Above, from left: The ripe fruits of the white rose tree in Bonnefont garden are held on their stems late into the fall, and provide food for birds and wildlife; the fleshy red fruits of the rose are known as “hips” and contain seeds that were used medicinally in the Middle Ages.

Apples, roses, and hawthorns are all members of a single botanical family, the Rosaceae. The fruits of the hawthorn are known as haws. The fruits of the rose are known as hips, a word of Germanic origin that appears in the glossary compiled by the Anglo-Saxon grammarian Aelfric in the ninth century.  (The Romans had designated the rose hip as malum roseum, or “rose apple”.)

While all roses bear hips, it was the fruit of wild roses such as the briar rose or eglantine (R. rubiginosa) and the dog rose (R. canina) that seem to have been used for food and medicine. The cookbook of Apicius, compiled in the fourth or early fifth century A.D., includes rose hips in several recipes, but in both ancient and medieval cuisine rose petals are used more often than the fruits. Wild roses seem to have been a famine food gathered in case of need rather than a delicacy. In the fourteenth-century Middle English translation of the Romance of William of Palerne, two lovers, William and Melior, flee to the woods disguised in bearskins, where William is given advice by his cousin—who has been transformed into a werewolf—as to what foods they may sustain themselves on, in addition to their love. It is suggested that they forage for wild plums, blackberries, hips, haws, acorns, and hazelnuts (”haws, hepus, & hakernes & hasel-notes”):

(For acorns as famine food, see last week’s post, “Pigs and Pannage“.)

William Turner, in his New Herbal of 1565, warns that those who make tarts out of hips should take heed to remove all the “down” from the fruit. These little hairs inside the hips are quite irritating to the skin. (I once made hedgerow jelly from hips, haws, and sloes, while in England, and found the process of removing the fibers from all those little hips pretty unpleasant, as well as tedious.) Dioscorides also recommended that this wooly matter be removed before the fruits were dried as a medicament to “stop the belly.”  Albertus Magnus specified the seeds contained in the hips as a remedy for diarrhea in infants.

Rose petals and oil of roses are more frequently recommended in medieval herbals than the fruits. Although garden roses were characterized as cold in the humoral theory of the Middle Ages, wild roses were classified as hot. Hildegard of Bingen says that the hips are very hot. As such, they would be considered efficacious in a complaint of  “a cold cause,” such as catarrh.) Hildegard recommends rose hips as a cure in Book LII of the Physica:

One who has pain in his lungs should crush rose hips with their leaves. Then he should add raw honey and cook these together. He should frequently remove the froth, then strain it through a cloth and make spiced wine. He should drink this often, and it will carry off the rotten matter from his lungs, purging and healing him.

Despite the flower’s ubiquity in medieval art, rose hips are rarely depicted in paintings or illuminations. However, a leafy stem of rose hips does appear in an early sixteenth-century book of hours commissioned by Anne of Brittany and painted by Jean Bourdichon. The painter shows a single “robin’s pincushion” or rose gall, formed by a parasitic wasp. (For the illumination, see the British Library Images Online.)

The gall, which is especially common on the wild field rose (R. arvensis) and the dog rose, is created when the wasp deposits its eggs in autumn. The larvae overwinter in the plant tissue, which provides both food and shelter until they hatch out in spring. This rose gall, known as a “bedeguar,” was powdered and used to treat internal ailments.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Fisher, Celia. The Medieval Flower Book. London: The British Library, 2007.

Hildegard of Bingen. Physica. Transl. Patricia Throop. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 1998.

Touw, Mia. “Roses in the Middle Ages,” Economic Botany, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan.–Mar., 1982).

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Above, from left to right: Calendar page for November from the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, 1405–1408/1409. Pol, Jean, and Herman de Limbourg (Franco-Netherlandish, active in France, by 1399–1416). French; Made in Paris. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.1); detail of the activity for the month; detail of the zodiacal symbol Sagittarius. See the Collection Database to learn more about this work of art.

“September’s Husbandrie” from Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandrie, 1580.

