History Fiend

Christmas is today associated with merriment, gift giving and indulgence. But how was the festive season celebrated in the Middle Ages? What food was eaten? What traditions were upheld? Here, Dr Matthew Champion brings you the facts about medieval Christmases Your guide to Christmas in the Middle Ages… 1 Don’t go over the top Medieval Christmas wasn’t quite the all-encompassing celebration it often is today, so relax a little. Christmas, the Feast of Jesus’s Nativity, was important, but more significant was Easter, and perhaps also the Annunciation – that moment celebrated on 25 March when God was supposedly conceived in Mary’s womb. 2 Be wary Much of the medieval world didn’t celebrate Christmas, and if you were a medieval Jew, Christmas could be a time of danger. At Korneuburg in around 1305, townsfolk accused the Jews of procuring a consecrated communion wafer at Christmas and desecrating it, whereupon it ‘bubbled blood-drops, like an egg sweats when it is cook...

Covering Hong Kong, the anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, porcine inebriation and the  Battle of Algiers , nine historians select their favourite books of the past year. History Today  | Published in  History Today Toby Green As questions of colonial history and identity become central to framing debate, Jonny Pitts’  Afropean: Notes from Black Europe  (Allen Lane) is a must read. A personal, humane and searingly insightful journey through African communities in Europe, this book is the perfect antidote to Brexit, historicising and addressing the histories and legacies of racism at the heart of Europe’s current dilemmas. The most fascinating book I’ve read over the past year was Elaine Mokhtefi’s  Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers  (Verso). Mokhtefi was a translator and activist caught up in the pan-Africanist movement which made Algiers their HQ in the 1960s. Her lyr...