Researching the Diet of Medieval Germany: Possibilities and Limitations of Written Sources and Material Evidence

Researching the Diet of Medieval Germany:
Possibilities and Limitations of Written Sources and Material Evidence
Melitta Weiss Adamsan (London, Ontario)
For scholars who want to nd out what Gennans in the Middle Ages ate, cookbooks are the most obvious source of information. And yet, while early German cookbooks give us some idea of the types of dishes that were eaten, their names, ingredients, and preparation, they also have a number of serious limitations which make it necessary to consult a variety of other sources as weil. Foremost among the problems in relying solely on cookbooks is the fact that German cookbook-literature did not start until the middle of the fo eenth century, and that the earliest collections originated and circulated in the upper classes of society (aristocratic, patrician), or in monasteries. Cookbooks, therefore, tell us little or nothing about German food in the early and high Middle Ages, about the diet in the lower classes of German society, or about regional variations of medieval German cuisine. Of the culinary recipes we do have, the majority provide no quantities, cooking times, and o en use collective terms such as seasoning which make it next to impossible for culinary historians or mode chefs to recreate the authentic taste and consistency of many medieval dishes. Cookbooks also contain little information on the season when certain recipes were prepared. This type of information can be gained from meal plans which were put to parchment or paper in various German monasteries, such as the Benedictine monastery of Tege see. Incidentally, for a number of dishes the meal plan from Tegernsee even lists the quantities of the main ingredients needed to feed 30 people, presumably the nu ber of monks the abbey housed.
A written source which allows food historians to go back much rther than 1350 is the Iiterature of Roman and Byzantine writers such as Caesar, Pomponius Mela, Tacitus, and Anthimus, who give us some insights in the food habits of the early Germanie tribes. However, these texts rarely contain infonnation on tbe ingredients, quantities, and
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preparation of dishes, and they have the disadvantage of giving us a highly biased view of the German diet. Pomponius Mela, for instance, comments that Genuanie tribes eat meat raw and knead it if it is too tough. Archeological evidence, however, suggests that tbe Gennans at that point in bistory were familiar with fire, and roasted meat on spits. Anthimus, writing a er the Fall of Rome, praises the simple diet of the Frankish people, especially tbeir Iove for bacon, over the sophisticated Mediterranean cuisines of Rome and Byzantium, and in doing so seems to blame food for the decline of the Roman Empire.
In addition to comments by writers from other cultures, we nd numerous comments on German food in the Iiterature of high-, and Iate­ edieval Germany. In the courtly Iiteraure of the time, food is usually discussed in the context of a meal, an aspect missing from the cookbooks. Dress, table manners, and entertaimnent at festive occasions are descibed in detail, while concrete infonnation on the preparation of dishes is generally lacking. In the verse epics ofthe high Middle Ages („Parzival“, „Nibelungenlied“) food serves as a status-symbol of the aristocracy, whereas in the didactic Iiterature of the later Middle Ages, aristocratic and peasant food are nothing more but cliches used to put the upwardly mobile lower classes in their proper place. Dietary trans essions in „Helmbrecht“ and Wittenwiler’s „Ring“, for instance, are severely punished.
How much the Iiterature was out oftouch with reality, can be seen from the fact that bourgeois society, and consequently their food do not figure at all in the texts, and this even though the earliest Gennan cookbook from ca. 1 3 5 0 already represents the cultural appropriation of an aristocratic/episcopal recipe-collection by a member of the Würzburg patriciate.
A more realistic picture of the foodstu s available in German­ speaking towns, and the prices of food, can be derived from the various Iate- edieval chronicles which have survived. A famous example of tbis genre is Ulrich Richental’s chronicle of the Council of Constance from the early fi eenth century which devotes ample space to the supply and pricing of foods. It also contains pictures of the way in which the foodstuffs were marketed. Since the council was an inte ational gathering of Church dignitaries, the foodstuffs and dishes mentioned in the text re ect an inte ational rather than a national or regional cuisine. This becomes evident in comments such as „frogs and snails, the Latins (walhen) ate those“. Chronicles are o en one of the few written sources which tell us what people ate in exceptional circumstances, be they festivities, famines, or wars. The chronicle of Nure berg contains a detailed account of the town’s food supply during a siege that Iasted over a year. A common proble with many chronicles, however, is the
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tendency on the p of many authors, to exaggerate, which is why, like literary texts by and about Germans, they must be taken with a ain of salt.
