Love Is All You Need

A lovely thing happened on Saturday: some people got married. People get married every Saturday. Yet until two days ago, it was not legally possible for many of Saturday’s brides and grooms to marry. I am of course referring to the legalisation of same-sex marriage, which came into effect at midnight on Friday. While we find ourselves in a time when LGBT+ people around the world are facing new waves of persecution, both from hate groups and from the governments who ought surely to protect them, it is nonetheless important and marvellous that in England and Wales (and shortly in Scotland) steps towards equality-in-law are being taken.

Now today is International Hug a Medievalist Day, and I’ve been thinking about Peter Abelard. I was recently tickled by a throwaway remark by Anders Piltz, that Abelard is ‘nowadays better known for his amorous private lessons with the beautiful niece of an unpardonably naïve canon and the tragic consequences they had for his virility.’ In the grand scheme of castration euphemisms, this one is particularly dry. One of the finest minds of his generation – perhaps even his century – and a revolutionary force in the study of logic, many people today associate him entirely with his ill-fated affair, his violent gelding, and his monstrosity of a shared tomb in Père Lachaise. The whole affair is well-known from his perspective: Alexander Pope’s poem Eloisa to Abelard imagines her side of their legendary correspondence, a matter joked about by Cole Porter in Just One Of Those Things:

As Abelard said to Eloise,

Don’t forget to drop a line to me, please.

There will be a whole panel at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo dedicated to Abelard and Heloise. Love is in the air, and Tristram and Isolde ain’t got nothing on these two. Abelard is known to have written songs, now lost, to Heloise, setting them to music, and this no doubt contributes to his towering image as a romantic hero. Despite my misgivings about this status, it is from this angle that I read his Planctus David, a virtuosic lament for Saul and Jonathan, based upon a bit at the beginning of II Samuel.

As the story goes, the prophet Samuel anoints David as successor to the occasionally insane King Saul. David becomes fast friends with Saul’s son Jonathan, and they spend a significant amount of bro-time together, much to Saul’s chagrin. When father and son are killed in battle against the Philistines at Mount Gilboa, David sings a lament which, even in the delicate language of the Authorized Version, is an exemplar of eloquence in overwhelming grief.

The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!

In this form it has no explicit homosexual undertones. In I Samuel, it is stated that ‘Jonathan Saul’s son delighted in David,’ ‘he loved him as his own soul’, ‘they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded’ – but it is Platonic in the extreme, even unto the knitting of souls. Yet an undercurrent has been read since at least the fourteenth century: in sideways references to Edward II and Piers Gaveston, in sideways references to Achilles-Patroclus-type relationships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the trial of Oscar Wilde, and in an extraordinary scene in A.L. Haydon’s 1926 romp Manisty of the School-House where a bespectacled fatty called John realises he’s in love with his glamorous, sporty chum David during a chapel sermon on this very passage. (The names could be the other way round, but are you actually going to read it?)

Bros before foes, woes and lign aloes.

Where the unlucky lothario Abelard comes into it is in his reapportioning of verses so that the lament, whose biblical source is largely about Saul, becomes mostly about Jonathan. The original parts about Mount Gilboa being cursed with dryness, and the daughters of Jerusalem weeping for Saul who had dressed them in crimson, remain. But here Jonathan’s relationship with David, so fundamental to I Samuel, is brought to the fore, often in loosely paraphrased biblical language. So where the Vulgate reads

Doleo super te, frater mi Ionatha,

(I mourn you, my brother Jonathan), Abelard’s version reads,

Plus fratre mihi Ionatha,

(Jonathan, more than a brother to me). Since in the earlier book Jonathan’s soul ‘was knit with the soul of David’, Abelard’s David states

Et me post te vivere mori sit assidue,
Nec ad vitam anima satis sit dimidia.

(For me to live after you would be continual death, for half a soul is not enough for life.)

This lament does however break from the language of its source. Its first and last verses, and their references to the ‘cithara’ and ‘fides’ (lyre), suggest not the battlefield explosion of II Samuel but a private, repeated meditation. In the biblical account, David gets up, goes up to Hebron and is anointed King. Despite his battlefield explosion, he gets on with his life with scarcely another word about Saul, and never another about Jonathan. Abelard’s song expresses both the immediate shock of grief and the knowledge that it will follow the griever for the rest of his life. In a phrase including the highest note used in the entire lament, David sings,

Tu mihi, mi Ionatha, flendus super omnia,
Inter cuncti gaudia perpes eris lacrima.

(To me, my Jonathan, you will be a thing to mourn above all, a source of perpetual tears amidst all joys.)

