bunnyjadwiga

Wolfgang Braunfels, Monasteries of Western Europe: The Architecture of the Orders (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972)
talks about 'a description of a model Cluniac monastery, dating from about 1042...' which '...dwelled lovingly on the depiction of the large latrines, mentioning their forty-five seats, each ventilated by a finistrella above" (p 55-56) and that running water was laid-on throughout.

The latrine is 70 feet long, and 23 feet wide. 45 seats are arranged there, and for each seat there is a little window in the wall two feet high and half a foot wide; above the arrangement of the seats [one sees] a layer [?] of timbers, and 17 windows, three feet high and one and half feet wide, have been made above this timber construction...
Outside the monks' refectory and 60 feet from the end of the latrines, twelve sunken chambers with as many tubs are to be organized, where baths may be prepared for the brethren at the appointed times.(p.238-9)

(The guesthouse for visitors also is supposed to have 40 latrines for men and 30 for women.)

In the same book, an early 13th-century description of Clairvaux explains how the river is diverted through the entire settlement, serving to run mills, etc, then for cooking/washing/etc, and finally 'bearing away the refuse, it leaves everything spick and span behind it.' (p. 245)
The author also discusses latrines in other types of monastic foundations, including the individual ones attached to Carthusian monks' cells (p. 114)

In addition to washing upon rising and before meals, period Jews also washed before praying and thus before going to bed. This practice was so universal as to be used by the Inquisition to identify converso Jews still practicing Judaism (see A Drizzle of Honey). The rules of kashrut (kosher) laid down in the Torah for ritual cleanliness enforced other specific kinds of hygiene as well.

In particular, the mikveh, the ritual cleansing bath, was (and is) an important part of Jewish life. Women of childbearing age needed to visit the mikveh at the end of their menstrual cycle in for ritual purification in order to consort with their husbands; the mikveh was also used to purify people and things on other occasions.
Mikvot from the classical period have been found in archaeological digs at multiple sites, including Masada. Hanan Eshel summarized the rules for the construction of mikvot:

"A mikveh must hold at least 40 seahs of water (approximately 60 gallons). The whole body of the person or vessel to be purified must be totally immersed. And, most significant for our purposes, the water must be "living" water. That is, it must come directly from a river or a spring or from rainwater that flows into the pool; it may not be drawn. To meet this latter requirement, the rabbis permitted the use of an otter, a pool of living water that was connected by a plugged pipe to the main immersion pool. The main pool could be filled with drawn water (not qualified for use in ritual immersion), and when needed, the pipe between the otter and the main pool was unplugged, allowing the qualified, living water from the otter to come into contact with the water in the main pool, rendering it fit for immersions."(p. 43)

The distinctive nature of mikveh structures causes them to be regarded as archaeological markers of Jewish communities at classical and medieval sites. A mikveh dating from around 1150 has been uncovered by archaeologists in Bristol, England (Aldous, p. 27), and another in Cologne, Germany dates from around 1170 (http://www.thetravelzine.com/ejht3.htm).

Jewish privies

We know that the Jewish scriptures (Deuteronomy 23:12-13), requires men in military camp to have a separate latrine and to bury their excrement:

"You shall also have a place outside the camp and go out there, and you shall have a spade among your tools, and it shall be when you sit down* outside, you shall dig with it and shall turn to cover up your excrement.

* also translated "squat
Information from anti-Semitic stories and saint's lives (such as the story of St. Hugh of Lincoln recounted by Matthew Paris) as well as archaeological research suggests that Jewish families and communities had privies and/or cesspools.

Various sources suggest that the approved wiping method among Jews in period was scraping with a rock, and there are Jewish scriptural commentaries discussing what size of rocks are acceptable to carry for this purpose on the Sabbath, so it may be that people carried personal wiping rocks with them.

Ok, I'm struggling with whether to use this story in my CA, because it's got social/ethnic/religious/political issues, which may or may not be relevant.

Several of my secondary sources repeat a story in which a Jew falls into a cesspool or privy on a Saturday, and refuses to be pulled out because to do so would violate the Sabbath. The local lordly authority consequently refuses to have him pulled out on the Sunday, since that would violate the Christian sabbath, and he perishes. Even if the story is a piece of history and not merely a Victorian, 'Enlightenment' or medieval urban legend, there is a lot of baggage in it.

