Lent — forty days of abstinence — spans from Ash Wednesday up until Easter Sunday. Today, Lent is quite a subdued version, especially with so many other sects of Christianity, the practice doesn’t even come up in peoples’ minds. But wind back the clock hundreds of years ago to the Medieval Era, and you’ll find a different story.
During the medieval period, spanning from 500 AD to 1500 AD, the Roman Catholic Church held the reins across Europe, becoming a political and social vacuum of the continent, meaning that practices, especially religious ones like Lent, were widely followed. Today, we think of Lent as giving up things like eating three meals a day or not eating chocolate, but back then, Lent was a more bleak sort of religious fast. Lent prohibited the consumption of meat, animal fat, dairy products, and eggs, every day. It’s not clear through sources if Sundays were a part of or excluded during the Lent fast, but if it was apart of Lent it would mean that Lent was more of a forty-six-day restriction rather than the well-known forty days,
So what could people eat? Vegetables, fruits (if they were available), bread, salt (if you lived near the coast), and fish. People could drink water, almond milk (yes, it existed), or if water quality was questionable, ale.
This diet is limited, but the difficulty of these rules varied depending on where you lived. In regions that are Catholic and still heavily Catholic today, like Spain, Italy, and Greece, following Lenten food rules was quite easy and conformed to the local diet and food supply with ease. In other, more colder, non-coastal regions of Europe, the ease was not shared. This time of year is already a time of scarcity, stores from the harvest were already at a low, so finding vegetables may not have been as easy as it was for Mediterranean counterparts.
Initial Lent rules were strict, very strict. Wednesday and Friday were considered Black Fasts, where people abstained from eating food completely. The other restricted days had people abstaining from food until 3 PM.
However, it didn’t take long for changes to slowly creep into these Lent rules. The Lent fasting time was shortened, and people ate at around noon instead of 3 PM. In Germany, if you did a good deed or could pay a fee, you were forgiven and able to serve and eat dairy in your home. This became a great fundraising technique, as many wealthy households simply paid the fee to the diocese in order to eat dairy products.
When tea and coffee were becoming readily available for general consumption, both beverages were allowed, and consuming either tea or coffee did not break a person’s fast.
The most intriguing of the rules lies in the no-meat constriction. As Lent was practiced in a variety of regions, questions about the dietary parameters were always having to be defined and redefined. As early as the 12th century, beaver is referenced as being a food during the fasting time of Lent and appears as Lenten foods in 15th and 16th-century cookbooks. While scientific reasoning would not define a beaver as a fish, the fact that it could swim well in water was enough for the Church to permit the consumption of beaver.
For those in inland Europe, seafood was not in abundance, so Lent was spent eating bottom-dwelling freshwater fish and salted cod. The rules were in store for some bending. In Northern France, an abbey was scrutinized by the local archbishop, who discovered the abbey was eating puffins. Puffins, the abbey argued, were found near and around water and therefore must be fish. Other obviously not fish animals — like dolphins and barnacle geese — were categorized as fish and consumed if found. To people in the Middle Ages, the question seemed to be less about warm-blooded versus cold-blooded animals and more of a dichotomy between land versus water and where the animal was found in nature.
Even with these workarounds, Lent was still far from an easy endeavor. Gradually papal edicts slowly stripped away the initial strict rules. Snacks were slowly entering into the diet called collations. These snacks were like meals, either brothy vegetable stews or small bits of bread. Then meat was allowed on Sundays, then other days of the week, until Friday became the only meatless day of the Lenten season.
Fasting too, was minimized. Traditionally in seasonal agricultural lifestyles, Lent was a lull in the year, with less work. However, with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, papal edicts adapted fasting rules to allow people with manual labor jobs to eat breakfast without breaking their Lenten practices.
The Lent rules were redefined in 1966 by Pope Paul VI, whose apostolic constitution is how we know and recognize Lent today. No meat on Fridays, only fish. On Ash Wednesday and Good Friday only one meal and two collations could be eaten. While medieval Lenten rules are almost non-existent in modern Roman Catholic practices, in eastern orthodox catholic communities, some of the old food rules are practiced today, albeit the rules vary from community to community.
Do you think you could follow these strict rules for weeks on end?