Renaissance fruit

 Earlier I posted about medieval fruits and vegetables, the mainstay of the diet for people who had access to a lot less meat than we do in the modern West.  Today I want to discuss a bit more about how we know what their fruit was like.

Surprisingly, we know an awful lot from Renaissance paintings, dating from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.  The artists would put people in the foreground, maybe a wealthy duke who wanted to be memorialized, maybe a Madonna and child, and then fill in the rest with a realistic landscape or household setting.  Often they would include fruit.  For example, Baby Jesus might be depicted holding some cherries, whose red juice was considered symbolic of the blood of the Sacrifice.

(Wait, the kid's not even to his first birthday, and we're already foretelling his painful death?  Yep, that's what's happening.)

A painting by Bellini from the end of the fifteenth century shows a Madonna and child with what appears to be a pear sitting in front of them. Recent scholarship has indicated that it is more likely to be an apple, perhaps symbolizing the Fruit that Adam and Even unwisely ate, causing all sorts of problems, to be contrasted to the salvation Jesus would bring.

 Renaissance painters also sometimes did still lifes, pictures of bowls of fruit and flowers and the like, and helpfully these still lifes often came with labels, as the artist was proud not just of painting an attractive picture but of doing so extremely accurately.  "See, I caught the distinguishing characteristics of this variety of peach or these plums very clearly."

These detailed paintings have been used to identify many kinds of "heritage" fruits, with the purpose of not letting the biodiversity of multiple varieties disappear, as just a few popular types take over the market.  In Italy especially (where a lot of this Renaissance art is found) there is now a concerted effort to find a few small orchards that might still be growing some of the scores of varieties that used to be grown, before the big orchard growers turned to varieties that, with chemical fertilizer and irrigation, could turn out large harvests.

Interestingly, a lot of these small orchards with old varieties are found at monasteries.  The monks and nuns have had orchards since their monasteries were first established, and since the fruit was for their own use, not for the grocery store, they kept on with the varieties they knew best.

Historians can also get a better sense of what medieval fruit looked like.  It was smaller and doubtless a bit scruffier than modern fruit, and often what we would call misshapen.  The apple in the picture above, for example, is a variety dubbed "cow nose apple," still grown in a few places and considered very good, but it doesn't look a lot like a nice round, red McIntosh.

There is an article in the November 2024 Smithsonian magazine about Isabella Dalla Ragione, who is leading the effort in Italy to rediscover and identify many types of heritage fruit, with the purpose of maintaining fruit's ability to adapt to changing climate and conditions.  She found many clues in old manorial records from the Renaissance as well as in Renaissance paintings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Good and Bad Plants

 We constantly make distinctions between good and bad plants, especially as they are good or bad for us.  The distinction has a long history.  The book of Genesis in the Bible has God warn Adam, as he's driven out of Paradise, that from now on he's going to have to work growing and harvesting grain, and that bad plants (like thorns and thistles) were going to get into his fields, causing trouble.

We call plants that are growing where we don't want them weeds.  But the distinction between good plants and weeds is a tricky one.  Any plant growing where we don't want it may be labeled a weed, and individual plants may be good or bad in different contexts.  Dandelions, all lawn maintenance firms agree, are a weed that must be eradicated, but they do make one's lawn brightly yellow and cheery after a long winter, plus you can make wine from dandelions (and eat the greens if it's been a long and hungry winter).  For years American cities planted callary pear trees for springtime flowers along the streets, but now they've been declared a noxious weed.  Brush and high grass are generally considered weeds, but they provide cover for songbirds.  Native plants may be considered good and non-native plants (that would cover dandelions) as weeds, but that would dump many of our crop plants into the weed category.

Medieval thinkers understood the difficulty of good and bad as unambiguous labels for plants.  (Interestingly, Latin has no word for "weed," so one could speak of "bad plants" but not "weeds" in the English language sense.)  For example, stinging nettles were definitely bad plants for farmers, who tried to eradicate them, but medieval herbalists used them to make various medicinal concoctions.  Nettles (or at least the ground-up stems) were considered good for colic and for coughs.

The use of medicinal herbs was complicated in the early Middle Ages by lingering fears about paganism, which was usually tied to magic.  So someone grinding up and sprinkling herbs around could either be a wise doctor or a dangerous pagan.  Women especially were looked at with suspicion if they seemed to know too much herbal lore.

The distinction between good and bad plants also had gradations.  It is clear that different kinds of grain were rated more or less highly.  Of the major crop plants, wheat was always described as best, followed by rye, followed by barley, followed by oats, designated as coarse peasant food.  Interestingly, however, dark bread made with at least some rye was eaten by everybody in much of France and Germany, including the elite, and in some places, like Scotland, everybody ate oat bread.

