Food History

Welcome to the June Carnivalesque. I’ve been waiting anxiously for the thousands of fascinating posts about Medieval and Ancient history to wend my way, but they didn’t come. Rather than leaving you with slim pickings (I shan’t make music-related puns today, Canberra is in the grip of cold, cold winter and any puns at all are beyond me) I’ve explored a few of my favourite blogs. This month’s theme is therefore obviously exploration. Very much the stuff of the round earth’s imagined corners. I’m going to label those imagined corners macrobiusly (according to climates, just to warm myself up a bit – I can dream of torrid zones, even if my heater is working hard to stop my computer developing icy innards), and this shall serve.

Freezing Zone (far, far, far north)

It’s impossible for me to have no food blog posts referred to in this Carnivalesque. It would be all wrong for a food history blog. It would also be all wrong for me to refer to something I wrote. So here is something someone else wrote. Right now, the thing on that list that I crave most is hypocras. Must be the cold. I did say I live near the Snowy Mountains, in Australia and it is winter? Very much winter.

Temperate zone (less north, and probably where most of you live)

It’s not quite the weather for making hay, but it’s the weather for blogging about it, with pictures from manuscripts, to boot.

It’s also the perfect time to blog 1381 and to make jokes about revolting peasants.

Torrid and wondrously warm equatorial zone

Modern Medieval maps of Charlemagne (and makes me wish I had the skills to do this section of the blog on an actual equatorial map, with links rather than descriptions).

Steve Muhlberger on Joan of Arc.

Plus some marginalia to help cure heatsickness. It’s almost impossible to have too much marginalia.

Temperate zone (south – currently freezing – the posts in this section don’t come from the south, but I do find them cheering, somehow)

Something warming: Zenobia on Zenobia. There’s also a follow-up post that includes a ring. The Ring of the Zenobias. Someone ought to write an opera about it.

Jason gave me two posts suggesting that maybe one of them didn’t entirely suck. It’s very mean and nasty of me to report his comment, so I’m including both his posts here. Besides, you need to make up your own mind on the level of suckitude (I need an Old French word meaning ’suckitude’. It would transform my life.)

Freezing Zone (south of here – you really don’t want to go there right now)

This is intensely depressing. Though there is some cheering news on Medieval News if you explore a bit.

Chaucer is in trouble with his wife after his trip to Vegas. Ice represents the family climate rather nicely.

PS All similarity between my descriptions and any extant map (whether linked to Macrobius or not) is probably in error.