The term “mast” was applied to any autumnal fodder on which pigs might forage, including beechnuts, haws (the fruit of the hawthorn), and acorns, as well as fungi and roots. Acorns were the principal fodder in fattening up swine to be slaughtered and salted for winter food. While green acorns contain toxins that are poisonous to cattle and to people, they are not harmful to pigs. (Pigs were not reared in winter. Once the boar had sired a litter, he was sacrificed. Bacon and hams were cured after the November slaughter. Bacon grease replaced butter as the principal fat in the winter diet.)

“November’s Husbandrie” from Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandrie, 1580.

A swineherd carrying a pole or stick to knock down acorns for his pigs frequently appears in the calendar tradition as the activity proper to November, as in the detail from the Belles Heures shown above. A very similar scene is depicted on the November page of the Très Riches Heures.

The same subject is drawn in ink on the lower left margin of the November calendar page of the Hours of Jeanne d’Évreux, currently on display in the Treasury at The Cloisters. Jeanne, queen of France, retained the right to the income from the harvest of acorns in the forest of Nogent for her lifetime.

Jean Pucelle (French, active in Paris, ca. 1320–1334). Detail from the November calendar page from The Hours of Jeanne d’Évreux, ca. 1324–1328. Grisaille and tempera on vellum; 3 1/2 x 2 5/8 in. (8.9 x 6.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.2). See the Collection Database to learn more about this work of art.

In medieval forest law, certain rights and privileges were afforded the tenants on the lord’s woodlands; the term “pannage” was used to designate both the practice of bringing pigs to the wood to forage for mast, and the right or privilege to do so. The term could also be applied to payment made to the owner of the woodland in exchange for this privilege, or to the owner’s right to collect payment, or to the income accruing from the privilege.

In England, where the tradition of foraging swine in oak forests was an important part of the agricultural cycle, the Saxon rights of pannage were much reduced by the Norman enclosure of game preserves, and the Saxon diet was greatly reduced when their pigs were deprived of acorns.

Acorns contain fat, carbohydrates and protein. The acorns of the common oak of Britain and northwestern Europe (Quercus robur) have a high tannin content and are too bitter to be palatable, but have been eaten in times of famine. They were ground into a meal that afforded a coarse bread. Alan Davidson notes that both acorns and bread or cakes made from them have remarkable keeping powers.

The Mediterranean holm oak (Quercus ilex var. rotundifolia) bear acorns that are much sweeter, and these are still enjoyed in Spain and Portugal, much as chestnuts are. It is probably the acorns of this species that are recommended in the fifteenth-century Tacuinum Sanitatis as a health-giving food, to be roasted and eaten with sugar.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:
Arano, Luisa Cogliati. The Medieval Health Handbook: Tacuinum Sanitatis. New York: George Braziller, 1976.

Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hartley, Dorothy. Lost Country Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

Husband, Timothy B. The Art of Illumination. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.

Pérez-Higuera, Teresa. Medieval Calendars. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997.

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Above, from left: A strawberry tree growing in a sheltered corner in Trie garden; Arbutus unedo in fruit in the woodland of The Unicorn At Bay; the evergreen strawberry tree bears flowers and fruit simultaneously in late October.

A native of the Mediterranean, the strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo) is valued as an ornamental evergreen whose late-blooming flowers and red fruits enliven the garden in late fall and early winter, when few other species are of interest. The common name derives from the description of the tree made by Pliny the Elder, who compares the fruit, with its thin, rough, red rind, to that of the strawberry, Fragaria vesca. He believed the two plants to be related, and states that the strawberry is the only fruit that grows both on a bush and on the ground, although he acknowledges that the flesh of the two fruits is quite different (Historia Naturalis, Book XV.xxviii. 98-99). The fruit of the arbutus much more closely resembles that of the lychee, although they are not botanically related. The specific epithet unedo (from the Latin unum edo, or “I eat one”) derives from the same passage. According to Pliny, the fruit is so insipid that no one who has tasted it will be tempted to eat another.

I’ve never tasted the “strawberries” myself, and our own specimen, although flowering freely, has no fruit to sample this year. (The tree is at the limit of its cold-hardiness here at The Cloisters, and it suffered some winter damage last year. We were forced to prune the wood that had died back, thus sacrificing this year’s fruit.) Many people do describe the fruit as bland and uninteresting, but not everyone. For a long and lively discussion of its flavor and for recipes for making both preserves and a traditional Portuguese liqueur called medronheira from arbutus fruit, see the comments appended to the Plant Portrait on the Plants For A Future Database.