Hospital and municipal records, of which many have come down to from southe German towns such as Augsburg, Würzburg, and Munich, generally provide more reliable information on the foodstuffs that were purchased, their prices, quantities, places of origin, and the dates at which they were bought. These records also give us insights into the diet of the urban middle class, albeit a middle class in times of sickness. The limitations when using such records for the reconstruction of the German diet include the relatively late date (fi eenth century) at
which detailed records began to be kept on a large scale, the lack of information on the preparation of dishes, and the fact that some basic foodstuffs, including eggs, chickens, uit, and vegetables, are habitually missing om these records. It must be ass ed that they came om the hospital gardens or om donations.
Food was also the subject of regulations by Church and municipal govemments. Christians throughout the Middle Ages were expected to adhere to the edicts of the Pope stating which foods were permissible during Lent and the many other fast days of the Christian Calendar. Jews for their part were told to eat kosher food only. The upward social mobility of the Iater Middle Ages brought a urry of municipal legislation, known as sumptuary laws, which laid out, o en in minute detail, what citizens of a certain income bracket and social status were allowed to consume. Legal texts such as these throw some light on the types of food eaten by different segments of society or by members of a certain faith, and in the case of the Catholic Church, Iist the foodstuffs not to be eaten at certain times of the year. As with all legal texts, however, they were prescriptive rather than desciptive in natme; they present an ideal state, from which reality may at times have di ered considerably.
The medical Iiterature of the Middle Ages, which contains vast amounts of nutritional information, is a peculiar mix of prescriptive and descriptive elements. On the one hand, German dietaries leave the impression in a mode reader that Germany was a land in which alcohol, lard, and butter owed freely, but on the other their rootedness in Greco­ Arabic dietetics is the cause for all kinds of advice, any German
housewife would have been hardpressed to follow. A case in point is camel milk which is lauded as the best kind of milk, especially by those German physicians who were trained in Salemo on the „Liber pantegni“, a medical compendium. put together by the Arabic writer Haly Abbas.
Compared to all the written sources mentioned above, archeology, speci cally the study of botanical and osteological material, has the advantage of providing reliable data of what was eaten where, and in
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what quantity. For times from which no written sources exist, such as the early Middle Ages in Germany, the study of the material culture is o en the only evidence we have for a people’s culinary habits. But archeology is limited in the information it can provide on the times when ce ain foods were eaten, by whom they were consumed, in what form, and how exactly they were prepared.
Facit: For researchers intent on giving a comprehensive picture of a people’s diet in history, interdisciplinarity is mandatory. It is necessa to study all the available types of written sources, and complement them with visual representations (illuminations, paintings, stained glass win­ dows, statues, etc., a eld I did not elaborate on in this briefsurvey), and a11 the archeological data available for the period and geographic area in question.
.S. A detailed analysis of the sources mentioned above will appear in the chapter on medieval Germany in my book „Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe“, ed. by Melitta Weiss Adamson, Gainesville: University Press ofFiorida, in preparation).
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MEDIUM AEVUM QUOTIDIANUM
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K MS 1998
HE USGEGEBEN VON GERH J TZ
GEDRUCKT MIT UNTERSTÜTZUNG DER KULTURABTEILUNG DES AMTES DER NIEDERÖSTERREICHISCHEN LANDESREGIERUNG
Titel aphik Stephan J. Tramer
Herausgeber: Medium Aevum Quotidianum. Gesellscha zur Erforschung der materiellen Kultur des Mittelalters, Kömennar 13, A-3500 ems, Öste eich. F den lhalt verantwortlich zeiclmen die Autoren, olme deren ausdrüc iche Zustimmung jeglicher Nachdruck, auch in Auszügen, nicht gestattet ist. – Druck: KOPITU Ges. m. b. H., Wiedner Haupts aße 8-10, A-1050 Wien.

