a  bad spot, or meat that didn't sell by its Sell By date.  A bakery may put "day old" bread on sale, but two-day-old bread is thrown away.

Most of this would not have been at issue in the Middle Ages.  A farmer would try to harvest and store everything grown, whether or not there was an immediate market for it—and in fact there usually was.  Misshapen fruits and vegetables bothered no one.  Who cared if the apple wasn't perfectly round and red?

There were far fewer of what we'd consider restaurants, and an inn would just reheat the next day anything that didn't move today.  Bread had to be baked frequently, since it didn't have the preservatives found in most modern bread, but dried out bread would still find a place on the menu, probably cooked into something else.

The food wasted before it got to the consumer was wasted for other reasons.  Grain was a favorite meal for mice and rats, and storage facilities were not nearly as effective in the Middle Ages as they are now at keeping out the vermin.  Cats were valued not as pets but as pest control.

All food will eventually rot, becoming unfit (or even dangerous) to eat, and it was much harder to keep without modern refrigeration.  Hence drying, salting, smoking, or sticking full of peppercorns or cloves were widely practiced, as was making milk into cheese, a more durable form.  But an onion will eventually rot even if properly dried, even heavily salted and smoked meat isn't going to last over a year without refrigeration, and spices were expensive.  And there nothing like canning to preserve "shelf life."  Fresh fruits and vegetables had to be eaten when fresh.

Even so, some part of the food was never going to be eaten.  A lot of cheese has an inedible rind.  No one was going to eat onion skins or egg shells or bones.  Technically these are also food waste, destined for the landfill today, tossed in a midden heap or buried in the Middle Ages.

How about food that now either gets taken into the house (and left to slowly go off in the refrigerator) or gets onto the plate but not into the mouth?  Such waste constitutes 40% of the food waste in the modern US.  In medieval times, there was doubtless some of that, but very little.  By our standards, most people were always on the edge of being "food insecure."  If food was there, you ate it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval food and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.