Dioscorides mentions the fruit of the arbutus without assigning any medicinal virtues to it. He warns that it is bad for the stomach and that it causes headaches (De Materia Medica, Book 1.175). Although Dioscorides may be referring to a related species, Arbutus andrachne, also found in Greece, the sixteenth-century herbalist John Gerard applied these caveats to A. unedo, and followed Pliny in his description of the fruit as being without relish, although he notes that thrushes and other birds are fond of it.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

E. J. Alexander and Carol H. Woodward. The Flora of The Unicorn Tapestries. Second edition. New York: The New York Botanical Garden, 1947.

Anderson, Frank J, ed. “Herbals through 1500,” The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 90. New York: Abaris, 1984.

Dirr, Michael. Manual of Woody Landscape Plants. Fourth edition. Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing Company, 1990.

Grieve, Maude. A Modern Herbal. 1931. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1971.

Grigson, Geoffrey. The Englishman’s Flora. 1955. Reprint: London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987.

Gunther, Robert T., ed. The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides Translated by John Goodyer 1655. 1934. Reprint. New York: Hafner Publishing, 1968.

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Above, from left: The medicinal teasel, Dipsacus fullonum, growing in Bonnefont garden; a teasel depicted in the foreground of The Hunt of the Frail Stag: Vanity Sounds the Horn, and Ignorance Unleashes the Hounds Overconfidence, Rashness, and Desire, South Netherlandish, about 1500–1525, Wool and silk, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950 (50.145.4); detail of the flower head, whose straight spines distinguish this species from D. sativus.

The principal medieval uses of the wild teasel, Dipsacus fullonum, were medicinal. (See last week’s post for uses of the cultivated form.) In the De Materia Medica (Book III. 13), the ancient herbalist Dioscorides groups teasel with other prickly plants of the thistle tribe, but teasel does not belong to the Compositae (daisy) family, as true thistles do. (I wrote extensively about thistles last year. See a list of thistle-related posts.) Dioscorides compares the spiny flower head of the teasel to a hedgehog, and gives several medicinal uses for small “worms” that can be found inside: sufferers from intermittent fevers were instructed to put the worms in a purse and hang it around their necks. He also recommended mixing the root with wine to cured anal fissures and fistulas.

The teasel, or ‘Cameleon,’ is depicted in a number of medieval herbal manuscripts, including the Herbal of Apuleius Platonicus. Although the representations of teasel in these sources vary widely in their realism, the spiny heads are consistently emphasized. In general, the prickly character of the plant seems to have been taken as a sign of its efficacy against fistulas and hemorrhoids, boils, abscesses and ulcers of all kinds, and poisoned bites.

The fifteenth-century Herbarius Latinus maintains that the plant was also a strong diuretic. [According to the Roman natural historian Pliny, the plant grew on watery ground (Book XXVII.71)]. The name Dipsacus given to the genus derives from the Greek verb “to be thirsty,” and the propensity of the plant to gather rainwater and dew in the cup formed by its perfoliate (pierced by the stem) leaves has been noted since antiquity. It was known to the Romans as labrum Veneris, or “Venus’s lip.” One of the common names used by Renaissance writers is “Venus’s basin.” The water gathered in the plant’s leaves was believed to have cosmetic and curative powers and to be especially effective in removing warts. In Adam in Eden, a history of plants published in 1568, the herbalist William Coles uses the teasel’s association with Venus and its prickliness to point a moral lesson, comparing the flower heads to whores who tear and destroy both the estates and the bodies of those who consort with them.

The teasel represented in the foreground of the tapestry shown above may have been used to enhance the work’s allegorical theme. The Hunt of the Frail Stag is a symbolic representation of human frailty and vulnerability to vice. The teasel in the scene may symbolize the toil and tribulation brought into the world at the Fall of Man. (According to the book of Genesis, thistles and thorns did not exist in Eden, but came into being when God cursed the earth after Adam and Eve sinned.) Another fragment from the same series, currently on view at The Cloisters, shows Old Age driving the stag out of a lake. The hounds Heat, Grief, Cold, Anxiety, Age, and Heaviness pursue him and a large and very thorny rosebush is shown beneath the forelegs of the stag.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Anderson, Frank J, ed. “Herbals through 1500,” The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 90. New York: Abaris, 1984.

