Sunday morning coming down: The Black Death, a bum rat and the Danse Macabre.

It isn't the best BBC documentary I've ever watched, seeing as I tend to frown on period piece recreations. However, it is decently informative and thought-provoking in places, as when surviving peasants in England suddenly realize their economic prospects have vastly improved since the number of competing laborers was halved.

A more concise overview is here, including brief treatments of other pandemics:

This apparently precedes new research findings, as noted in this space last year.

They got a bum rat.

Rats were not to blame for the spread of plague during the Black Death, according to a study.

The rodents and their fleas were thought to have spread a series of outbreaks in 14th-19th Century Europe.

But a team from the universities of Oslo and Ferrara now says the first, the Black Death, can be "largely ascribed to human fleas and body lice".

There's much written about the Black Death in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, which remains an excellent introduction to the late medieval period. Not only that, but no discussion about the Black Death is complete without a reference to the Danse Macabre, a medieval allegory about the inevitability of death.

In the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, skeletons escort living humans to their graves in a lively waltz. Kings, knights, and commoners alike join in, conveying that regardless of status, wealth, or accomplishments in life, death comes for everyone. At a time when outbreaks of the Black Death and seemingly endless battles between France and England in the Hundred Years’ War left thousands of people dead, macabre images like the Dance of Death were a way to confront the ever-present prospect of mortality.

The Crusades, a video series about medieval holy warriors.

That dreaded word “journey” appears to have been banned: instead, we have proper, old-fashioned narrative history of the sort that TV has almost forgotten how to do, starting at the beginning and continuing until the end.
-- Robert Colvile

Indeed.

I vote in favor of old-fashioned narrative history, as with this series from a few years back.

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Holy War 1/3: How the first crusaders marched 3,000 miles from Europe to recapture Jerusalem from Islam.

Clash of the Titans 2/3: Dr Thomas Asbridge examines the lives of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin.

Victory and Defeat 3/3: Dr Thomas Asbridge reveals how the outcome of the holy wars was decided in Egypt.

The official BBC Two site is The Crusades, with further background by Colvile:

The Crusades: holy warriors (The Telegraph)

Robert Colvile is inspired by a new BBC Two series telling the real history of the crusades.

A few years ago, I found myself standing on the ramparts of Krak des Chevaliers, Syria’s great crusader castle, just as a thunderstorm broke. As the wind howled through the slitted stone windows, I tried to imagine what would have gone through the heads of the knights who garrisoned this lonely fortress for more than a century, as medieval Christendom’s first line of defence against the Muslims to the east.

In BBC Two’s new three-part documentary series, The Crusades, Dr Thomas Asbridge of the University of London asks his viewers to make that same leap of imagination – to understand a world in which faith was so important that in 1095, Pope Urban II was able to convince anything up to 100,000 people to forsake their family lives and homes and answer his call to reclaim Jerusalem, even though the holy city had fallen to the Muslims centuries earlier. So alien is the devotion – the fanaticism – that was displayed that Asbridge has to spend almost a third of the opening episode easing us into the medieval mindset, making us understand how the Pope’s promise of salvation could outweigh any worldly good or blessing.

The resulting story, while gripping, is far from pleasant ...

THE BEER BEAT: Wicked, Weed -- Whatever: "Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors" (2014).

Their latest shipment of Trillium has arrived.

Wicked Weed Brewery is in Asheville, North Carolina. As of last week, it is wholly owned by the Great Satan.

Read more: THE BEER BEAT: The Pour Fool nails it yet again, as "Budweiser Finds Another Sell-Out" -- this time, Wicked Weed.

The Pour Fool explains AB InBev's motives with perfect clarity. If you believe that the multinational brewing conglomerate's motives are pure, why not take the next step and book a holiday to Disney World?

I'm less interested in the familiar nuances of robber baron capitalism than the reactions of the "craft" beer community.

As for myself, it's simple. I haven't been to Asheville, and in my recollection, the only time I've ever tasted Wicked Weed's beers is when I sampled those brought home by a friend.

I trust they were good beers, but since I don't amass lists or seek the advice of ratings aggregators, who knows? My preference is for local moments and revelatory snapshots in time, not numerical data bases.

