Saint Hildegard and “Labors of the Months”

English Fleta and other European manuals on model agricultural practices for landlords and manorial managers appeared widely in the late thirteenth century, followed by others like Pietro de Crescenzi’s exceptional fourteenth century Agricultural Calendar. Although many of these manuscripts were heavily influenced by the classic Latin treatises of Varro and Columella, that they were penned in vernacular languages was significant and reflects the growing appreciation of agriculture beyond abbeys and royal libraries as a subject worthy of intellectual interest and susceptible to systematic improvement. 

Hildegard of Bingen, The Wheel of Life

Detail showing harvest reaper at center left; Codex Latinus 1492 (Liber Divinorum Operum); State Library, Lucca, Italy; Wikimedia Commons

The progression of European summer climate from Mediterranean to continental influenced these artistic arrangements with representative reaping scenes in Italy typically shown in June (Cancer), and in July (Leo) in France. Similar views are found for August (Virgo) in Germany and England, though fewer depictions of the “labors of the months” are known during this time in northern Europe.  In de Crescenzi’s Calendar the emerging Italian conception of realism holds colorfully active sway with men and women in period clothing shown more naturally working together to reap and thresh the crop. De Crescenzi’s illustrated treatise on agriculture, Liber Ruralium Commodorum (Book of Rural Benefits, c. 1309), became the first printed book on the subject when it was published in Augsburg in 1471. 

Personified cycles of diligent rural endeavor, which often prominently feature lightly clad men and women in wide-brimmed straw hats, are typically shown with accompanying signs of the zodiac and more realistically depicted than earlier, passive symbolic forms in earlier illuminated manuscripts like the Calendar of Salzburg (c. 820). Benedictine abbess and visionary mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)—the “Sibyl of the Rhine” who wrote extensively about botany and plant cultivation, composed and illustrated her remarkable Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works) from 1163-1174 which described a holistic cosmology of the temporal and divine realms. Hildegard conceived of a natural world (in regno mundi) that remained vital and inseparable from Christ’s divine kingdom (in regno Christi) as people lived in accordance with the perpetual calendar of natural processes and religious observances. In this way of viriditas (fecundity), the microcosm of an individual’s life could more fully conform to the universal divine macrocosm as revealed in Scripture, evident in nature, and shown in the Book of Divine Works’ illuminated Universal Wheel of Life that depicts the entire calendar from fall sowing to summertime harvest.

The “Cerealization” of Europe

The story of farming is one of usual significance throughout rural America, and certainly to urban consumers year-round, let alone in times like these when stocking grocery store shelves is threatened by pandemics and market dislocations. Self-reliant agriculture had long been practiced by natives peoples in North and South America, and since ancient times in the Eastern Hemisphere. When European immigrants began flocking to the United States in the early 1800s they brought many Old World farming traditions that harken back to practices introduced a thousand years ago. A gradual shift in the early medieval period away from annual and two-year cropping in Europe that exhausted soil fertility led to improved cereal production across the continent. The three-year open field rotation system (German Verzelgung, Russian trekhpol’ye) became widespread during the thirteenth century and increased crop yields from one-half to two-thirds in many parts of central and eastern Europe with heavier soils and higher rainfall than in the south. While variable local geographic conditions allow for only generalizations, the triennial system did begin a widespread continental shift from mixed farming to the production of specific grains on designated fields.

This “cerealization” of Europe was directly related to the era’s population rise and led to the emergence of urban centers and new social classes. Grain yields from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries remained negligible by present standards, however, with wheat averaging some eight to twelve bushels per acre, barley ten to fifteen, and oats fifteen to twenty. (Modern non-irrigated yields are commonly five to six times higher.) England’s medieval standard measure of distance, the furlong, was established at 220 yards, or about how far a team of oxen could make a furrow by pulling a plow before needing to rest. A width of forty-four yards—twenty-two trips down and back, came to represent a full day’s work to define the present acre of 4, 840 square yards.

Pietro de Crescenzi, “Farmers Harvesting Crops, ”Opus Ruralium Commmodorum (1471), Vollbehr Collection, Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress

Field size varied widely depending on local norms of peasant holdings, topography, and soil conditions. The area of a “full holding” varied considerably in early medieval Europe but was generally understood to be the amount of land and livestock necessary to support a three-generation family living under the same roof. The year’s culminating grain harvest served the three imperative needs of sustenance for family and livestock, seed for future crops, and seigneurial tax. Over time conventional units of area (English “hide,” German Hufe, French mansus) came to be associated with obligations to seigneur and state, though definitions reflect considerable stratification among villagers. In central Europe, for example, a prosperous Austrian peasant head of household with both full holding and a tenancy might have a hundred acres, while similar status in Bohemia represented sixty acres, but half that area in England and Hungary. Subdividing over generations led to numerous fractional holdings, cotters with only a house and garden, and large numbers of landless laborers.