High Days, Holidays & Holy Days

If it's baking, historical celebration foods, late-Roman Europe, Christmas, Easter, pre-16thC chivalry, or the old high days, holy-days & festivals, I'm in!

[Ninefold Kyrie @Gda1238]

Today is the Feast of St. Botolph.

St. Botolph was one of the earliest and most revered of East Anglian saints, and became known as the patron saint of wayfarers.

Gordon Slater's lovely hymn-tune of 1929 is named after him also.

[Anne Louise Avery @AnneLouiseAvery]

It was Old Midsummer and all was quiet and peaceful in the village. The gentle air was scored with the notes of a Dorset June: a distant aeroplane high over Abbotsbury, an occasional motor car or wagon or gig rumbling along the sea road, a cuckoo deep in the Greenwood, the sky larks over the fields, Wolf's portable gramophone playing in the overgrown meadow, the flickered shriek of the swifts along Lace Street. Old Fox's enchanting garden was in full-tangled-bloom by Barnaby day, and the humble-bees were loud there too, drowsily making their way from flower to flower, particularly favouring the fox-gloves, which grew in great abundance, it being a fox's dwelling and a fox of eminence at that.

[Mark Rees @reviewwales]

"The Fairies’ Song" by Arthur Rackham (1908) 🌙🧚‍♀️
From "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" by William Shakespeare
Midsummer is coming… time to learn the words! ✨
#midsummer #summersolstice

[Fake History Hunter @fakehistoryhunt]

Classic.
This Danish road safety advert is more accurate than quite a few Viking films & tv shows... and photo shoots... ;)
But above all, it's very, very funny:
https://t.co/J0534wrwCc

[High Days, Holidays & Holy Days @DaysHolidays]

@fakehistoryhunt I'm so 'in'.

I have SOME traditional baking skills, but as both a police inspector, former jouster and keen HEMA enthusiast, I might be better placed organising the town Watchmen / Bellmen.

[Fake History Hunter @fakehistoryhunt]

So my list of foods & ingredients available in Medieval Europe is getting a bit out of hand, so I'm giving it it's own article, you can find it here:
https://t.co/i2CvVX7Osk

[Eleanor Parker @ClerkofOxford]

'Boþe groundez and þe greuez, grene ar her wedez,
Bryddez busken to bylde, and bremlych syngen
For solace of þe softe somer þat sues þerafter...'

A beautiful passage from 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', on how spring triumphs after the testing time of Lent.

[The Bee Guy @the_beeguy]

Queen BUMBLEBEES - HELP THEM OUT!
A vital thread concerning bumblebee queens at this time of year!
Please #retweet/#share. EVERY QUEEN BUMBLEBEE THAT SURVIVES GETS TO ESTABLISH A NEST which otherwise would not happen.
Let me explain.
1/11
#bees #help #love
#nature #bumblebees

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

I find it bleak how millions have grown up not knowing of Guinevere & Galahad, Odysseus & Circe, Rick & Ilsa. There’s been a mass cultural forgetting, not from war or plague but because we simply stopped teaching the old stories. We are a poorer people for not knowing them.

[NT Bath Assembly Rooms @NTAssemblyRooms]

Had enough of the chocolate eggs this weekend? Then why not try one of these recipes from Charlotte Mason's 1773 cookbook, The Lady's Assistant, and eat like a Georgian. 🍽

How do you like your eggs in the morning? boiled, poached or perhaps buttered? 🍳

#EatLikeAGeorgian

[New College Library and Archives, Oxford @NewCollegeLib]

Why the green face? Looks like someone has been having too much chocolate over the Easter weekend!

🤢😆🍫

(@NewCollegeOx, MS 210, f. 233v)

#Easter #ManuscriptMonday #Medieval

[Cadw @cadwwales]

#RevealTuesday

The answer was Sul y Blodau (Flowering Sunday). Observed around Palm Sunday in Wales, families decorate graves with fresh flowers and evergreens — especially honouring the recently departed. A tradition of remembrance and renewal.

