Episode 351:

High-Five Halloween

The Great Famine of 1315

Karen

The History of the Mummy Trade

Georgia

Episode 351: High-Five Halloween

On today's Halloween episode, Karen and Georgia cover the Great Famine of 1315 and the history of the mummy trade.

The Great Famine of 1315

The Great Famine of 1315 Notes:

Header Image Source: Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

Other Images:

Artwork from Biblia pauperum. The figure points to its mouth, depicting famine. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Temptation of St. Anthony by Jheronimus Bosch (c. 1530 - c. 1600) (Artokoloro / Alamy Stock)
Illustration of Hansel & Gretel published in 1899 (World History Archive / Alamy)

"Seven hundred years ago this month, people across northern Europe saw a comet in the sky and feared the worst. They were already running out of food. It had rained too much in 1315—sometimes every day for weeks at a stretch. Wheat, barley, and oats rotted in the fields, and it was too wet to make hay. Then, after an unusually cold winter, the rains started again, and the 1316 harvest failed, too. Grapes in vineyards were covered with a fuzzy mildew, and, one observer wrote, “there was no wine in the whole kingdom of France.” There wasn’t much bread, either. The historian William Chester Jordan, in his book “The Great Famine,” recounts how Parisians first put to the wheel and then exiled a group of bakers whom they accused of bolstering their loaves with waste. Across the Continent, there was also a severe shortage of salt—used to make cheese and to preserve food—since there was not enough sun to dry the salt pans on the Baltic and North Sea coasts. In 1317, the rains came again. Storms washed away not only newly planted grain—which was already scarce, because farmers had begun eating their seed corn to survive—but also topsoil and dikes. Sheep and cattle, standing in cold, muddy pastures, began dying of infection. People died, too, from malnutrition and illness.

In some regions of Europe, the Great Famine of 1315-17 killed a tenth of the population, shattering social norms and local economies. Villages were abandoned, religious houses were dispersed, and minor feudal lords pawned their land to whoever could pay. Peasants and the urban poor were left to fend for themselves. And yet the Great Famine is not as well known as it might be; William Rosen, the author of “The Third Horseman,” calls it “the famine history forgot.” In part, this is because of what followed it: the Black Death, which reached Europe in 1347 and killed a third of the population; and the Hundred Years’ War, which was fought between 1337 and 1453, and was as brutal a slog as it sounds. Those catastrophes, though, were visited on a population that had been left physically weak and divided by the famine, which, in turn, increased the damage they did. If nothing else, the hard times of seven centuries ago demonstrate that hunger has both moral and political costs..."

— Source: “The Next Great Famine” by Amy Davidson Sorkin (New Yorker) 2016

The History of the Mummy Trade

The History of the Mummy Trade Notes:

Header Image Source: Photo by Narciso Arellano on Unsplash

Other Images:

4. Apothecary vessel with inscription "MUMIA" dating to 18th century (Bullenwächter via Wikimedia Commons)

5. Lithograph depiction of people gathered to witness the unwrapping of a mummy, 1815-1825 (WBC ART / Alamy)

"Why did people think cannibalism was good for their health? The answer offers a glimpse into the zaniest crannies of European history, at a time when Europeans were obsessed with Egyptian mummies.

Driven first by the belief that ground-up and tinctured human remains could cure anything from bubonic plague to a headache, and then by the macabre ideas Victorian people had about after-dinner entertainment, the bandaged corpses of ancient Egyptians were the subject of fascination from the Middle Ages to the 19th century.

Mummy mania

Faith that mummies could cure illness drove people for centuries to ingest something that tasted awful.

Mumia, the product created from mummified bodies, was a medicinal substance consumed for centuries by rich and poor, available in apothecaries' shops, and created from the remains of mummies brought from Egyptian tombs back to Europe.

By the 12th century apothecaries were using ground up mummies for their otherworldly medicinal properties. Mummies were a prescribed medicine for the next 500 years.

A jar used for storing mumia. (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY)

In a world without antibiotics, physicians prescribed ground up skulls, bones and flesh to treat illnesses from headaches to reducing swelling or curing the plague.

Not everyone was convinced. Guy de la Fontaine, a royal doctor, doubted mumia was a useful medicine and saw forged mummies made from dead peasants in Alexandria in 1564. He realized people could be conned. They were not always consuming genuine ancient mummies.

But the forgeries illustrate an important point: there was constant demand for dead flesh to be used in medicine and the supply of real Egyptian mummies could not meet this.

Apothecaries and herbalists were still dispensing mummy medicines into the 18th century.

Mummy's medicine

Not all doctors thought dry, old mummies made the best medicine. Some doctors believed that fresh meat and blood had a vitality the long-dead lacked.

The claim that fresh was best convinced even the noblest of nobles. England's King Charles II took medication made from human skulls after suffering a seizure, and, until 1909, physicians commonly used human skulls to treat neurological conditions..."

— Source: “Unwrapping, Grinding Up, Eating – European History of Mummies Is Truly Disturbing” by Marcus Harmes (The Conversation)