AB InBev has purchased several erstwhile "craft" breweries these past few years. Not a one of them brews a beer that we can't do without, primarily because thousands of independent breweries still stand, undefiled, with as many as 20 in metro Louisville alone.

Perhaps I'll walk down the street later today and purchase a growler.

In the interim, I'll be reprinting a few previous columns this week, with the aim of making the case that you're better off nurturing your local and regional brewing communities than chasing white whales.

In this first installment, you'll be subjected to one of my favorite comparisons.

Hint: The medieval spice trade was about social status, not spices. 

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Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors (2014).

I’m not in the habit of compulsively re-reading books, even those of the highly influential sort.

Of course, there are exceptions:

• The early beer writing of Michael Jackson
• The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, a sobering tome by John Barry
• Jim Bouton’s ribald baseball tell-all, Ball Four
• A Confederacy of Dunces, the classic New Orleans comic novel from John Kennedy Toole

Another is Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants, by the wonderfully named Wolfgang Schivelbusch. He is not a Groucho Marx character from Duck Soup, but a German-born cultural historian operating from a decidedly (Karl) Marxist perspective.

Two decades after Schivelbusch’s book was published, I still consult it with frequency. It’s neither long nor “heavy,” and boasts thoughtful essays on coffee, chocolate, tea, tobacco, hashish, opium and alcoholic beverages. Taken together, these have the effect of guiding readers from the Middle Ages through modern times, with the focal point being not pharmacology, but sociology.

At its European debut in the 17th-century coffeehouse, coffee officiated at the rise of the bourgeois technocrat; the brew's displacement from the coffeehouse to the home in the following century, the author argues, is a measure of the assimilation of bourgeois consciousness at the private hearth.
-- Excerpt from Publishers Weekly

We already know that coffee is caffeinated, while beer and wine are alcoholic. When the Muslim world introduced Europe to coffee, the beverage’s “dry” and sobering qualities were aligned perfectly with developing notions of a work ethic in the context of expanding capitalism – or, where Calvinism meets the Industrial Revolution. Coffee made workers more efficient, while alcoholic beverages rendered them less productive.

Even today, while at work, you’re generally free to consume as much coffee as you please, though not ale … and that’s a shame.

Beer itself is a pre-industrial, communal and organic beverage, reflecting the pastoral ethos of the countryside, and inexorably bound by nature’s limitations on maximum alcoholic strength attained through fermentation. Distillation – again, introduced to Europe by the learned Arabs, who used the process in chemical experiments – provided the means to concentrate the strength of alcohol as beverage, subsequently wreaking havoc on human beings unaccustomed to the potency of distilled spirits, or to their new, oppressively squalid homes in urban industrial slums. Greasy gin offered ready pain relief between ceaseless shifts at the factory, which yielded just enough cash to begin the cycle anew.

You see, it really does matter where your sneakers are fabricated.

Schivelbusch makes it clear that while alcohol has been subject to abuse since the beginning of time, temperance movements as we know them today began only when liquor became cheap, common and widely ingested. In the end, liquor’s debilitating tendencies became too much even for the exploitative robber barons, who formerly deployed the liquid as pacifier from the company store. Reversing course, the accumulators of capital forged an unholy alliance with religious fundamentalism.

By the late 1800s, the city of New Albany’s much-lionized plate glass magnate, Washington C. DePauw, was providing financial support for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) – the latter agitating for the complete prohibition of alcoholic beverages, either when on the clock or off, all from the cozy confines of its downtown reading room, located in a long-demolished house that occupied the space where Bank Street Brewhouse’s* beer garden now operates.

In this way, nowadays, we pay back those mad mothers with each pint of locally brewed goodness.

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Recently, listening with mounting fascination as local beer enthusiasts explained to me how this very same fresh, local beer cannot possibly be worth drinking, and must take a seat to the rear of the bus when compared to the newest, biggest, greatest phenomenon brought to metro Louisville from far, far away, Schivelbusch’s fascinating explanation of the medieval spice trade came back to me.