In all of this the assumption was that plants were good if they were good for humans.  Thorns and thistles, against which God warned Adam, were for medieval people the markers of wild places, uninhabited or at best the home of bandits and untamed beasts. Medieval monks sought out wild places to establish monasteries far from worldly distraction, but their first thought was to get rid of all the bad plants and replace them with good crops.

Humans have always had a hard time with wilderness.

Much of the information in this post is treated at greater length by Paolo Squatriti, in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval food crops and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Merovingians in the New World

 I've earlier discussed the Merovingian kings of the Franks, considered the first French dynasty, who ruled what is now France from the late fifth century to the middle of the eighth, when they were replaced on the throne by the Carolingians.  Although French students learn about them just as we learn about Columbus and George Washington, it's probably fair to say that not one person in America who is not a medievalist ever heard of them, or of the baptism of Clovis, considered a great turning point in the Christianization of the Germanic peoples.

But this was not always the case!  In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American writers often discussed the Merovingians, as a foil to the new republic just being properly established, or even as a way to understand the French, who had been major allies during the American Revolution and who began their own French Revolution in the same year as the American Constitution was adopted (1789).

Even American school children learned about the Merovingians back then.  British accounts of what they called "universal" history (or, more accurately, western history) began their discussion of post-classical history with the "fall of Rome," with Anglo-Saxons invading Britain and Germanic peoples like the Franks becoming established in the old Roman Empire in Continental Europe.  These British accounts formed the basis of American history books.

(The mind boggles when one realizes how much more a twelve-year-old was expected to read, understand, and remember of historical events, two centuries ago.)

Writers and political theorists, including President John Adams, had much to say about the Merovingians.  Adams himself saw the consecration of Clovis with holy oil, as shown in the ivory carving above (note the dove bringing the ampoule), as an example of what the US had to avoid, in that he didn't want any divine aura hanging around our leaders.  Others however saw the mixing of Roman and Germanic in what is now France as a sign that people of different backgrounds and ethnic origins could work together in this new country.

In trying to understand France, some looked at the French Revolution as the final breaking away from tyrannical kingship, that had been holding the French back since the fifth century.  Others, on the contrary, saw the violence that grew out of the French Revolution as a sign that the French were just inherently violent, as they had been ever since the days of Clovis.  In any event, these writers had a lot to say about the Merovingians.

Merovingian-era documents could even be used to justify slavery.  After all, Roman slavery continued under the Franks until the sixth century, and household slavery for several centuries after that, with plenty of legal justification.  Slave-holders could try to pass off the relatively recent enslavement of Africans to work in the New World as just the continuation of a thousand-year-old practice.

In all of this, one can see that history is not simply events in the past, that stay where you put them.  History is a form of memory, and people are constantly making choices about what to remember and how to interpret past events in light of present concerns.

Gregory I. Halfond has recently published a book on how the Merovingians became a major topic of discussion in the new American republic, Writing about the Merovingians in the Early United States (2023).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

The Chinese Lion of San Marco

 The cathedral of San Marco (Saint Mark's) in Venice, with its surrounding piazza, is decorated with art work taken from many other places.  The famous horses of San Marco, for example, came from Constantinople, when the Fourth Crusade raided this supposed ally of the Christian West at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

Less well known is the lion of Saint Mark—all four evangelists were associated with a symbol, and Saint Mark's was a lion.  This is not just an ordinary lion.  It's a Chinese lion.

A Chinese lion with wings.  So how, you ask, did a Chinese lion end up at the head of the Adriatic in the Middle Ages?

It's huge, made of bronze, thirteen feet long (without the tail) and weighing some three tons.  Venetian records note the lion's presence, atop a pillar of Egyptian granite, no later than 1293.  Recent studies of the isotopes in the bronze suggest that most of it dates to eighth-century China.  During the Tang dynasty, such enormous creatures, often winged, were erected as tomb guardians by the wealthy and powerful.  Such tomb guardians were more commonly ceramic, however, though at the same time small bronze creatures might be erected at Buddhist temples.  Whatever this lion might have stood for originally, the Venetians saw it and coveted it.

So this lion's presence at San Marco indicates that the trade routes that brought spices and silks from the far East to medieval Europe also brought larger and heavier objects.  Something this size would have had to have been cut up for transport and then reassembled on site.  The Venetians must have paid a whole lot to have something like this brought overland some 4500 miles.

But this was the era of Marco Polo, when Italians were very interested in the East.  The whole Italian peninsula thrived on trade that brought goods from very far away to Europe.  As well as objects to sell, the Venetians were eager to obtain goods they could display.

Much of the recent work on the lion of San Marco has been reported by Sarah E. Bond.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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