Waste

I think a lot about waste. Outside of the SCA, I'm somewhat of a hippie environmentalist type, and I'm working on reducing how much waste I generate. I've been really interested to notice that there's a lot you can learn about waste reduction from medieval people. It makes sense, really: a medieval person didn't have the luxury of disposability that we have. Reuse your shopping bags? What else would you do! Buy a new set of clothes every season? How ridiculous! (Okay, sure, some medieval people did waste, on purpose, as a display of affluence, but it wasn't the normal way of doing things.)

In A Medieval Life, Bennett talked about the family dung hill. Peasants would maintain a dung heap for both animal and human poo. (This was not the only way people dealt with poo; I read a great article in college called "Latrines and Cesspools in Medieval London" which dealt specifically with city folk.) Now I flush the toilet and it "magically goes away" but there are those more dedicated than I who are trying to revive the whole idea of "humanure." I'm not sure if I'm sold on this yet (pathogens! heavy metals! it's poo!), but when you look at it from a medieval perspective (that's valuable fertilizer!) it seems a lot less weird.

I realize that medieval people had a very different perspective on this than I do, and were definitely NOT trying to preserve the environment. I just think it would be really interesting to compare our attitudes toward waste to medieval attitudes toward waste.

I've finally hit my stride

And it's a nice feeling.

I had an epiphany (I guess) about how to organize my documentation for my bread entry for Kingdom A&S, and I'm feeling really good about it. I've decided to just accept that I'm really nerdy, and use a nice little chart so you can see the details of each loaf at a glance. This will be up front, so that you can look at it and then read on to get more detail and the reasons behind the decisions I made. I've also got all my bullet points laid out and I think it flows really well.

I love this project, which is good. I still have a whole list of things that I want to keep working on after I present it:
-Bolting through cloth. I still haven't gotten this to work.
-More information on medieval milling. This was something I just started to develop at a pretty late date so I don't think I'll be able to have anything really clever to say about it by KA&S.
-Keep trying different grades of wheat bread specifically.
-More research into how modern grains differ from period grains.

As for the teeth entry, I'm feeling quite good about that, too. I have a nice article on dental caries (thanks R for mad library skillz!) to incorporate, I have more blue stuff (Better Half threw the bottle out when she thought I was done with the project! waa!), and I still think this was a super fun project. I did not, unfortunately, manage to find pellitory, so that's another one for my "to be continued" list. Everything is always a work in progress! Ooh, but I did find an extremely cheap bottle of French wine to use for the mouthwash. My research into what kind of modern wine is the best substitute for period wine didn't turn up much useful. I did learn, though, that most wine produced in England would have been white, most wine drunk in England during the later Middle Ages was imported from France (hence the provenance of my bottle!), and regardless of where it originated, much wine drunk in England was pretty harsh and unpleasant. Hence, I am not going to worry about the effects of steeping on my mouthwash.

I should probably go to bed, now. This has been a productive evening, though, as I managed to get good strong outlines for my rewriting/reorganizing of the docs (both are written and researched already; now the focus is on being coherent).

Another book review: Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, edited by Bennett, Clark, O'Barr, Vilen, and Westphal-Wihl

Another great book for those interested in medieval women, this one is a collection of essays on a variety of topics. (Learn more from the publisher here) I haven't actually read all the essays yet, but the ones I have gotten to have been amazing, covering everything from silkwomen to prostitutes.

This is a great look at the lives of the women we tend to overlook in the SCA, especially working women in towns, while also critically examining the societal expectations placed on women. Even though it's a little academic, it's definitely readable, and even though all of the authors are writing from a feminist perspective, it never veers off into polemic. All of the essays are well-reasoned and thoroughly researched. The focus seems to be on England, but not exclusively.

Highly recommended.

One tidbit from an essay on prostitution really caught my attention. Apparently, increasing numbers of women turned to prostitution in the later middle ages due to skewed sex ratios: with more women than men, not all women could get married. Needing to support themselves, unmarried women (especially in towns) had few options. Since they earned less for wage-work than men, prostitution was a way to support themselves. Incidentally, in A Medieval Life, Bennett calculated that women earned about 66% of what men did for similar labor. The most recent estimate I've seen for the present day puts women at earning 77% of men. 700 years, 11%: GO TEAM! (See, unlike the authors of these essays, I can't resist going there sometimes.)

Book Review: A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344, By Judith Bennett

Okay, I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: I heart Judith Bennett. When I first read Women in the Medieval English Countryside, I was amazed to find out that someone was had written the kind of book I dreamed about.

So it's no surprise that I adored A Medieval Life. It is a biography of Cecilia Penifader, a well-off peasant woman living in Brigstock, England during the first half of the 14th century. Bennett skillfully weaves together the many threads of Cecilia's life into a complex tapestry showing not only a particular peasant woman's life, but a glimpse into the lives of medieval peasant women generally.

I can't emphasize enough how rich with detail this book is. I felt like I really came away with a picture of what Cecilia's everyday life looked like -- where she slept, how and where she worked, what she ate, the challenges she faced and freedoms she had, and more. I was really surprised by some of the things I learned, just since I had never really thought about them before. For example, even though Cecilia was quite well-off for a peasant and owned numerous properties throughout her life, she slept on the floor.

As always, Bennett delighted me by her mention of unmarried women. She discusses, briefly, how many manors were run by women (either singlewomen or, more commonly, as part of a widow's dower). Cecilia herself never married, which, though unusual, was not unheard of. And yes, Bennett mentions that some peasant women entered into liasons with other women. (Sweeeeeet!)

This is an awesome resource for persona development. I know that peasants are not the standard choice for personas in the SCA, but this book also gives a good overall picture of life on a medieval manor, which is useful for anyone with a "generic medieval" persona. Additionally, I think anyone with a female persona from medieval England would be interested in reading this for more insight into women's worlds.

By the way, my mom, who is the best mom ever, introduced me to this book. She had checked it out from the library and was telling me about it:

"I think you'd really like this book. It's about a medieval woman living in Brigstock--"

I stopped her right there: "Is the author Judith Bennett?"

"Yeah, have you read it?"

"No, but I LOVE JUDITH BENNETT!!!"

So she bought me a copy for Christmas.