[Sca-cooks] Recipe Books

[Daniel Myers]

On Mar 19, 2007, at 12:49 PM, Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise wrote:
>
> Most historians do think of medieval as having ended by 1400 though.

I would say that the above statement is far from true.  On this  
matter historians appear to be very like economists - ask four of  
them a question and you'll get five different answers.

For example:
"The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History" [ISBN: 0-14-051152-0] has a  
cutoff date of 1478.

"Love & Marriage in Late Medieval London" [ISBN: 1-879288-53-2] makes  
extensive use of fifteenth century documents for its source material.

In his introduction to "Early French Cookery" [ISBN: 0-472-10648-1],  
Scully defines the middle ages as being from the end of the fifth  
century to the end of the fifteenth.

Wikipedia (yeah, I know) uses the Lutherans' split from the Catholic  
church in 1517.

C. Woolgar's "The Great Household" [0-300-07687-8] sets the medieval  
period as 1200 to 1500.
(A source referenced in "The Great Household" gives that same date  
range in its title alone - C. Dyer's "Standards of living in the  
later Middle Ages: social change in England c. 1200-1500")

Then there is the SCA, which puts the end of the middle ages at 1600  
(or 1620, or several other dates).  I've also got a co-worker who got  
a degree in Medieval literature who says the medieval period ended  
in  1918 (he tends to look at things in terms of political structure).

 From my viewpoint the date range runs from 1000 to 1500, though that  
includes only France, Germany, and Italy on the 1000 end of things,  
and excludes Italy by the 1500 end.  It also encompasses a much  
smaller geographic region than is accepted by SCA - a very Euro- 
centric region at that.

So, how about a survey?  Those on the list who think of yourselves as  
historians (amateur or otherwise), what is the medieval time period?


- Doc (poking a stick at the beehive to see what happens)

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200. Take merybonys and Orage, an smyte in fayre pecys, than take hem  
vp of the water after the fyrst boylyng, an caste ther-to Percely,  
Sawge, powder Pepyr, Clowys, Maces, Vynegre, and a lytyl Red wyne  
caste there-to, an latte it boyle tyl it be y-now, an thanne serue  
hem forth in a fayre dysshe.  [The Boke of Swyllyng]
-=-=-=-