medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Since Laura's context is "explaining the stocky nature of Giotto's
peasants in the Arena Chapel", it might be well in attempting to answer
her question to move away from a discussion of _European_ dietary
practices. Perhaps in the later Middle Ages dietary practices in
Thessaloniki and in Trondheim and in Merida and in Moscow were so
similar that one can argue from generalizations covering all of these
and many other places beside to the specific situation of a Tuscan
painter working in Padova. But I would think it more productive to
start with what's known or believed about dietary practices in northern
Italy, especially as there's a not entirely minuscule literature on
this particular subject.
The big name here is that of Massimo Montanari. There's a little bit
about legumes in northern Italy from 765 to the fourteenth century on
pp. 45-48 of Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, _Italian Cuisine: A
Cultural History_, tr. Aine O'Healy (Columbia University Press, 2003;
Italian-language original: Laterza, 1999), including the important
observation (p. 45) that "Legumes were normally associated with the
inferior grains, partly because they were cultivated alongside them in
the fields, and partly because they had similar nutritional uses." A
much more detailed account occurs on pp. 150-65 of Montanari's
_L'alimentazione contadina nell'alto Medioevo_ (Liguori, 1979): this
has a critique of White similar in many respects to what John Howe said
this morning and is followed by considerations of the production of
legumes and of their quantitative and alimentary importance primarily
in the ninth and tenth centuries (though some of the documentation,
e.g. Pietro Crescenzi, is later). That Montanari's conclusions are
also valid for later medieval centuries is implied in the second
chapter ("Espansione dell'agricoltura,..."; pp. 32-54) of his _Campagne
medievali. Strutture produttive, rapporti di lavoro, sistemi
alimentari_ (Einaudi, 1984), where he argues that in medieval Italy as
a whole agricultural expansion consisted essentially of the extension
of surface area devoted to this activity and did not entail significant
qualitative breakthroughs.
A more restricted view of the status of legumes emerges from Irma
Naso's article "Alla mensa del principe. I prodotti alimentari alla
corte sbauda negli ultimi secoli del Medioevo," in _Gli archivi per la
storia dell'alimentazione. Atti del convegno Potenza - Matera, 5-8
settembre 1988_ (Ministero per in beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio
centrale per i beni archivistici, 1995; Pubblicacazioni degli Archivi
di stato, Saggi, vol. 34), II, 1052-85, esp. 1076-77. Naso, in
contradistinction to Montanari, associates legumes with garden
vegetables only and finds them of regular occurrence in this court's
accounts but not numerically very important. Apart from the
possibility that here, as elswehere, many receipts of legumes may
simply have been logged in as 'grani minori', Naso's findings are
subject to the limitation that this evidence relates to the diet of a
court and not to that of a populace at large.
Best,
John Dillon
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