【一起来听写】小高~老豆角也有新梦想

还是小高UID: 2716600

In order to really study social history of the Middle Ages, you have to understand the role of spices. Now this might sound a little spurring, even a little strange. But what seem like little things now were back then actually rather big things. So, first let’s define what a spice is. Technically speaking, a spice is part of an aromatic plant that is not a leaf or herb. Spices can come from tree bark like cinnamon, plant roots like ginger, flower buds like cloves. And in the Middle Ages, Europeans were familiar with lots of different spices, the most important being pepper, cloves, ginger, cinnamon, maize and nutmeg. These spices literarily dominated the way Europeans even for centuries, how they traded and even how they used their imaginations. So why this medieval fascination with spices? We can boil it down to three general ideas briefly. One was cost and rarity. Two was exotic taste and fragrance. And third, mysterious origins and kinds of mythical status.

Now for cost and rarity, spices aren’t native to Europe and they had to be imported, spices only grew in the East Indies and of course transportation costs for were incredibly valuable even from the very beginning. Here is an example. In 408 AD, the Gothic General who captured Rome demanded payment. He wanted five thousand ponds of gold among other things but he also wanted three thousand ponds of pepper. Maybe that give you an idea of exactly where pepper stood at that time. By the middle ages, spices were regarded as so important and expensive they were used in diplomacy, as gifts by heads of state and ambassadors. Now for the taste. The diet then was relative bland compared to today’s. There wasn't much variety. Especially the aristocracy who tended to eat a lot of meat, they were always looking for new ways to prepare it, new sources, new tastes and this is where spices came in. Now this is a good point to mention, one of the biggest myths about spices. It's commonly said that medieval Europeans wanted spices to cover up the tastes of spoiled meat. But this isn't really true. Anyone who had to worry about the spoiled meat couldn’t afford the spices in the first place. If you could afford spices, you could definitely afford fresh meat. We also have evidence that various medieval markets employed a kind of police to make sure that people did not sell spoiled food and if you were caught doing it, you were subject to various fines, humiliating public punishments. So what actually was true with this, in order to have meat for winter, people would preserve it in salt, not a spice. Spices actually aren’t very effective as preservations. And throughout winter, they would eat salted meat, but the taste of the staff could grow really boring and depressing after a while. So the cook started looking for new ways to improve the taste and the spices were the answer, which brings us to mysterious origins and mythical status. Now the ancient Romans had a thriving spice trade and they sent their ships to the east and back. But when Rome collapsed in 15 century and the Middle ages began, direct trade stopped, and so did that kind of hands-on knowledge of travel and geography. Spices now came by way of the trade routes with lots of intermediaries between the producer and the consumer. So these spices took on an air of mystery. Their origins were shrouded in exotic travels. They had the allure of the unknown, of wild places. Myths grew up of fantasy lands, magical faraway places made entirely of food and spices. And to that, spices themselves had always been considered special or magical not jjust for eating and this was already true in the ancient world where legends about spices were abundant. Spices inspired the medieval imagination. They were used as medicine to ward off diseases, and mixed into perfumes. They were used in religious rituals for thousands of years. They took on a life of their own and they inspired the medieval imagination, spurred on the age of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries. When famous explorers like Columbus and Da Gama and Magellan left Europe in their ships, they weren’t looking for a new world; they were looking for spices. And we know what important historical repercussions some of those voyages had.



Spur 刺
Bark 狗吠
Cinnamon 肉桂
Ginger 姜
Cloves 丁香料
Maize 玉米色的
Literarily 文学的
Dominate 统治
Medieval 中世纪的
Fascination 魅力
Rarity 稀有
Exotic 外来的
Fragrance 香味
Diplomacy 外教手腕
Ambassador 大使
Bland 和蔼的
Aristocracy 贵族
Humiliate 使羞辱
Collapse 碰撞
Legend 传说
Intermediary 中间的
Shroud 罩
Ward 保卫
Perfume 香味
Ritual 典礼
Repercussion 反响

这篇词汇太强大了啊。虽然都认识，但是让我听真是要我的老命了。
又发现对我来说分不清的音
in the=and   
ed=to
还有就是aren't 的t听不出来！