From a woman’s 14th-century Book of Hours

IMAGINE what it was like to live in a society in which a season of penitence was observed by all. In the Middle Ages, meat, eggs and even dairy products were banned during Lent in much of Europe, making abstinence unavoidable for most. There were many people who were not holy, of course, but there must have been a “supernatural energy,” as Dom Prosper Gueranger refers to it, in the air. The French abbot wrote in his Liturgical Year:

There are but few social questions which have not been ably and spiritedly treated of by the public writers of the age, who have devoted their talents to the study of political economy; and it has often been a matter of surprise to us that they should have overlooked a subject of such deep interest as this: the results produced on society by the abolition of Lent; that is to say, of an institution which, more than any other, keeps up in the public mind a keen sentiment of moral right and wrong, inasmuch as it imposes on a nation an annual expiation for sin. No shrewd penetration is needed to see the difference between two nations, one of which observes, each year, a forty-days’ penance is reparation of the violations committed against the law of God, and another, whose very principles reject all such solemn reparation. And looking at the subject from another point of view – is it not to be feared that the excessive use of animal food tends to weaken, rather than to strengthen, the constitution? We are convinced of it: the time will come when a greater proportion of vegetable, and less of animal, diet will be considered as an essential means for maintaining the strength of the human frame.

He seems to have foretold modern vegetarianism. Dom Gueranger also wrote:

Body and Soul; they cannot be separated until death. What the body does, the soul will either also suffer the consequences of or reap the rewards. Lent affords both to work in harmony through mortification of the body for contrition of the soul. If the soul has willed to sin, then the body must also pay. There can be no sincerity where the body doesn’t participate with the soul. Practice makes perfect and that is the purpose of cleansing both body and soul of the harmful effects of sin during Lent through prayer, fasting, penance and almsgiving.

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