Medieval and renaissance use of short sleeves and loose sleeves on dresses

Medieval and renaissance use of short sleeves and loose sleeves on dresses

This week I am focusing in on the use of short sleeves and loose sleeves on dresses in the medieval/early renaissance period, particularly in the 1400’s, give or take a few years. It seems like unlike earlier periods it became common to have short sleeves on the outer dress with a shift or an underdress beneath it. I am mostly looking at this using visual source material, such as paintings and drawings. I am mostly interested in Northen Europe. I am aware that short sleeves is a thing earlier in southern Europe. Keep Reading

Medieval soup of root vegetable with pork bacon

Medieval stew & soup of my own making

For the marked event we attended this weekend I made a medieval stew and a soup for our lunch. It was a cold windy and rainy weekend, so eating hearty medieval dishes was perfect.

To make dishes that ordinary people ate in the past you often have to attack it with imagination and knowledge rather than historical sources, because there are so few. This weekend I wanted to make lunch for us two days at a medieval marked event at Vistkøl Monastery. We had a wonderful event and got to talk to a lot of people about spices and mulled wine. For lunch I made a stew and a soup using the knowledge I have of period cooking. I will share the recipes and my thinking below.

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The medieval stew served with a bit of smoked mackerel

Medieval vegetables stew with pork

We know that people ate a lot of dishes with grain and pulses and that the most common meats eaten was salted pork and fish. Kale and cabbage was also very common ingrediens. This is my base for the stew I made Saturday. I used a stew I found in a book from Ribe Vikinge Center as a base, but adapted it to what I had at hand. Keep Reading

Spiced Wine at Vitskøl 2019

This weekend the husband and me are going to be at the medieval marked event Vistkøl, where you can find us and taste our delicious spiced wine and talk with us about the history of spices. Find us near the food tents in the middle of the marked.

Spiced wine dates back to at least 3000 BCE in Egypt and has been drunk though out European history in many forms. Recipes for hypeocrates dates back to the end of the 1300’s.

Read more about the history of mulled wine here: Hypocrates & lutendranck

Get the recipe for the salted almonds that we served

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The spices used in the medieval mulled wine

We make two different traditional medieval mulled wines for the marked events we go to, hypocrates & lutendranck. The recipes we use are from a danish medical and cook book from the late 1500’s but the recipes goes back to at least the 1300’s. I have looked into the history of the individual spices before, but have forgotten most of the research I did, so it is time to do re-search it again. So where did the medieval spices come from and how were they used? #AskMeAboutMyGainsOfParadiseAgenda

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Lordly sauce

Lordly sauce is a medieval spice sauce made with spices and vinegar. This is quite a high end sauce because of the amount of spices in it.

The recipe is from Libellus de Arte Coquinaria, which is the compilation of several northern European cookbooks and manuals from the middle of the 1200’s. It is the first cookbook in Danish and I plan to put all 25 recipes up on the site when I get to them.

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Medieval fabrics and the use of colour, part 2

At the marked this weekend it came to my attention that I know quite a bit about the shapes of medieval and renæssance clothing but much less about the medieval fabric colours- both how they were used and how they were made – so I decided to educate my self and share what I learned in the process. I decided to investigate both the fabrics used and the colours and dyes.

In this post I take a closer look at the medieval use of colours and dyes. I also look at who wore what colours and a bit about the symbolic use of colour.

Read part 1 here

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Woman spining wool by the fire, 1400's manuscript

Medieval fabrics and it’s uses, part 1

Knowing about medieval fabric when sewing your own garment for reenactment make your clothing look more historically accurate and more real. In the medieval and renaissance period what fabric you wore as much as the shape and pattern of the dress would indicate your social standing. A medieval peasants would not wear the same clothing as the rich or the nobles.

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Majmarked 2019 & spiced wine

We came home from the medieval marked event Majmarked in Viborg late last night. We had a wonderful time again this year – it is defiantly our favourite marked of the season. We talked to so many great people. As always we sold mulled wine in the medieval tradition. I promised a few of our costumers that I would re-post the recipes so they are easy to find. It is really important for us that we share and give back to the community – even if it is just in small ways – like knowledge sharing.

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