Grieve, Maude. A Modern Herbal. 1931. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1971.

Grigson, Geoffrey. The Englishman’s Flora. 1955. Reprint: London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1987.

Gunther, Robert T., ed. The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides Translated by John Goodyer 1655. 1934. Reprint. New York: Hafner Publishing, 1968.

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Above, from left to right: The seed head of the cultivated form of teasel (Dipsacus sativus) in a bed devoted to plants used in medieval arts and crafts (2006); detail of the seed head of the teasel growing in the same bed this year; detail of the seed head of common teasel, or fuller’s teasel (D. fullonum), now in the medicinal bed.

Visitors to Bonnefont Garden are often surprised to find plants that they recognize as common weeds being carefully cultivated in the beds here. One ubiquitous weed found growing in waste places throughout this country is the common or wild teasel, Dipsacus fullonum, a plant which had various medicinal applications in the European Middle Ages. A distinct but closely related form of teasel, D. sativus, was also introduced here in colonial times, and was cultivated for use in the woolen trade. Both forms have naturalized in the United States (see the U.S.D.A. website), although the wild or common teasel, D. fullonum, is much more widespread than the cultivated variety. There is considerable confusion between the two, and sometimes seed sold as the cultivated form turns out to be the common variety.

Teasel is so called because of the use of the spiny seed heads to tease out woolen fibers before they were spun, a process known as carding, and in raising the nap of finished woolen cloth. While the conical heads of wild or common teasel (Dipsacus sylvestris) may once have been employed in wool carding (some authorities question this) and are sometimes used on a small scale by hand-spinners, they are of no use in raising nap, as the spines are too straight and weak to be effective. The curved cylindrical seed heads of the cultivated form were and are considered to be superior to any other instrument for that purpose. The hooked spines of this form “give” when they are drawn over the cloth, smoothing it rather than snagging it. In the Middle Ages, teasel heads were fitted into wooden frames. In the nineteenth century, the frames might be placed on rotating drums over which the cloth was passed. Although teasel heads began to be replaced with steel brushes in English woolen mills in Victorian times, the very finest finish, especially that of the baize used for high-quality billiard tables, is still produced with teasel.

At one time, D. sativus was considered to be a subspecies of D. fullonum, but the two are now considered to be distinct. The botanical names are somewhat misleading, as the common or wild variety is now known as Dipsacus fullonum—the teasel of the “fullers,” or cloth makers—while the specialized, historically important form used in the wool trade since the Middle Ages is known simply as Dipsacus sativus. ‘Sativus’ is the botanical epithet given to a plant known in a cultivated form that may no longer have an independent existence as a wild species. D. sativus may have been selectively bred for its useful qualities in early times.

We grow both teasels here at The Cloisters, although the common teasel is given a place in our medicinal collection and the cultivated form is grown in the bed devoted to plants used in medieval arts and crafts. This year, the plants that matured from seed sown as D. sativus in the spring of 2008 proved to be the wrong kind and we will need to obtain seeds from a reliable source for planting next spring.

More to come on the medieval medicinal uses of the wild teasel . . .

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Griffiths, Mark. The New Royal Horticultural Society Index of Garden Plants. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1992.

Mabey, Richard. Flora Brittanica. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996.

Ryder, Michael. “Fascinating Fullonum,” Circea: The Journal of the Association for Environmental Archaeology, 1993.

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Above, from left to right: Calendar page for October from the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, 1405–1408/1409. Pol, Jean, and Herman de Limbourg (Franco-Netherlandish, active in France, by 1399–1416). French; Made in Paris. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.1); detail of the activity for the month; detail of the zodiacal symbol Scorpio. See the Collection Database to learn more about this work of art.

The annual cycle of cereal production that dominates the depiction of the agricultural year in the medieval calendar tradition began and ended with the sowing of seed corn. Scenes of tilling and sowing typically appear as the activity proper to October, before the arrival of the winter rains. While a plow was used to turn the earth in spring, a harrow was used to prepare the ground in autumn, as in the Très Riches Heures. The harrow was also used to cover the seed once it had been sown. In the Belles Heures, as in many other calendars, a single sower represents the month, although a harrow appears at the edge of the scene.

