The Medieval Year: The Ides of September, AD 1224
With thoughts on balancing a basket of grapes.
The Medieval Year, a weekly feature of the Via Mediaevalis newsletter, gives us an opportunity to appreciate calendrical artwork from the Middle Ages, reflect on the basic tasks and rhythms of medieval life, and follow the medieval year as we make our way through the modern year. Please refer to the first post in this series for more background information!
Rural folk in the Middle Ages had a fine selection of fruits near at hand. Apples, cherries, strawberries, plums, peaches, and pears were widely grown for the family and for the market. Medieval society was not accustomed to our fresh-fruit-every-day lifestyle and thus had no reason to resent the seasonality of nature’s finest delicacies, which fell from the trees only at favored times of the year. I’ve found that my appetite for fruit tends to be somewhat seasonal anyway, and my suspicion is that the peasants of old would have been unimpressed with the semi-truck-and-supermarket system after they had tasted the sorry specimens that often pass for fruit these days. Actually, this is more than a suspicion—it’s something I learned through personal experience.
The fruits that left the deepest impression on my gustatory psyche grew near the fields and footpaths of a very old village in eastern Europe. The farmers there have changed plenty since the Middle Ages, but their style of agriculture hasn’t changed too much, and their trees have probably changed even less.
That fruit tasted rich and alive in a way that is difficult to describe. It wasn’t just about sweetness—the wild cherries, for instance, were both bitter and delicious. There was a fullness in that fruit, a sense of wholeness that probably derives as much from human psychology as from plant biochemistry. Was medieval fruit more flavorful and satisfying than modern fruit? I have no doubt that, in general, it was. But more importantly, life itself was more flavorful. It is a privilege and a delight to eat cherries and pears and apples and prunes that grow in your own village and appear in magical abundance during one cherished season of the year:
But it is a far greater privilege, and a much deeper delight, to eat fruit that has absorbed the richest flavor of all: traditional human culture, and the ancient spirituality from which it flows.
In the culture of the Middle Ages, the noblest fruit was the grape, and where wine grapes could be grown, no other agricultural endeavor was held in such high esteem. Medieval peasants understood that cheese or pease porridge or organ meats were far more nourishing than wine, but as we discussed last week, wine was leisure, and leisure was the fulfillment of labor. Furthermore, wine was an eminently symbolic and spiritual drink—made by Christ Himself at Cana, served by Christ Himself during the Last Supper, transformed into Christ Himself upon the altar.
Today I want to share with you the September calendar page from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, usually called simply the Très Riches Heures (Very Rich Hours). This is one of the most artistically sumptuous manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Commissioned by the Duke of Berry in the early fifteenth century, it was the work of three Dutch artists known as the Limbourg brothers. The book was an unfinished masterpiece—before it could be completed, the duke and all three brothers were dead. The inscription on the duke’s tomb shows that he moved gracefully from the luxurious arts of life to the stark poetry of death:
“What is noble birth, what are riches, what is glory?
Look upon me: for a moment all was mine. Now I have nothing.”
Unhurried peasants harvest grapes in the foreground, and after we’ve taken in some of the charming details, our eyes are drawn upward to the magnificent ivory castle and the watery depths of a dark blue sky.
Grapes are everywhere in this scene: two vats on the oxcart are brimming with them, the donkeys are laden with them, baskets are filled with them—it takes a lot of grapes to make enough wine for all that medieval merrymaking. The lady in blue looks like she’s expecting (perhaps that’s why she’s taking a break); the man next to her apparently got a bit hungry while handling all that luscious fruit; and the hardworking fellow in the center appears to be experiencing what modern folks might call a wardrobe malfunction. Overall it looks like a mighty fine way to put in an early autumn day’s work: the weather is mild, the birds are singing, the animals are doing the heavy lifting, and there are plenty of friends to share the labor with.
And then there’s this lady dressed in scarlet. She steadies a basket of grapes on her head. Seeing her alone somehow makes it easier for my imagination to replace her with myself, and when I do that, her world feels all the more unreal—a world of footpaths and manorial farms instead of highways and tractors, of cottages and castles instead of tract homes and skyscrapers, of work powered by bodies instead of machines. Would she choose to live in my world if she could? Would I choose to live in hers?
There’s one thing I know about that scarlet lady. If she paid a visit to the twenty-first century and stayed here long enough, she would find it considerably more difficult to balance that basket of grapes, because her other hand would be holding a smartphone, and she would be looking diagonally downward, rather than straight ahead.
This was a delightful passage! Relatable and humorous and appealing!
Want it to be known that the phrase “gustatory psyche” is wicked good.