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Bread of Dreams
Mar. 23rd, 2006 08:22 pmWe broke 70 today! I spent a sunny afternoon washing up seed trays, pots, and labels. Yeah, real exciting, but I'm pleased. I can almost believe spring is here.
I spent an hour sitting in the sun reading bits of Bread of Dreams by Piero Camporesi. The title comes from one of his more outrageous claims, that medieval peasants spent much of their lives in a narcotized state, due the inclusion (deliberate or not) of mood-altering substances in their bread.
It's an interesting book, rather densely full of fantastic imaginings, liberally sprinkled with primary source quotations. Unfortunately, the link between the primary sources and his flights of fancy seem tenuous at times, and just plain wrong other times. Regarding the bread, it does seem well attested that a weedy grain called darnel commonly infests wheat fields and can cause symptoms like drunkenness (the French word for it is 'ivraie,' from 'ivre' meaning drunk) when ground up with the wheat and baked as bread. There's a suspicion that the real culprit was ergot fungus, but for all intents and purposes, darnel was to blame.
However, he goes on to talk about poppy-derived narcotics and implies that eating poppyseeds in bread would have a similar effect. Bad scholarship. He also makes innuendos about hemp farming and all that narcotic dust and 'pollen' floating around. Dubious as well.
He points out, validly, that in times of famine, people would eat just about anything, and apparently baking stuff into bread was a common way to stretch their limited flour supply. Though I suspect they were far more likely to out and out poison themselves this way, not just get a buzz on.
A thought-provoking but mostly irritating book.
I spent an hour sitting in the sun reading bits of Bread of Dreams by Piero Camporesi. The title comes from one of his more outrageous claims, that medieval peasants spent much of their lives in a narcotized state, due the inclusion (deliberate or not) of mood-altering substances in their bread.
It's an interesting book, rather densely full of fantastic imaginings, liberally sprinkled with primary source quotations. Unfortunately, the link between the primary sources and his flights of fancy seem tenuous at times, and just plain wrong other times. Regarding the bread, it does seem well attested that a weedy grain called darnel commonly infests wheat fields and can cause symptoms like drunkenness (the French word for it is 'ivraie,' from 'ivre' meaning drunk) when ground up with the wheat and baked as bread. There's a suspicion that the real culprit was ergot fungus, but for all intents and purposes, darnel was to blame.
However, he goes on to talk about poppy-derived narcotics and implies that eating poppyseeds in bread would have a similar effect. Bad scholarship. He also makes innuendos about hemp farming and all that narcotic dust and 'pollen' floating around. Dubious as well.
He points out, validly, that in times of famine, people would eat just about anything, and apparently baking stuff into bread was a common way to stretch their limited flour supply. Though I suspect they were far more likely to out and out poison themselves this way, not just get a buzz on.
A thought-provoking but mostly irritating book.