In The Medieval Calendar Year, Bridget Henisch notes that the sower shown in calendar scenes is always male, although a woman may be shown walking behind him with a sack. Neither do women plow, but a female might be shown guiding the horse who draws the harrow.

In her masterly description of the art of sowing seed broadcast, Dorothy Hartley emphasizes that it was highly skilled and responsible work. (Depending on the grain and the weather, sowing was done either immediately after plowing or harrowing. ) The field to be sown was measured, and the seed was measured into open sacks that were set out at each end of an open furrow. The sower then walked smoothly and steadily down the furrow, counting his steps and keeping them even for the length of the field, guiding his feet down two adjacent plow lines. He then reckoned how many steps he must take to each handful of grain he would cast. (Field workers would not have been able to write or to count above ten, so agricultural tallies were kept by reckoning in four sets of five fingers, making a score.)

If a man sowed from a basket hanging from his neck, he might sow with his right and left hand in alternation. If he used a sowing cloth or apron, he would cast with one hand only and only to one side as he went up or down the furrow. Once the rhythm that determined how many handfuls of seed would be matched to the number of steps needed to cover the ground was established, it remained constant for the whole field. However, a skilled worker might be asked to sow more thinly or thickly in different parts of the field, which might be drier or damper in one place than another. He did this not by changing the rhythm, but by taking a little larger or smaller handful of grain.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:
Hartley, Dorothy. Lost Country Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

Henisch, Bridget Ann. The Medieval Calendar Year. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

Pérez-Higuera, Teresa. Medieval Calendars. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997.

Husband, Timothy B. The Art of Illumination. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.

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Above, left: Volunteer gardener Nuala Outes befriending a mantis in Bonnefont Garden last summer; right: one of three adult mantises seen recently on the asters now blooming in Cuxa garden.

The European praying mantis is so named because of the manner in which it raises and extends its grasping forelegs before seizing its prey, suggesting an attitude of prayer. This omnivorous species was not among the beneficial insects released in the gardens this summer as part of our biological pest control program, although several mantises already inhabited Trie and Bonnefont gardens. However, the mantis population does seem to be on the rise, and no less than three of the insect predators were recently spied in Cuxa garden on a windy day, clinging to a single planting of ‘Hella Lacy,’ a cultivated form of the native New York aster now blooming along the roadsides.

The sexual cannibalism for which the mantis is notorious seems to be more common in captivity; it is less frequently and readily observed by entomologists in the field and is the subject of scholarly debate. Autumn is the mating season for praying mantises in our climate, although we haven’t observed any unions. The compound eyes and binocular vision over a wide field—characteristic of mantises—make them at least as aware of us as we are of them, and they clearly register their consciousness of our presence when we encounter them in the gardens.

—Deirdre Larkin

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Above, from left to right: Hop bines grown in Bonnefont Cloister garden send out new shoots in March, reaching the roofline by the end of May and dying back to the ground in late autumn; a hop bine bearing female flowers, called cones, adorns the abacus of a column from Saint-Guilhem Cloister; detail of a bine bearing a male flower.

Hop (Humulus lupulus) has been used as a vegetable (according to the Roman natural historian Pliny, the young shoots of the plant were eaten), as both fodder and bedding for cattle, as a dye, and, like its close relative hemp (Cannabis sativa), as a fiber plant. It also appears as a medicament in medieval and Renaissance herbals. The fifteenth-century Herbarius Latinus recommends hops for purifying the blood, opening obstructions of the spleen, easing fever, and cutting both headache and jaundice. However, the most important economic use of hops in the Middle Ages and at the present writing is in brewing beer. The bitter, aromatic principles of the hop give flavor to the brew, but they are also antimicrobial. This preservative property was well known to the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote that the bitterness of hops retards spoilage in beverages to which it has been added. [She also deplored the plant’s tendency to induce melancholy (Physica, LXI).]

