Say "Justification by Faith", or I Pull Your Beard!

The Council of Trent (From: Wikipedia)

At the Catholic Church's Council of Trent around 1545: "After passing various reform decrees on preaching, catechetical instruction, privileges of mendicants and indulgences, the council took up the thorny question of justification. Discussion was postponed for some months out of consideration for the emperor, who feared it might irritate the Protestants, and only gave his consent to it in the hope that some ambiguous form acceptable to that party, might be found. How deeply the solifidian doctrine had penetrated into the very bosom of the church was revealed by the storminess of the debate. The passions of the right reverend fathers were so excited by the consideration of a fundamental article of their faith that in the course of disputation they accused one another of conduct unbecoming to Christians, taunted one another with plebeian origin and tore hair from one another's beards." (297) --Preserved Smith, Reformation in Europe

Pigs in the Church

Coat of arms for the Corbin family,
of which I am a descendant.
(From: byandbylord.blogspot.com)

"The reality of privilege, by the seventeenth century, had virtually no connection at all with the medieval vision of an aristocracy of warriors whose qualities were said to be inherited, from father to son. Of those medieval knights, precious few still had descendants in possession of their ancestral fiefs in the sixteenth century. While the actual personnel of the medieval warrior caste was gone forever--the families having died out or lost their seigneurial rights--the trappings of chivalry, constantly reinterpreted, remained in place, secured by a steady flow of edicts from the royal palaces. Coats of arms were fabricated at short notice, for a price, by specialists in heraldry. The palaces and country houses of Europe were filled with phony dukes and marquises who asserted the antiquity of their privileges, which they did not hesitate to trace back to ancient Rome or even ancient Troy.

Newcomers to noble status, whether they had bought their fiefs in 1500 or in 1600, knew how to keep up appearances. They dressed the part. They built elaborate country houses. They maintained large numbers of retainers. They were presented at court. Their claims might arouse the suspicion of a handful of noblemen of older vintage, the king himself might laugh, privately, at their pretensions, but in public, as they made their way in silk-lined coaches toward masked balls and other expensive entertainments, who could deny their eminence?

Were they not received at court? Were they not lords among their peasants? Were they not set apart from commoners by their expensive wigs, their fashionable clothes, their perfumed gloves, the jeweled swords which hung from their belts? Participants in a ballet of deference, the noblemen and would-be noblemen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were constantly removing and replacing their wide-brimmed hats, acknowledging the superior rank of a duke or president, receiving the homage of their own presumed inferiors. Bowing and scraping, insisting on their prerogative to remain seated or to keep their hats on, attended by servants and pushing their way into the place they felt entitled to on public occasions, hordes of men and women insisted on their various and conflicting positions in the world of privilege. They came to blows, at church, over the right to be seated in the front benches. 'They are like pigs,' wrote a country priest. 'Like pigs, they tear each other up. They have nothing but contempt for each other, they think that they can add weight to their own reputation by accusing others of being of more recent nobility.' Since privilege was largely a matter of wealth and of appearances [not birth], it is not surprising that appearances mattered so much. Kings set the tone, establishing elaborate hierarchies at court. At the royal palace in Versailles, thousands of courtiers lived in fear of committing breaches of etiquette, clinging to bewildering distinctions of rank. It was bad manners to knock at a door in Versailles. The proper way was to scratch at the door with the little finger of the left hand. If the servant of a social superior brought you a message, you had to receive him standing and bareheaded. If you encountered the royal dinner on its way from the kitchens to the table, you were obliged 'to bow as to the King himself, sweeping the ground with your hat and saying, in a low, reverent, but distinct voice: 'The King's dinner.' Who could sit down, in the presence of whom, and on what, was a vexing problem at court. Two prominent people could not meet without verifying the seating arrangements in advance. A fifteen-year-old duchess, elevated by her recent marriage to a rank which made her superior to her own mother, has a screaming fit when the usher on duty throws open both leaves of the door as her mother enters the room. As her social inferior, the mother was entitled only to one half of the door being opened for her." (63) --George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe

I am descended from the Corbin family, which has its own coat of arms, pictured above. Therefore, I hereby assert my full privileges. I am declaring myself tax-exempt and demand that you not read this blog while you are sitting on the toilet or riding the bus. Such action would not be respectful to my rank.

Pass Some of that Spicy Sauce, Please!

A spice market in Istanbul. (From: Wikipedia)

"The twentieth-century American, taking for granted refrigeration, ease and rapidity of transport, and the resulting extraordinary variety of diet, may find perplexing his ancestors' lust for spices. We must remember some of the foods Europeans lacked. They had no rice, no corn, no potatoes; little cheese or butter; fresh fruits and green vegetables only in season, and few of these in the larger cities; almost no sugar. Fresh meat was relatively plentiful at the moment of massive slaughter in the autumn. At other times of year meat was salted and more than a little high; and since its source was excess work animals, it was hardly of prime quality. The ordinary diet was based on bread and gruel, enlivened by pickled cabbage, turnips, peas, lentils, and onions. The entire art of cookery lay in the sauce, and the piquancy of the sauce lay in its spices. Men wanted spices because they teased the palate, disguised the disagreeable or dull, gave variety to the menu. They wanted them for medicines and drugs, for perfumes and for use in religious ceremonies. The result was a most powerful demand for camphor, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, mace, cardamom, and, above all, for pepper and cloves--all products of Asia and excessively rare in Europe." (36) --Eugene F. Rice, Jr. and Anthony Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559 2nd edition

I might also add that medieval Europeans had no tomatoes. Tomatoes are native only to South America. So, for hundreds and hundreds of years before the 16th century, Italian cooks had no tomatoes!

Peasants and Potatoes

"More efficient methods of land use [in 19th century Europe] were accompanied by the rapid development of improved strains of wheat and other traditional crops... Far and away the most important of the new crops, however, was the potato (also originally imported from America), which could be grown on poor soil, was comparatively insensitive to the vicissitudes of weather, and yielded from two to four times as much food as grain crops. Although cultivated throughout Europe, the potato became the staple diet of poorer peasants in the northern and central regions along a broad front from Ireland to Russia, a dependence which was to prove a disaster when the potato crop failed." (2)  --Norman Rich, The Age of Nationalism and Reform, 1850-1890

Potatoes originally came from South America. They were
brought by Spanish explorers to Spain in the mid-16th
century. From there, the crop gradually spread throughout
Europe. 

Having had plenty of exposure to Polish cuisine and its heavy reliance on potatoes, I am curious to discover what Polish and other peasants of northern Europe ate before the arrival of the potato around 1600!