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Featured Comment: February 17, 2012

Alum quite rightly points out that our memory was faulty with regard to a recent paper on the lexicography of the cucumber’s spread into Europe:

I don’t think you’ve blogged on this cucumber paper. We had one recently about their appearance in French and Italian texts that cued up the next paper on routes into Europe.

To recap, that latter paper suggests that according to the lexicographic evidence the cucumber…

…was introduced to Europe [from the Indian subcontinent after 500 CE] by two independent diffusions. One diffusion appears to have been overland from Persia into eastern and northern Europe and preceded the Islamic conquests. The other, subsequent diffusion into western and southern Europe, was probably by a mostly maritime route from Persia or the Indian subcontinent into Andalusia.

The earlier paper, by the same authors, tells us about what happened subsequently, in medieval times once the cucumber had gained a foothold in Europe:

The absence of melon in some manuscripts and the expropriation of the Latin cucumis/cucumer indicate replacement of vegetable melons by cucumbers during the medieval period in Europe.