In the bed below the parapet wall in Bonnefont Cloister Garden, hop bines twine themselves up hemp ropes strung from a series of metal rings set into the wooden roof beams. The bines have persisted in the same spot for more than fifteen years. They die back to the ground in winter, but vigorous new shoots emerge in early spring, reaching the roofline in a mere six or seven weeks of growth. (The name “hop” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon verb “hoppan,” or “to climb.” ) The plant is dioecious, i.e. the species includes indivduals of both sexes, and  male and female flowers are produced in August and September. While the plant is referred to in the singular (”hop”), the female flowers are designated as “hops.”

Pollinated female cones are no longer viable for brewing purposes, which makes the male plants a nuisance in commercial hop yards. For our educational purposes at The Cloisters, we’re happy to grow both sexes. Two years ago, we had both male and female plants in abundance, and I was somewhat mystified that no female flowers developed either last year or this year. Our bines are basically healthy and vigorous, although they do suffer damage from mites and mildews in summer, and it seemed odd that all of the female bines would have died back or been crowded out by the males, who continued to flourish.

This made me wonder: Can hops change sex? I visited an online forum for home brewers and discovered that other growers found themselves in the same situation.  One of them had consulted a commercial hop supplier who claimed that it was indeed possible for hop plants to change gender in response to stress, but according to Dr. John Henning, a plant geneticist who heads the USDA-ARS Hop Breeding & Genetics Program based at Oregon State University, this is not a scientific explanation. Dr. Henning thinks it more likely that the females of the unidentified hop strain we’re growing (our bines were acquired from a commercial herb grower who did not specify the cultivar) were more susceptible than the males to insect damage and disease. Both the male and female plants die back to the ground after the first frost, and we can’t determine whether the young shoots that emerge in spring are male or female. Only when the bines flower again in late summer can we know if both sexes have survived. Now we know that we’ll need to plant new stock, and Dr. Henning, who maintains a germplasm bank that includes many cultivated forms of hop, including antique strains that might be closer to the medieval type than modern varieties, has kindly offered to help us by providing an appropriate strain.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Andersen, Frank J. Herbals Through 1500. New York: Abaris Books, 1984.

DeLyser, D. Y. and W. J. Kasper. “Hopped Beer: The Case for Cultivation.” Economic Botany, Vol. 48 [2] (1994). New York: The New York Botanical Garden, 1994.

Throop, Priscilla, transl. Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica: The Complete English Translation of Her Classic Work on Health and Healing. Rochester, VT:  Healing Arts Press, 1998.

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Turmeric (Curcuma longa), a native of India, flowering in the arcade of Bonnefont Cloister. Turmeric and other tender exotics in the collection are grown in pots.

The plant collection at The Cloisters includes a number of exotic species that would not have been grown in medieval European gardens, but whose dried roots, seeds, bark, or other parts were imported for use in food and medicine. Far from their native habitats, these plants are not hardy in our climate and must be grown in pots and removed to a greenhouse in autumn. They produce an abundance of healthy foliage but may not flower or fruit if the climate and conditions they prefer can’t be imitated. Since the limited greenhouse space available to us off site is only heated to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, it can be difficult to accommodate tropical species that prefer a warmer temperature, such as black pepper (Piper nigrum), which struggles through a winter sojourn in the greenhouse and does not always survive. Although we were very excited when our pepper set fruit last summer, the plant succumbed before we could bring it back out again this spring and the berries did not have the opportunity to ripen into peppercorns.

Members of the ginger family in the collection, such as galangal (Alpinia galanga), cardamom (Elettaria cardamomum), true ginger (Zingiber officinale), and turmeric (Curcuma longa) have a much easier time of it. The attractive foliage of the easily grown cardamom is maintained all year round, while both the ginger and the turmeric go dormant in early winter, putting out new shoots in the spring. Although we have grown gingers successfully for some time, I have not known them to flower. We were both pleased and surprised a few weeks ago when the turmeric put out the first of three leafless stems covered with oblong clusters of beautiful and long-lasting white and green flowers.

Unlike ginger, which is prized for its heat and strong flavor, turmeric is more valued as a colorant than as a condiment. The pigment contained in turmeric root, known as curcumin, imparts a characteristic bright-yellow color to curries, mustard pickles and preparations, and many other food products. An ancient cultigen whose wild form is not known, turmeric is believed to be indigenous to India, where the rhizomes, fresh or dried, have a long history of use as a spice and a dye, as well as a medicament for stomach ailments and catarrh.

