I don't understand this type if historiography where "medieval" is an adjective used as if it refers to a very well defined time and place.
Anything medieval can refer to up to a thousand years of history and several dozen polities.
The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
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Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
#22>As it happens, drinking water was commonplace throughout history. We have to remember that the notion that water could carry diseases is a fairly modern one
No, it's anything but new. People in the past might not know about viruses and bacteria and such, but they very well knew about clean vs dirty water, the dangers of some animal corpse upstream, and many other such things...
Ancient people had knowledge from experience of far more intricate subjects than "polluted water can kill you", without having to know the mechanisms involved.
Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
But humans have been cooking stuff for thousands and thousands of years to improve nutritional value and kill off bacteria. Why would water be an exception?
Bacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now). There are a plethora of other reasons food might have been cooked, not least of all being flavour. The fact that it also killed bacteria would have been an accidental benefit. Also a lot of food actually loses nutrients when cooked.
I think you're underestimating humans who for hundreds of thousands (!) of years have been as smart as you and I.
Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now). There are a plethora of other reasons food might have been cooked, not least of all being flavour. The fact that it also killed bacteria would have been an accidental benefit. Also a lot of food actually loses nutrients when cooked.
I think you're underestimating humans who for hundreds of thousands (!) of years have been as smart as you and I.
It’s pretty well documented during the Middle Ages that people thought it was the smell that made them ill and not any bacteria
Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
#25[flagged]
Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
#26[flagged]
Agreed. That’s why I started using flags more liberally.
Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're underestimating humans who for hundreds of thousands (!) of years have been as smart as you and I.
It’s pretty well documented during the Middle Ages that people thought it was the smell that made them ill and not any bacteria
And smell and bacterial levels are absolutely correlated
Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
#28This is a great podcast about how Victorian London built a huge sewer system to deal with the vast amount of human waste generated by one of the biggest cities in the world: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gjcm
I was reminded of it by the mention of people who collected the waste from cess pits, which is also in the podcast - it was transported outside the city and used for fertiliser.
Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
#29This article is right, but also misleading. Yes, people did drink water. But they preferred to drink beer, and basically they drank beer for thirst if they could. And they did this not just in the Middle Ages, but into the 20th century.
I wrote [a blog post](https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html) that goes into this in more detail.
Re: The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
#30I'm not entirely sure I buy this argument. There are vast swathes of the world today where drinking tap water will likely make you sick, and in all these countries it is standard procedure to boil tap water before drinking it. In fact, in eg China & Indonesia, cold water (even if clean) is believed to be bad for you and drinking still warm boiled water or weak tea instead is very common. Was medieval England really a…
And in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste. The difference between now and medieval England is that we know taste is not everything, that even "sweet water" can be dangerous unboiled.
> And in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste.
Considering the strength of the Chinese taboo on cold water, I find that fairly unlikely.