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Mortality And Meals: The Black Death’S Impact On Diet In England, Jessica Cordova
Mortality And Meals: The Black Death’S Impact On Diet In England, Jessica Cordova
History Undergraduate Theses
This paper investigates the role of the Black Death in developing England’s eating habits and culinary traditions. The mid-fourteenth century saw a marked change in English cuisine, change that traversed the classes. This change correlates with the timing of the Black Death, an episode of extreme mortality cause by bubonic plague. Notorious as the greatest single source of death across medieval Europe, the Black Death looms in modern minds as an unparalleled tragedy. Between 1348 to 1350, the Black Death swept across Europe and killed between one third and one half of the population. England endured an average of forty …
Weaponizing Ordinary Objects: Women, Masculine Performance, And The Anxieties Of Men In Medieval Iceland, Steven T. Dunn
Weaponizing Ordinary Objects: Women, Masculine Performance, And The Anxieties Of Men In Medieval Iceland, Steven T. Dunn
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This thesis unravels the deeper meanings attributed to ordinary objects, such as clothing and food, in thirteenth-century Icelandic literature and legal records. I argue that women weaponized these ordinary objects to circumvent their social and legal disadvantages by performing acts that medieval Icelandic society deemed masculine. By comparing various literary sources, however, I show that medieval Icelandic society gradually redefined and questioned the acceptability of that behavior, especially during the thirteenth-century. This is particularly evident in the late thirteenth-century Njal’s Saga, wherein a woman named Hallgerd has been villainized for stealing cheese from a troublesome neighbor. If Hallgerd were a …