The Medieval Culture of Food – a Case Study of Hippophagy in Medieval Hungary
In this interview László Bartosiewicz, Emeritus Professor of Osteoarchaeology at Stockholm University, discusses his recent research, undertaken with Erika Gál, on hippophagy, the eating of horse meat, in medieval Hungary. He considers their various sources of information and how they compare the archaeological occurrence of horse bones and any cutting marks on those bones, to known, but sometimes ambiguous references in written sources to hippophagy. This analysis demonstrates that people in the Carpathian basin ate horse meat, as well as keeping horses for many other purposes. He also shows how the horse bones were used to make skates, runners for sledges and even weights for fishing nets.László discusses the cultural implications of hippophagy in terms of social status, ethnic background and geographic location. He notes that while the Christian church did not out-right ban eating horse meat, it actively discouraged it, possibly because hippophagy may have been linked to earlier, non-Christian, religions and their celebrations. He notes that in this way, the foods that people eat help to define them as ‘one of us’ or ‘the other’ in terms of social acceptability.This podcast is part of a series of interviews covering central Europe in the medieval period for MECERN and CEU Department of Historical Studies.