It turns out that fascination with the far-off is as old as humanity, too. When the spice trade commenced in Europe several hundred years ago, the newly posited “need” to obtain previously unknown Oriental spices was far less about their supposed usefulness in masking otherwise rancid food, as is often erroneously imagined today, but because the spices themselves were quantifiable, visible measures of social status according to prevailing subjective value systems.

In essence, back then, anyone who was anyone just had to have these spices – or, risk not being anyone, any longer. Possession of Oriental spices was a palpable, tangible symbol of status, and the key to their value was a basic reality: These spices were from somewhere else – exotic, expensive and hard to obtain, and therefore infinitely sexier than piddling local norms.

But it went even further, into the realm of sheer mysticism. In the beginning, spices symbolized the superiority of the far-off lands from whence they so rarely came. If the spices themselves were imbued with magical and totemic properties, then surely it proved conclusively that the other side of the planet was superior to the mud, blood, poverty and ignorance of Europe. Paradise was elsewhere, and spices provided tastes of this paradise. It was evidence of a raging subliminal inferiority complex, and comprised the most anti-local viewpoint imaginable.

Like the objectified beer porn selfie of 2014, no one thought it necessary to bother with explanations as to why the bowl of Oriental spice proffered at the wedding feast mattered. It simply was understood. Peers compared the quantity of their stashes to establish social pecking orders, and any stray servant or cowed peasant in proximity of the scene knew immediately that strength and power were conferred on those who possessed the requisite spicy symbolism … while he or she remained a degraded underling.

It’s that Billie Holiday song, all over again, like a mantra for the coming year: “Them that’s got shall have, them that’s not shall lose.”

It should be obvious that I highly recommend Tastes of Paradise; just exercise caution when reading near mirrors.

That’s because flying glass is dangerous.

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* Now known as Cafe & Brewhouse

The medieval diet: "White wine makes you piss better than any other wine."

It's where the love of history meets the needs of a foodie.

I Tried a Medieval Diet, And I Didn't Even Get That Drunk, by Sarah Laskow (Atlas Obscura)

The Salerno health regimen was based in the humoral theory of medicine, which is focused on keeping balance among the body’s four humours—blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Foods were thought to possess qualities that could help maintain that balance: each hot or cool, dry or moist. These ideas originated in the ancient Mediterranean world, most prominently with the Greek physician Galen, and were passed to doctors in the Arab world, before returning to Europe.

Way back in the late 1980s, I bought "The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines: China, Greece and Rome," a cookbook by the late Jeff Smith. From the outset, he cautions readers not to expect rich tomato-based sauces in the Roman recipes.

The selection of vegetables in medieval Europe was relatively small, to begin with. It would not have included plants native to North or South America, which means no potatos, no corn, no tomatoes, no avocados, no peppers, and no beans (with the exception of fava beans). Spinach came from Persia, via Arab conquests of southern Europe, in the 800s, and gradually replaced other greens, like sorrel. Sugar first reached Europe in 1148, when Crusaders brought it back from their war, but it was a luxury product, with limited availability, for centuries. Coffee didn’t come regularly until the 17th century.

She can't do without coffee, but otherwise the author of this post imagines the medieval diet, and actually lives it for a few days.

"Tuchman's Law", and other reminders of A Distant Mirror.

I was conversing with the Bookseller and commented that the historian Barbara W. Tuchman's The Guns of August, an examination of events leading to the start of World War I, has not maintained the reputation it once enjoyed. This may be overly glib, based as it is on cursory glances at contemporary essays, but it got me thinking about Tuchman, and the book of hers I always enjoyed the most: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.

Kindly permit me to offer two excerpts. First, a reminder that the Creation Museum isn't far away, and neither is the prevalence of superstition -- in the 14th century or the 21st.

“History was finite and contained within comprehensible limits. It began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not indefinitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the hope of afflicted mankind, followed by the Day of Judgment. Within that span, man was not subject to social or moral progress because his goal was the next world, not betterment in this. In this world he was assigned to ceaseless struggle against himself in which he might attain individual progress and even victory, but collective betterment would only come in the final union with God.”

Then, the so-called Tuchman's law, which was formulated long before social media.

“Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening--on a lucky day--without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).”

Occasionally, maybe we all just need to take one, good, deep breath.