SC - (OT) "Medireview" ???

[Jenne Heise]

	K. wrote:
	Sure, people would still eat communally, and large households (and
	especially the huge households attached to a royal court) would eat
in a
	Great Hall with the a high table and numerous dishes and all that...
but 
	would they put on a big show of it, or would it be relatively
austere?

Sorry, didn't quite finish!

It depended on the strength of the religious convictions of the lord/lady of
the house. 
There are accounts of households where austere Lents were kept and others
where the Lenten rules were not broken but certainly bent like a Mobius
tube. 
The one that sticks in my mind being a C.15th feast given by the Duke of
Cumberland (or Clarence? something beginning with C), attended by some
foreign dignitary and his staff who were rather shocked to be given goose -
because barnacle goose = fish, seeing as how it was born and raised at sea.
Hmm. <dubious eyebrow quirk> 
Another loophole was the selling of indulgences for butter and diary
products in Lent, which was a very nice little money earner for the Church
and caused no small amount of acrimony, especially in the northern countries
where oil was generally more expensive and of poorer quality - indeed Martin
Luther cited butter indulgence selling as one of the corruptions of the
Roman Church. 
Another interesting blip was the classification of beaver tail as fish and
Lent-edible - though the rest of it was not (!) and therefore couldn't be
served during Lent. 

	It seems to me that a Lenten feast might be a good opportunity to
hold a
	smaller, more intimate feast with less pomp and wossname.
	But this is based on no actual documentation, just a gut feeling.
I'd
	love to see some actual primary source material on it.

There are also lots of accounts of monastic culinary excesses and evasions -
though I can't remember any Lenten ones offhand. Sorry, don't have my books
at work, but if you are interested I can send you some Lent-specific
references later as I'm actually researching it at the moment. 

Overall I would say that the type of Lenten 'feast' ranged right across the
board - it would be perfectly apt for you to be a somewhat lax faster and
provide your household with a magnificent Lenten feast - maybe even with one
dish using butter as long as you could produce the requisite indulgence
<grin>.

Al Servizio Vostro, e del Sogno
Lucrezia

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Lady Lucrezia-Isabella di Freccia   |  mka Tina Nevin
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