( Read more... )

Not all of these have been helpful, but I'm still chasing citations through them:

These only have a few useful references:
Palmer, Roy. The Water Closet: A New History. (Newton Abbot, England: David & Charles, 1973)
Horan, Julie L. The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet. (Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Publishing Group, 1996)
Dobell, Steve. Down the Plughole: An irreverent history of the bath. (London: Pavilion Books, 1996).

This one is useless for my purposes, but full of pictures of 19th and 20th century products and advertising that is fascinating:
Lupton, Ellen, and J. Abbott Miller. The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination. (New York: Kiosk, 1992)

Especially useful for the article on Pompeiian Private Baths:
Koloski-Ostrow, Ann Olga, ed. Water Use and Hydraulics in the Roman City, Archaeological Institute of America, Boston MA, Colloquia and Conference Papers, Number 3. (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 2001)

Shanks, Hershel. "The Puzzling Channels in Ancient Latrines." Biblical Archaeology Review. September/October 2002, p. 49-51, 70.

Shanks gives us some helpful information here, in discussing a narrow channel that runs in front of the seats in Roman latrines.

For example, A. Trevor Hodge ... noted in a 1992 book that Roman latrines often contained rows of 10 or 20 or even 40 toilet seats, "allowing the occupants to consort in happy camaraderie." The toilet seat, usually made of wood but sometimes of stone or marble, was mounted above a continuously flowing stream of water "and thus obviated the need for flushing." . . . But then he adds: "This highly hygenic procedure was reinforced by arranging for a small gutter or runnel [what we have been calling the flushing channel] again carrying a continous stream of water, to run along the floor just in front of the seats [emphasis added], in which patrons could bend forward and dip their hands; no doubt it also conveniently carried away spillage, and generally helped in keeping the place clean."

Shanks here disagrees with Hodge, feeling that this requires some bodily contortions which seem unlikely, and some peculiarity of the spillage so far from the mark. However,

Koloski-Ostrow offered the same spillage argument as Hodge in an article she published in 1996-- but then as an alternative explanation added that the channel on the floor in front of the toilet seats may have been "for rinsing out soiled sponges tied to the ends of sticks," which Romans apparently used instead of toilet paper. In a later article, she again says that the sponge, "served as communal toilet paper."

Apparently, the evidence for this comes from Epistle 70 in Seneca's Moral Epistles, where a slave, being trained to fight animals in the arena and never left alone save in the privy, commits suicide instead. The slave "siezed the stick of wood, tipped with a spong which was devoted to the vilest uses, and stuffed it, just as it was, down his throught; thus, he blocked up his windpipe and choked the breath from his body. That was truly to insult death...."

So, my first thought, he choked to death on a toilet-brush?!

Martial also mentions the results of a sumptous dinner, "nought that the luckless sponge at the end of a degraded mop-stick would discover..."

Shanks also notes that: "Ancient toilet seats have a smaller opening on top than most modern toilet seats and also have an opening in the vertical face..."
The Jerusalem latrine he is discussing also has periodical round basin sections in the flushing runnel in front of the seats, perhaps for rinsing one's sponge.
Shanks also suggests that some Romans may merely have scooped water with the hand from the flushing channel through the vertical face of the toilet in order to clean the affected parts after relieving oneself. (Apparently cleaning with water, or if water is not available, clean dry soil, after evacuation is also suggested by the Quran.

Got my tickets and my conference registration and my residence hall reservation, oh yes I do, I'm goin' to Kalamazoo...
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/

Once again, I'm splashing around in a subject that interests me, and it sends sidelights on my research topics. I've ILLed every available one of the proceedings of The Leeds Symposium on Food History -- whose book The Country House Kitchen Garden I reviewed earlier.

Pamela A. Sambrook and Peter Brears, eds. The Country House Kitchen, 1650-1900: Skills and Equipment for Food and Provisioning (London: Alan Sutton, 1996).

The majority of the papers in this volume come from the eighth and ninth Leeds Symposiums on Food History, though additional papers were added to round it out. I'm going to list the contents not in order, but by contributor:

Peter Brears

The Ideal Kitchen in 1864

Behind the Green Baize Door

Kitchen Fireplaces and Stoves

The Batterie de Cuisine

The Pastry

The Bakehouse

The Dairy

C. Anne Wilson

Cooks, Kitchen-maids, and Kitchen Helpers in the Country House

Stillhouses and Stillrooms

Pamela Sambrook

Larders and other Storeplaces for the Kitchen

Supplies and Suppliers to the Country House

Household Beer and Brewing

Rob David

Ice-getting on the Country House Estate

Una A. Robertson

The Scottish Country House Kitchen

My first question is, does Peter Brears ever sleep? The man is a font of knowledge, and he not only publishes on interesting topics, he writes interestingly. C. Anne Wilson is just the same. The articles in this volume, though not being period, fill in gaps in my knowledge I sometimes didn't even know I had.