He couches his lament in language that, if not erotic, is undeniably intense, and the music that accompanies it, though austere, is extremely difficult to perform. The form itself was used by Abelard in six different planctus by Old Testament figures, including Jacob on parenthood and Dinah on the murder of her husband. It is his preferred medium for translating and dramatizing biblical passages that go to the very heart of human relationships and touch especially upon matters of grief and mourning. This week we mark the first anniversary of the death of a friend, and though it is not much of an insight, I have found it appropriate to dwell on the Vulgate’s statement,

Saul et Ionathas amabiles et decori in vita sua… Doleo super te, frater mi.

The important point is that Abelard, whose thought I generally trust, saw in David and Jonathan a fine example of love that is not only widely comprehensible, but also attested scripturally. Homosexual or simply homosocial, the relationship between David and Jonathan is biblical, a matter often overlooked by those whose first response to things they do not like is to turn to Leviticus. I don’t assume that Abelard would necessarily endorse same-sex marriage – he was, after all, of the twelfth century – but he recognised in this biblical relationship the sort of intensity that his biographers ascribe only to his romance with Heloise. So why not. To paraphrase St Paul, love matters. And to paraphrase Sammy Cahn, the legal recognition of love matters too.

Eat, Drink and Be Merry

Lent, the Gawain poet notes,

fraystes flesch wyth þe fysche and fode more symple.

But if fasting was both a religious and economic necessity in that world, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the nobility. From surviving recipe books, and indeed from the Gawain poet’s line, the main component of a late-medieval aristocratic fast was simply giving up meat. This is a period, of course, before it was possible to give up chocolate, say, or facebook.

The Forme of Cury provides several parallel recipes for flesshe day and fyssh day, each with much the same array of exotic ingredients: powdered almonds, ginger, saffron. The work’s fish recipes are exotic in and of themselves, with items like furmente with porpeys (dolphin porridge) and laumpreys in galyntyne, a blood-sucking eel roasted on a spit and then simmered in wine with raisins, ginger, cinnamon, cloves and galingale. When the inimitable Clarissa Dickson Wright, who died last week, investigated the Forme of Cury and attempted to cook from it, she noted,

Fish it was for more than half the year, so the chefs had to be very creative. The recipes in Richard’s cookbook detail a huge array of ingredients, and it particularly mentions the jewels of his courtly cuisine: exotic spices.

Period-accurate it may all be, but when I suggested to my homegirl Alex yesterday that I cook a Lenten salmon-and-fig pie after a fifteenth-century recipe, her reaction was less ‘a passinge grete nocioun, ifaith’, more ‘weilawei, Helle no’. In the spirit of proving her wrong, here follows the true account of how we, and the delightful Michael, made the world’s weirdest pie for five people.

 

Tart de ffruyte (BL, Harley MS 4016)

Take figges and seth hem in wyne and grinde hem smale. And take hem vppe into a vessell ; And take pouder peper, Canell, Clowes, Maces, pouder ginger, pynes, grete reysouns of couraunce, saffronne, and salte, and cast thereto ; and þenne make faire lowe coffyns and couche þis stuff thereinne and plonte pynes aboue ; and kut dates and fresh salmonne in faire peces, or ells fresh eles, and parboyle hem a litull in wyne, and couche thereon ; And couche the coffyns faire with þe same paste, and endore the coffynne withoute with saffron & almond mylke ; and set hem in þe ouenne and lete bake.

I bought dried dates and figs, about 700g of skinless, boneless salmon, and pre-rolled short crust pastry – partly because there was no recipe for pastry in the actual recipe, partly because I am lazy. I didn’t feel like buying 500g of raisins (the local Sainsbury’s smallest quantity) only to use a handful, so ignored the raisins. After finely chopping the figs, we simmered them in a covering of white wine for about 20 minutes, and then mashed them with a potato masher. If we hadn’t been in a student kitchen, we might have used a hand-processor.

Getting figgy with it.

In the meantime, I chopped the salmon into inch-long chunks and stoned and quartered the dates, then simmered these in a covering of white wine for five minutes, until the salmon was starting to pale. We drank the rest of the white wine.

Mmm, fish wine.

After adding a half-teaspoon each of powdered white pepper, cinnamon, cloves and ginger, and a few pinches of salt, to the fig mixture, Alex and Michael rolled the pastry and lined a rectangular dish. We spread the puree on top of the pastry bottom, sprinkled it with pine nuts and then added the salmon and dates. Oddly, no one fancied drinking the fishwine. We added the pie lid, pricked it with a knife, finished it with a teeny weeny crest, and then put it in the middle drawer of the oven at gas mark 6 (200°c) for 45 minutes.

A teeny weeny crest.

 Frytour of erbes (Forme of Cury)

Take gode erbes ; grynde hem and medle hem with flour and water & a lytel ȝest and salt, and frye hem in oyle.