Inhaltsverzeichnis
Vorwort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 HistoryofDailyLife:TheVarietyofApproaches………………………… 7
Franceise Piponnier,L’histoire de Ja vie quotidienne
auMoyenAge…………………………………………………………….. 8 Gerhard J , Geschichte des Alltags im Mittelalter-
eine Herausforderung komparativen Forschung . . . … . . . … . . 10 Axel Bolvig, Medieval Images and the History ofEverydayLife . . . 20 Norbert Schnitzler, „Reality“ oflmages- „Realities“ ofLaw . . . . … . 23
Melitta Weiss Adamson, Researching the Diet of
Medieval Germany: Possibilities andLimitations of
WrittenSourcesandMaterialEvidence…….. ………… . …… ….. 27
GordanRavancic,CrimeinTavemsofLateMedievalDubrovnik …….. 31
Anu Mänd, Shooting the Bird and the MaigrafFestival
inMedievalLivonianTowns………………………………………… 46 Rezensionen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 66
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Vorwort
Medium Aevum Quotidianum legt mit diesem He 38 die erste Ver­ öffentlichung des Jahrgangs 1998 vor. Der Band widmet sich im besonderen den Statements zu einem Round-Table-Gespräch „History of Daily Life: The Variety of Approaches“, welches im Juli 1997 am Inte at i o n a l Medie v a l Congress i n L e e d s m i t r e g e r P u b l i k u m s ­ beteiligung stattgefunden hat. Dabei zeigte sich wieder, daß einerseits die interdisziplinäre Analyse unterschiedlichsten Quellenmaterials i m jeweiligen Kontext, andererseits die vermehrte Heranziehung bildlicher Überlieferung im Zen um der Diskussion stehen. Aspekte der digitalen Bildverarbeitung spielen dabei eine relevante Rolle sowohl in bezug auf Bilddokumentation als auch hinsichtlich der Analysen. Zwei Einzel­ studien behandeln Wirtshauskriminalität im spätmittelalterlichen Ragusa, sowie die Ausgestaltung von Kaufmanns- und Handwerkerfesten im spät­ mittelalterlichen Baltikum.
He 39 wird bereits anfangs Juli 1998 erscheinen und sich vorran­ gig mit verschiedenen Möglichkeiten der Bildanalyse in der Geschichte des Alltags auseinandersetzen. Die einzelnen Beiträge werden den nord­ und zentraleuropäischen Raum behandeln und konzentrie von Beispie­ len mittelalterlicher Wandmalerei ausgehen.
Unser Heft 40 wird – mit Schwerpunk auf dem ungarischen Raum – vor allem der mittelalterlichen E ährung gewidmet sein und soll neue interdisziplinäre Forschungsansätze vorstellen; dabei werden besonders die Möglichkeiten einer Verbindung der Analyse schri licher Quellen und archäologischen Materials im Zentrum der Argumentation stehen.
He 41 wird sich wiederum in starkem Maße mit jenen Ergeb­ nissen auseinandersetzen, welche am Inte ational Medieval Congress, Leeds 1998, in dessen alltagsgeschichtlichen Sektionen zur Vorstellung gelangen werden. Damit soll neuerlich vermittelt werden, auf welch intensive Weise sich die Anwendung mode er Methoden und die Verwirklichung neuer· Ansätze in aktuellen Studien zu Alltag und materieller Kultur des Mittelalters – im inte ationalen Rahmen – verfolgen läßt.
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Medium Aevum Quotidianum dankt seinen Mitgliede und Freunden r das anhaltende bzw. steigende Interesse an den Anliegen und an der Arbeit der Gesellschaft.
Gerhard Jaritz, Herausgeber
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History of Daily Life: The Variety of Approaches
At the Inte ational Medieval Congress, Leeds 1997, a round table discussion was organised as part of the strand „History of Daily Life“ that dealt with the variety of possible approaches towards this, still rather young eld of Medieval Studies. The inte ational panel consisted of Axel Bolvig (Copenhagen), Gerhard Jaritz (Krems), Franyoise Piponnier (Paris), Norbert Schnitzler (Chemnitz), and Melitta Weiss Adamson (London, Ontario).
a kind of basis for the discussion, it was emphasised that the history of medieval eve day life is a eld of research dependent on interdisciplinary approaches. Written and pictorial sources, as weil as archeological evidence play important rotes for any analysis. The different contexts of infonnation and their interpretation detennine our (re)constmction of everyday life in the Middle Ages decisively. The aim of the round table was to discuss some of the methods and approaches which are relevant for today’s research. It should also show that „History of Daily Life“, generally, has to be seen as undispensable eld of Medieval Studies that also offers relevant methodological aspects and results for many other historical disciplines.
We are happy to be able to publish the modi ed short statements of t h e p a n e l i s t s i n t h i s v o l u m e o f Medium A e v u m Q u o t i d i a n u m . T h e originally English statements of Franyoise Piponnier and Gerhard Jaritz were translated by their authors into French and Gennan respectively.
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