When Marco Polo encountered turmeric in China in 1280, he described it as having both the color and flavor of saffron. While it’s true that the color is similar, turmeric neither tastes nor smells like the much more costly true saffron, Crocus sativus. (Turmeric is sold to the unwary as true saffron to this day. If it’s cheap, it’s turmeric.) Color was a very important element in courtly cuisine in the Middle Ages and turmeric may have been valued on that ground alone. I haven’t been able to document the use of turmeric as a spice, unlike ginger, which was second only to pepper as an exotic ingredient in medieval European cookery. Turmeric did have a limited place in the pharmacopeia, although it did not have as many medicinal virtues as its close relative, zedoary (Curcuma zedoaria). The fifteenth-century Hortus Sanitatis recommends that turmeric be smeared on the skin to remove morphews, i.e., leprous eruptions or other lesions.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources:

Andersen, Frank J. Herbals Through 1500. New York: Abaris Books, 1984.

Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Van Wyk, Ben-Erik. Food Plants of the World. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2005.

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Above, from left to right: Calendar page for September from the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, 1405–1408/1409. Pol, Jean, and Herman de Limbourg (Franco-Netherlandish, active in France, by 1399–1416). French; Made in Paris. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.1); detail of the activity for the month; detail of the zodiacal symbol Libra. See the Collection Database to learn more about this work of art.

Images of peasants sowing, reaping, threshing, winnowing, and storing wheat in the appropriate months dominate the medieval calendar tradition—the only agricultural product that rivals wheat’s importance in the cycle of the year is the wine grape, Vitis vinifera. (For more on wine grapes and wine in the Middle Ages, see “Grapevines at The Cloisters,” March 13.). In the Belles Heures, as in many another Book of Hours, the cultivating and pruning of the vine stocks marks the return to fieldwork in early spring (see “Marching Out,” March 6). Once the grain had been brought safely in, it was time to bring in the grapes. The vintage culminates in the wine drunk at the winter feasts depicted in the months of December and January (see “Works and Days: The Medieval Year,” January 9).

In wine-growing regions, the grape harvest is the calendar activity for the month of September or October. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century calendar cycles, a single figure is often shown severing the fruit from the vine with a knife or a billhook, but this is an iconographic convention that probably derives from the personification of the season in the Roman calendar tradition. Like reaping or threshing, the grape harvest was a communal activity, as depicted in the Très Riches Heures, which was also commissioned by the Duc du Berry and painted by the Limbourg brothers. In harvest scenes like these, grapes are gathered into baskets or panniers, but the fruit would be transferred into wooden vats, like the one depicted in the Belles Heures. The grapes might then be trampled underfoot to express the juice or the juice might be extracted by means of a wooden screw press. (For information about wine pressing, see www.larsdatter.com/winepresses.htm.)

The former method was hallowed by ancient tradition; wine that had been mechanically extracted was sold as such and reaped a lower price than wine from trodden grapes.

Once the juice had been separated from the grapeskins, it was put into wooden barrels and casks for fermentation, storage, and shipment. The making of these vessels was the work of the cooper, a skilled craftsman who began the long process of making and finishing a barrel by cleaving wooden staves from the trunk of an oak (preferred, although other species could be used) rather than sawing them. If the staves were not cut properly, taking advantage of the wood’s structure, the barrels or casks would leak. (For a collection of images of medieval coopers at work, see www.larsdatter.com/coopers.htm.)

The making and repairing of the vessels to hold the wine was an important job and was itself a calendar subject for the month of August in some medieval calendars. As Bridget Henisch observes, the wine barrel is the only manufactured object to be given this honor in the calendar tradition.

—Deirdre Larkin

Sources
Henisch, Bridget Ann. The Medieval Calendar Year. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

Pérez-Higuera, Teresa. Medieval Calendars. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997.

Husband, Timothy B. The Art of Illumination. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.

For more information on medieval viticulture and the wine trade, see Wine and the Vine: An Historical Geography of Viticulture and the Wine Trade by Tim Unwin.

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