Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nutrition And The Early-Medieval Diet, Kathy L. Pearson

History Faculty Publications

The food supply of the temperate lands of early-medieval western Europe, and the ways in which its peoples dealt with the central problem of feeding themselves, has been subjected to a variety of interpretations in recent years. Vern Bullough and Cameron Campbell's study of the medieval diet and female longevity concluded that early-medieval women suffered from iron deficiencies triggered jointly by poor nutrition and frequent childbearing and that these deficiencies contributed substantially to their average early age of death. Ann Hagen's overview of Anglo-Saxon patterns of food production and consumption suggested that most of the early English population routinely lived …