For instance, I never realized before--despite my extensive reading of early-20th and late-19th century sources-- that the original 'kitchen range' is a set of "raised iron firebaskets" for roasting. Though still I'm not entirely sure I could point out a range in the wild, Brears leaves me in no doubt about how they worked and how they developed. He is equally informative about stoves, which were originally built-in 'chafers' or 'chafing dishes' loaded with coals, above which pots could be stewed or simmered at a lower heat than over the open fire. [My brother, who works in catering, would stare to see the originals of the 'shaafers' he and his coworkers deal with.] Brears's description of the range of cooking utensils/containers (batterie de cuisine) leaves me with intriguing thoughts-- such as the lack of molds in early inventories, the identity of several strange pieces of cookware that periodically turn up at estate sales, etc. His comparison of the equipment from four inventories of the same kitchen (1632, 1764, 1869, and 1900) gives me a sense of what I might have had to work with in period compared to what I've read in Victorian novels. Brear's article about the layout of food-preparation and serving rooms is heavy going, but the endless corridors and complicated labyrinths of service mentioned in English books now makes more sense.

Of especial interest to me is C. Anne Wilson's article on Stillrooms and Stillhouses. Not only were these places-- first the domain of the lady of the house, then the housekeeper-- used to distill medicinal liquors and process herbs and other items for home medical care-- they were also used to prepare confectionery and banquetting-stuffe such as preserves and bisket-cakes. Descriptions of the stilling apparatus are here, as are some information from seventeenth-century inventories.

Most importantly, it becomes clear that the stillhouse as well as the dairy was considered a ladylike place up to the middle of the 1800s-- and so our feminine nobility of the SCA would be most likely found in these places in the kitchen. Brears quotes Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, 1595: "The kitching, buttery or pantry are not places proper for [great mens wyfes]; a dary is tolerable; for soe may yow have perhaps a dische of butter, a soft cheese, or some clouted creme in a sommer..." Knowing how to carve and mold butter was apparently a desirable professional skill for a 19th-century housekeeper, while she also controlled the confections, the pickles, the preserves-- and the waiting services of the still-room maid. The differentiation between the status of the man-cook (typical of large houses in the SCA period) and the slow introduction of women cooks and maids, the status of different types of food service workers, and the prequistes thereof, are all touched on. Yes, in our period, most women wouldn't be allowed to work in a great house kitchen-- the upper body strength needed to handle the equipment would be one deciding factor.

It had never occurred to me, until I read Brears on "The Bakehouse" that large batches of bread might be kneaded any other way than by hand. Apparently, batches of dough might be kneaded using a lever-pole apparatus, or by wrapping them in a cloth and walking on it-- certainly more efficient than individual human arms. The operation of the kneading trough is also explained, as well as questions of flour-bolting. Many of the references are from the early-to-mid seventeenth century, with a few digressions before 1600. Very useful for casting backward toward medieval baking.

I was fascinated by the ice-house article-- who knew there was once a thriving trans-Atlantic trade in ice of all things? North American ice was gradually replaced by Norwegian ice, and eventually artificial ice got the trade-- but only when the purity was guaranteed. I only knew about ice-houses from Laura Ingalls Wilder, so I had no idea that ice-getting was such a cumbersome and labor-intensive chore. Apparently, in some years in England, it was more economically feasible to buy North American or Norwegian ice than to pay employees to cut and store it.

The information on Larders is invaluable, as it suggests that efforts were made to keep such areas for food that now requires refrigeration between freezing and 50-60 degrees F. It also explains the methods used to attempt to keep this temperature; what items were kept elsewhere, specifically in the 1800s; methods of keeping meat and fish, including pickling and ice. The supplies article also gives a lists of the 'presents' from tenants at a particular hall, Christmas 1643, that might make us mutter about interesting presentations.

The Beer and Brewing article contains the best quote of all, in the discussion of restoring to working order the brewhouse at Shugborough: "The puzzle was resolved when the joiner who carried out [the display restoration] work in the '60s explained that no one had any real idea whether it should be like that, they just thought it looked good." The article focuses primarily on the evidence they found and their process of installing a (much smaller) brewing apparatus in the site to demonstrate working brewing. For brewers, it's a fascinating read.

