SC - Anna Weckerin and Rosti

[Thomas Gloning]

You are absolutly right. But this is the kind of dilemma we meet in all
kind of disciplins. Margaret Meads work in Antrhopology was later called
"hoaxes", because she trusted an informator who told her the things he
believed she wanted listen. (The sexuality issue among the Polynesian
tribes). I ment it is really difficult to trace with "entire" accuracy
the trace of a single dish. I am working now with the Blanc-Mangé issue
and have 100 different versions about the origin and the evolution of
this dish.
Interesting to read your story about Isabelle. Many of todays historians
try too to revaluate the true facts behind Richard III, not a monster as
Shakespeare and many of his time chronists described him.
And thank you for your advice about Adamson, I found the book
entertaining and the bibliography interesting, but I can´t judge if it
was a work of total scholar correctness.
I am only a enthusiastisc amateur and I apologize to all of you who are
scholars if I offended you with some remarks or with some bad grounded
facts. I am working with an antrhopological thesis about "cruel food"
and it was for that special project my interest for the kitchen on the
Middle Age started.
Again, Elysande had the kindness of warning me about the high respected
scholars active on the list, and I repeat, it was not my intention to
polemize or question, I tried only to be helpful and share with people
who asked several recipes I believed was "period".
Regards
Ana L. Valdés

Laura C Minnick skrev:
> 
> On Mon, 5 Jul 1999, ana l. valdes wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> > As I wrote
> > before, several dishes and fooduses are not "dogmatical truths", without
> > discussion topics between different scholar traditions. I am, par
> > example, reading now "The Food in Middle Ages", edited by Melitta Weiss
> > Adamson, and she and other point out what difficult to find "facts"
> > about the evolution of certain dishes.
> 
> I think that there are some differences between 'dogmatical truths' (a
> term that I am very uncomfortable with) and 'facts' about food. A 'fact'
> might be something simple- we know for a 'fact' that tomatoes were not
> present in Western Europe before 1492, because they are a New World
> species. A 'dogmatical truth', if I understand your meaning, might be that
> they were not in use in the kitchen until well into the 16th century,
> because the first mention in a cookbook is 1544, I believe. This does not
> mean that they weren't in use in the intervening 52 years, but that we
> cannot prove their use as food, for lack of earlier evidence.
>         Adamson, BTW, is an interesting read, but I would not rely on her
> for accuracy.
> 
> > Bad translations, the distruction of orginal manuscripts, inepts
> > copysts, a lot of different explanaitions about the lacking "scientific"
> > accuracy.
> 
> You can say that about anything before the age of computers and
> photographic evidence- and still we know that those can be manipulated
> also. The 'bad translations/bad copies/missing evidence' litany is
> prevalent in any field of inquiry. I do hats and headdresses form
> 14th-15th c. France and England. There are none of them in museums- I have
> to go by what I can surmise from paintings, statuary, tomb brasses, etc.
> All of these can be subject the the whim of the artist, the mood or
> attitude of the photographer, even of the editor who crops a photo and
> puts it in a book. But when I look at evidence, I assume that A) what I
> have is incomplete, B) lack of evidence done does necessarily mean that
> there is none- perhaps only that I have not found it, and C) lack of
> evidence does not mean that there is any to be found- it may mean that I
> am looking at all there is. I cannot say that a headdress is traditional,
> therefore it probably existed in the 14th century also, and I just haven't
> found the evidence because they were too difficult to carve on the tomb
> brasses, or whatever. Well, I _could_ say it, but I would be wrong.
>         Another example closer to the 'missing evidence' idea- I wrote a
> paper a couple of years ago on Isabella of France, the queen of Edward II
> of England. Most references to her in modern books call her the 'She-Wolf
> of France'. I was interested in this and the origins and started digging.
> Would you believe that I can find not evidence that she was called by that
> name in her own day? The earliest evidence I could find was in Christopher
> Marlowe's play _Edward II_! All of the chronicles (English, Latin, French)
> called her La Belle Isabelle or Isabel the Fair, and after she deposed her
> husband (long story) they say nasty things about her, but never the
> She-Wolf epithet. This does not mean that she was not called that, but
> that it was not publicly recorded until Marlowe wrote it down. This is a
> far cry from the various historians saying she is 'traditionally' known as
> the She-Wolf...
> 
> Tradition and evidence are very different. Use them both as tools, not as
> masters, and you will be much happier about your work.
> 
> 'Lainie
> -
> Laura C. Minnick
> -
> 'A Vaillans Coeurs Riens Impossible'
> -
> "Libraries have been the death of many great men, particularly the
> Bodleian."
>         Humfrey Wanley, c. 1731
> 
> ============================================================================
> 
> To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
> Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".
> 
> ============================================================================

- -- 
http://www.algonet.se/~agora  Hemsida och skyltfönster
http://www.algonet.se/~agora/ada Nättidning för kvinnor och män med
humor
http://www.dn.se/liv&stil  Leta vidare till Anas länkar, min egen
samling av godbitar för tjejer
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================