The Medieval Year: Eighth Day before the Ides of September, AD 1224

Labor and leisure as the grape harvest begins.

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!

---

Though I’m sure that some of our northern friends are still busy with the grain harvest, most of medieval Europe has moved on to the principal rural labor of September: harvesting grapes and making wine.

This fine fellow, from an early-fourteenth-century Book of Hours, is “tasting” some new wine as he tramples grapes in the winepress. It looks to me like there’s more tasting than trampling going on here, and that would be very much in keeping with the medieval work ethic, which was careful to subordinate work to merrymaking, and which never understood or esteemed work—or to use a more modern term, “productivity”—as an end in itself. Medieval societies were extraordinarily productive, but not in the industrial-capitalism sense of the word. Work brought the pleasure and satisfaction of a job well done while supplying the needs of the body, purifying the soul, strengthening relationships, and beautifying the world. For medieval communities, labor was a rhythmical, communal activity by which all men and women played their role in the epic drama that began in Eden:

Cursed is the earth for thy sake: in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life…. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the earth.

Have you ever noticed that part of this curse can also be read as a promise? “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” By writing the subject and verb as “shalt thou…,” translators emphasize the manner of obtaining food: you’ll only have food because you work for it. But if we look at the Hebrew text, we see that it can also be translated in a more neutral way: “By the sweat of thy face thou dost eat bread,” or “Thou shalt eat bread by the sweat of thy face.” What we hear now is not just condemnation; it’s also Providence: “Give your toil to the earth, your love to one another, and your trust to Me: and you will have food for your table.”

And indeed, the human race has never starved, despite century after century of droughts and floods and plagues and wars. Somehow we’re still here, and the earth still sustains us, all these long years since Adam and Eve left Paradise behind, walking “hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow”—that phrase, the fruit of Milton’s genius in Paradise Lost, is from one of the most perfect lines of poetry I’ve ever read. Once again, as I write this, it stirs my heart; there is more emotional force and pregnant imagery in those eight words than in eight pages of lesser verse. Man and wife, together in the sin that ruined them, together in the curse of toil and want, gaze into a vast and empty and hostile world where all they have is God, from whom they are now estranged, and each other:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Wine and the Book of Genesis—with these, we have the essence of the medieval work ethic. The harvesting of grapes and making of wine is an allegory for the relationship between medieval culture and labor: Wine was not essential for bodily survival, and yet, medieval communities toiled long and hard to produce it. Wine was leisure, in the full sense of the word—that is, freedom to celebrate human life, in all its material abundance and spiritual richness. Labor was the means, leisure was the end, as the philosopher Josef Pieper recognized:

We must understand that a total and final disintegration of the concept of leisure, a basic concept of traditional Western thinking, will have a clear historical consequence; namely, the totalitarian work state…. We must discover anew, and appropriate again, the meaning of the statement, “We work so we can have leisure.”

If wine is an allegory for us as we look back into medieval life, the Book of Genesis was an allegory for those who actually lived that life. In the story of Adam and Eve they saw themselves: we work because our first parents sinned, and God was displeased, and the shadow of death fell upon us, and the earth turned against us. As the Psalmist says,

The days of our years, but seventy years:
      if a man is strong, they are eighty years:
and most of them are labor and pain,
      and swiftly they pass: and to darkness we faint.

And yet, God is good and generous, and He has forgiven us, and will not forsake us, and will bless the work of our hands. The Psalmist again:

From thy chambers in the heavens,
      to the hills thou givest water: sated, the land, with fruit of thy works;
thou makest grass to grow for the cattle,
      and green herb for the labor of men,
that thou may bring forth bread of the earth,
      and wine that cheereth the heart of man,
and oil that maketh his face to shine,
      and bread that maketh a man’s heart strong.

Cursed is the earth for thy sake: the garden of life, tainted by man’s transgression, brings forth thorns and thistles. And yet, a man or a woman need not be alone in the journey through this vale of long toils and deep sorrows. God declared that it is not good for man to be alone. “Hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow”—is this not a captivating icon of marriage? Or even of the wedding day itself, of that singular moment when a man and woman walk down the aisle and out of the church, facing the world for the first time as husband and wife, glimpsing their new life of pleasure and joy and exhaustion and heartache. The labors of the field will come; the labors of birth will come. Medieval couples faced them together:

Families and friends faced them together:

Entire communities faced them together:

From the Hamilton Field Book of Hours, fifteenth century, held by the Chester Beatty Museum.