[Medieval Military Medicine @MedMilMedicine]

Here for Easter, the magnificent Rabbit Fish - 14th century, British Library, Add. MS 11390, f. 59r

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

Before the chocolate eggs and the pastel baskets, the medieval rabbit was something else entirely. Flip through enough 13th-14th Century illuminated manuscripts held in British Library and Bibliothèque de Verdun, and you will find something deeply strange in the margins. Rabbits. Enormous, furious, heavily armed rabbits. Rabbits wielding axes at kings. Rabbits laying siege to castles. Rabbits shooting hunters in the spine with bows and arrows, tying them up, hauling them before a rabbit judge, receiving a guilty verdict, and joyfully beheading them. Rabbits roasting hunters over open fires and boiling their hounds. One rabbit, in the Smithfield Decretals illuminated in London in the 1340s, presides over an entire multi-page revenge sequence that unfolds like a comic strip across the manuscript margins. It is extraordinarily violent, meticulously illustrated, and clearly someone's idea of a very good joke.

These images are called drolleries, and they belong to a tradition that peaked between 1250 and the 15th century, drawn in the margins of serious religious texts by the monks copying them. The concept is called le monde renversé, the world turned upside down. Medieval artists loved depicting reality in reverse, hunters being hunted, prey becoming predator, the powerful made powerless. Rabbits, being the most docile and frequently eaten animals in the medieval world, were the perfect candidates for this role reversal. In real life they were on the menu at every feast and hunted daily with dogs and arrows. In the margins of manuscripts they got their revenge in spectacular and extremely graphic fashion. The earliest known killer rabbit, found in the Arnstein Passional from around 1170, shows two rabbits who have hanged a human hunter and are standing on their hind legs pointing and jeering at the body.

Not everyone found this funny. The Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux complained about the drolleries in terms that feel remarkably modern, asking what these ridiculous monstrosities were doing in the cloisters and what purpose was served by such unclean monkeys, fierce lions, and monstrous centaurs. He also noted, with some irritation, that even if the foolishness caused no shame, one might at least balk at the expense. He had a point. These books were extraordinarily costly to produce. Someone was spending serious money on manuscripts decorated with rabbits committing war crimes.

For several hundred years the medieval version of the Easter rabbit was carrying an axe, had an outstanding grievance against humanity, and was depicted in the margins of the most sacred books in Christendom getting extremely satisfying revenge. The Monty Python killer bunny was not just an invention; it was a history lesson....

© Eats History

#archaeohistories

[Diogenes of Sinope @DiogenisSinopis]

Πασχαλινά Κουλουράκια
Greek Easter Cookies
💙🇬🇷🍪☦️🍪🇬🇷💙

[Leon @Leon_F_T]

Viennese café-style Gugelhupf, two ways
Traditionally eaten at Easter

[Flower Show @TheFlowerShow]

Easter is special and celebrated a bit differently all over the world.
In many parts of Europe we decorate our Easter eggs with humble everyday flowers.

The coloring, especially in the past was made exclusively from natural materials !

[Eleanor Parker @ClerkofOxford]

People in Anglo-Saxon England made the most of their Easter holiday, to judge from this comment by Ælfric in an Easter week sermon:

'Very many there are who on this day will drink to vomiting, and shamefully brawl among themselves...' 🍻

https://t.co/MGvZuaemfw

[Eleanor Parker @ClerkofOxford]

Easter week has long been a time of spring holiday: Alfred the Great's law-code, from the late 9th century, directs that workers should be given a holiday for the week before and the week after Easter. It was the longest stretch of holiday in the year. Not bad!

(CCCC MS. 383)

[Eleanor Parker @ClerkofOxford]

'When I see blosmes springe,
And hear foules song,
A swete love-longynge
Myn herte thourhout stong,
Al for a love newe
That is so swete and trewe,
That gladieth al my song...'

A medieval springtime poem for Eastertide: https://t.co/lXKwvyuXB1