None of us had ever made a fritter before, so after consulting the internet and realising that milk or egg or bicarb were usually recommended, we opted to follow the medieval recipe anyway. What is a gode erbe? We arbitrarily went for parsley and spring onions, which were very finely chopped. The batter was made with an arbitrary amount of flour and an arbitrary amount of water – again, none of us knew what fritter consistency felt like. We then added a few pinches of salt and the herbs to the mixture, divided it into several farl-sized cakes, and fried them in a small amount of olive oil until golden brown on each side.

Is this a fritter?

Bened yfryed (Forme of Cury)

Take benes and seeþ hem almost til þey bersten. Take and wryng out þe water clene. Do þerto oynouns ysode and ymynced and garlic þerwith ; frye hem in oile oþer in grece & do þerto powdour douce & serue it forth.

Although peas are far nicer than runner beans, I bought about 250g of the latter. We trimmed them, cut them into inch-long chunks and boiled them in salted water. We then vaguely chopped an onion and three cloves of garlic, softened them in olive oil and then added the drained beans, turning the heat up and frying for a few minutes until it felt appropriate to stop. We then added powdour douce. The last time I cooked from the Forme of Cury the recipe I used was:

• ½ part caster sugar
• 1 part ground cinnamon
• ½ part ground ginger
• ¼ part ground nutmeg.

This time I also added ½ part of ground cloves, because the fig/wine mixture had made the kitchen smell like Christmas and it seemed like the right thing to do. After the powder was added, we served it forth.

The offending articles.

Verdict

After some serious negging on the fish-fruit combo in the morning, the first-bite reaction was stunned silence, which slowly but surely turned into noisy approval. One diner remarked ‘This is Christmas fish. Merry Fishmas’, which I’ll take. Another first-time medieval gourmand agreed that it tasted very medieval, but also like something from a tagine. The salmon and the fig are surprisingly complementary, and the pine nuts add interesting texture. Unlike the capouns in councy that we cooked a few months ago, the spices were not too strong, but rather supported the quite robust salmon. We drank a sharpish white wine. Seconds were had by all.

The fritters were problematic, since they had had no rising agent and were therefore pretty dense. The flavours of the parsley and spring onion were pleasant but not especially exotic, and though we ignored a suggestion in the MS to eat with clear honey, according to Michael they were quite nice with mayonnaise.

Despite the delicious combination of garlic and powdour douce, broad beans are and will forever remain super boring. But something green is really needed with this meal, or any semblance of Lenten self-denial is lost. Next time I use this recipe, I will follow my instincts and use peas.

Merry Fishmas.

Considering that I lured at least one friend there under the half-false pretence of cooking ‘fish pie’, the verdict was largely positive, dense fritters aside. On the eccentricity front I may have done myself no favours, but if it’s good enough for Clarissa Dickson Wright, it’s good enough for me.

Next Week: All hell breaks loose in the castle kitchens when Ranulf accidentally uses Gilbert’s custard.

Spring Is Sprung

Or, why palaeography is difficult.

These past few weeks I’ve been writing, then delivering, a lecture on The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and everything else has had to take a back seat. But today I have two brief observations to make: it is finally, and beautifully, sunny; and several of my students have written essays on MS Harley 2253 and it’s put me in a good mood. Last week I asked some of them to read from Ker’s facsimile, which didn’t go tremendously well. It was crap weather at the time and I had no idea how prescient all this would be, but here I share with you the poem I asked them to attempt.

 

The offending article.

f. 71va

Lenten ys come wiþ loue to toune,

Wiþ blosmen and wiþ brides roune,

Þat al þis blisse bringeþ.

Dayeseyes in þis dales,

Notes suete of nytegales,

Uch foul song singeþ.

Þe þrestelcoc him þreteþ oo

Away is huere wynter wo

When woderoue springeþ.

Þis foules singeþ ferly fele,

And wliteþ on here wynter wele,

Þat al the wode ringeþ.

 

Þe rose rayleþ hire rode,

Þe leues on þe lyghte wode

Waxen al wiþ wille.

Þe mone mandeþ hire bleo,

Þe lilie is lossom to seo,

Þe fenil & þe fille.

Wowes þis wilde drakes,

Miles muryeþ hire makes,

Ase strem þat strekeþ stille.

Mody meneþ so doþ mo,

Ichot ycham one of þo,

For loue þat likes ille.

 

Þe mone mandeþ hire lyht,

So doþ þe semly sonne bryht,

When bryddes singeþ breme.

Deawes donkeþ þe dounes,

Deores wiþ huere derne rounes,

Domes for to deme.

Wormes woweþ under cloude,

Wymmen waxeþ wounder proude,

So wel hit wol hem seme.

Ȝef me shal wonte wille of on,

Þis wunne weale y wole forgon,

And wyht in wode be fleme.

We got as far as ‘singeþ’. In their defence, they don’t know it by heart. Yet.