Thread by @TimONeill007

Did the Medieval Church regard eating breakfast as "gluttony"? No. A thread.

Just when you think you've seen all the strange myths about the Middle Ages, a new one appears. The Twitter account of the BBC panel show QI posted the following image yesterday, declaring "In the ...

... Middle Ages, eating breakfast was believed to be an affront to God". This attracted a predictable response, with various comments about how stupid medieval people were, how weird this was and how this was evidence of the stupidity of religion etc. It also attracted some ...

... well justified requests for some kind of substantiation, from @fakehistoryhunt and others, including me. Some commenters claimed that Aquinas had declared breakfast fell under sub-category of gluttony: namely eating "praepropere", too soon or too hastily. But when ...

... pressed for a specific citation, they flounced off in a huff. So a bit of Googling discovered that the Wikipedia article on "The History of Breakfast" seems to be the source of this claim (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o…

... There it is certainly claimed the "influential 13th-century Dominican priest Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologica (1265–1274) that breakfast committed "praepropere," or the sin of eating too soon, which was associated with gluttony." But the footnote given was ...

.... not to anything in Aquinas, but to a popular book *Breakfast: A History* by one Heather Arndt Anderson. She bills herself as "a Portland, Oregon-based food writer, culinary historian, and botanist" and her book leans heavily on other secondary works by non-historians. ...

... first page assures us that "In the Middle Ages people ate two meals, the larger in the morning. Today the idea of a heavy meal with meat and wine at 11:00 a.m. strikes us as strange and decidedly unpleasant." She really doesn't seem to like the medieval period, constantly ...

... insisting on its odd attitudes to breakfast. And her "Introduction" declares "overzealous moralists of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods of Europe stigmatized the morning meal, hitching it to
the Seven Deadly Sins." She explicitly attributes this to Aquinas, ...

... claiming (without a citation) that his *Summa Theologica* declared breakfast to be "praepropere
—eating too soon". Except if we actually turn to the *Summa* and consult the relevant section on Gluttony we find (surprise, surprise) no such thing. See *Summa* Part 2-2, ...

... Question 148, Article 4. (newadvent.org/summa/3148.htm). There's no mention of breakfast there and no way it could be considered "praepropere", given that this refers to eating again too soon after finishing a meal, where breakfast is, literally, breaking the longest fast of ...

... day; that between any evening meal and morning. Anderson goes on to claim "allowances were granted to children, the elderly, the infirm, and to laborers, regular people either did not eat breakfast or did not talk about it." This ignores that fact that once you take away ...

... "children, the elderly, the infirm, and ... laborers", there aren't a great many "ordinary people" left to not eat breakfast. It also ignores the fact that medieval literature and accounts contain plenty of evidence of people eating breakfast. Picking one medieval work ...

... frommy selves at random - *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight* - I quickly found Sir Bertilak rising very early to go hunting and, because he's eager to get going, "he ete a sop hastyly" (l. 1135). A "sop" was a hunk of bread soaked in milk, wine or ale and seems to have been a

... common quick medieval breakfast. Later the same morning Gawain has a more leisurely approach to breakfast and rises, hears Mass and then "meued to his mete that menskly hym keped" (l. 1312). Here "mete" simply means a meal and the line makes it clear that this was a ...

... normal and appropriate part of a nobleman's morning routine. But since Anderson is convinced that medieval peopled didn't eat breakfast, she goes on to come up with excuses for the references to them rather inconveniently doing so in the few secondary sources she's ...

... consulted. So the 13th century workers who she finds ate a "hunk of rye bread, a bit of cheese, and some ale" or the 15th century nobles who ate "bread, ale, and meat" on rising somehow weren't having breakfast, because she claims, without any basis that "this was not ...

... necessarily considered a proper meal." A reference to the Normans eating a meal at 9 am is referred to as " a mid-morning meal", so somehow that isn't breakfast either. A 1255 account book noting a whopping 252 gallons of wine for the breakfast of Henry III while passing ...

... through St Albans Abbey for breakfast (which implies a fairly substantial amount of accompanying food) is passed off as an exception because he was travelling. She keeps insisting that the (imaginary stigma of gluttony and the association of breakfast with labouring means ...

... "Regular men were usually too embarrassed to admit that they ate breakfast", so when she gets to a 1463 account entry for Edward IV's large "“Expensys in
brekfast” she makes a strange claim that "his
financial needs must have helped him overcome his embarrassment". I have ...

... no idea what that means.
But Anderson's badly researched book is cited several times to support erroneous claims in the Wikipedia article noted above and references all over the internet to breakfast being consider gluttonous in the Middle Ages because of its alleged ...

... condemnation by Aquinas all seem to trace back to this book. Once again, we have an amateur, popular writer working from secondary sources and a certain prejudice against the medieval period propagating nonsense that people who know better really should check.
To their ...

... credit, the @qikipedia account has removed the original tweet, though with a hedged statement that "eating breakfast first thing could be considered Praepropere so may have come up for some theological criticism", which is still total nonsense.

Moral? Check your facts, ...

... and doubly so when the claim begins "In the Middle Ages ..."