This volume does not appear to have been as widely distributed as the Garden volume, so it's harder to get online. Still... for the historical foodie... a worthwhile purchase.

But I'm opening it to everyone. I'll be screening comments so people don't peek, but I'll post answers and commentary later. If people like this, I'll repeat the process.

1. Name 3 period sources on herbalism (500-1600 AD), other than Gerard. Culpeper is OP.

2. Name 3 herbs or plants useful to a breastfeeding mother, and one that would not be. Tell me why.

3. Name 2 herbs used in period that are not considered safe any more.

4. List 3 herbs useful for fevers and known to be so in period.

5. Define carminative and emmenagogue.

6. List some substances used to thicken foods in period.

7. In the theory of humors, what would be a good treatment for someone of a phlegmatic constitution?

8. What shops would you visit in a trip to the city for herbal products in period?

The gourd too aspires to grow high from a humble beginning...
... Even so my gourd, rising on brittle stems,
Welcomes the props that are put there for it, hugging the alder
in the grip of its curly tentacles. It's so determined
Not to be wrenched away by even the wildest storm
That it thrusts out a cable at every joint and, each
Extending two strands, siezes support on this side and that.
It reminds me too of girls spinning, when they draw
The soft heaps of wool to their spindles, and in great twists
Measure off the endless thread into trim balls-- Just so
The wandering thongs of my gourd twist and cling; quick
To wrap their coils round the smooth sticks set as ladders for them
They learn to use borrowed strength and, with a swimmer's thrust,
Climb the steep rooms of the covered cloister. Oh, who now
Can praise as he ought the fruits that hang from its branches
Everywhere? They are as perfectly formed from every angle
As a piece of wood that is turned and shaved on a lathe.
They hang on a slender stalk and swell from a long, thin neck
Into huge bodies, their great mass broadening at the flanks.
They are all belly, all pauch. Inside
That cavernous prison are nourished, each in its place, the many
Seeds that promise another harvest as good as this one.
At the approach of tardy autumn, while yet they are tender
And before the hidden moisture that is sealed inside them dries
To leave but the withered shells, we often see the fruit
Handed round among the good things of the dinner-table
and soaking up the rich fat in a piping-dish;
For often these juicy slices, served as dessert,
Delight the palate. But if you let the gourd stay
Enjoying the summer sun on its parent tree and only
Set your blade to it late in the year, then after scooping
The flesh from its ponderous belly and shaving the sides
On a nimble lathe, you can put it to practical use as a vessel.
A pint this mighty paunch will sometimes hold, sometimes
Half a gallon or more; and if you seal your jar
With gummy pitch it will keep wine good for many a day.

Translated by Raef Payne. (Pittsurgh, PA: Hunt Botanical Library, 1966)

Someone on a list I'm on said something about guilds vs. 'companies' in the SCA.
Here is the response I posted:

There really isn't any SCA distinction, and as far as I know, no particular historical distinction either between guilds and companies (such as the Worshipful Company of Stationers). Some Guilds have
ranking/hierarchy, some don't; the term 'company' can refer to a guild, and the group may have hierarchy, or it can refer to another kind of loose association.

Historically, guilds were proceeded by 'livery companies,' which were associations of people who had a distinctive dress for festive occasions. Like the modern Elks, Moose Lodges, etc. they had traditions and
ranks. There were like 'sodalities' and 'fraternities' dedicated to a particular saint. These livery companies and many of the surviving sodalities originated or became associated with particular trades, and generally obtained charters from the Crowns of their particular countries to operate as trade organizations. These trade organizations usually had certain controlling and supervisory powers over the trade in question, which was administered by the Master and Wardens or other officers. Servitude (apprenticeship) was one way to qualify for entering the guild or livery company, though payment and inheritance were other ways to qualify.

In at a few cases I know of, there were some mystical societies (similar to the Freemasons) which appear to have developed from another Guild/Company/'mystery' (another name for a trade association)-- in Scotland in the 19th and early 20th century, there were scattered Companies of Gardeners which were outwardly similar to the Freemasons in their ceremonial/ritual activities. These appear to have disappeared.

The only formal recognition of 'guilds' in the East Kingdom is when a guild/company has a Royal Charter, which doesn't require hierarchy as such, but there does need to be someone who reports on behalf of the guild to the kingdom A&S officer.

There are also interkingdom SCA guilds, confirmed by Royalty of separate kingdoms, of which the Falconers is one, but I don't remember their exact name-- I believe they may also be a Worshipful Company.